I doubt that’s the first time that’s happened, nor will it be the last, sadly.
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Oh, Luis Guzmán! I loved him in… IMDb.
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i’m trying to understand why people are referring to it that way. while he directed the first three(?) episodes, and probably helped to set the overall tone, it’s a millar and gough gig. ( smallville for the win )
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I’m enjoying the series so far. Two thoughts:
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Little Christina Ricci made the decision to play her Wednesday Addams character with a similar Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice vibe permanently imprinting that characterization into all the Addams Family adaptations that followed it. For that reason alone, she deserves 5 bags of popcorn and a crawling hand. Producers should pay her handsomely for her contribution to entertainment. (I realize, blah blah blah Charles Addams, but… I mean come on… Stoic, brooding Wednesday is all Ricci.)
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My only real issue with the series is that I am not super thrilled with Wednesday’s seething hatred for her mother. One of the delightful things about the previous versions of The Addams Family is that they have a great deal of love, respect, and admiration for one another. The outright distain that Wednesday has for her mom bums me out. Otherwise I have been digging it.
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I just saw that as her going through that phase where kids are embarrassed by their parents but maybe a bit darker cuz that’s who she is. Similar to her relationship with her colorful cheery roommate. One thing I love is her nuanced acting. Like you can see behind her deadpan that in spite of herself she has emotions and cares about people. I feel like I know people like this. (I’d much rather be friends with people who are dark on the outside but good inside than people who pretend to be good and normal but are actually horrible… that is kind of a running theme of the Addams family)
Actually the only thing that freaked me out a bit was that she literally almost killed a swim team and certainly maimed at least one of them… being obsessed with goth stuff and actually hurting people are two different things. If she just scared them and they all got out of the pool in time it would have been a little better maybe… but maybe they needed something extreme to set up the school change… Other than that scene I really really loved the show.
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Correct. They are clearly trying to jam one kind of story - teen mystery show with angst and some romance, a la Riverdale, Sabrina, Enola Holmes, Veronica Mars - into a completely different sort of vibe - campy horror comedy.
I had that same sort of disconnect at times as well. It did keep the work from elevating to Stranger Things level (those first two seasons are still master classes in story telling and character development), but I still loved the show a great deal despite the uncomfortable mesh of these two styles of story. Hopefully they improve on that if they get a second season, the way Addams Family Values improved on the first movie.
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I love that Youtube series, and she’s been very gracious about not getting a show out of it and having to watch them develop this one sans her. She’s done SUCH great writing since then, too, like Santa Clarita Diet, which absolutely touches on similar macabre humor and was fantastic (another Netflix series ended too soon).
Yeah, it certainly set a different tone from the original and the movies, where the violence was cartoonish and never resulted in actual hurt (except to the truly bad people, like Fester’s serial killing wife). But you have to admit, her expression at the very end of that sequence is (chef’s kiss) just amazing.
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I adore the movies. Ricci’s terrifying grimace when asked to smile is just a perfect piece of acting and cinematography, and Joan Cusack is just spectacular in anything (I love her in Grosse Point Blank too).
Raul Julia was taken from us far too young, and I mourn the third movie we never got.
This series was definitely enjoyable, and I devoured it over the course of two evenings.
But as pointed out elsewhere above, it very much felt like the IP being forced to fit into a generic, formulaic Teen Dramady. One that had already been written without The Addams Family in mind. By committee.
There was very little surprising or genuinely counter-culture about it, and it felt like a lot of the spikey edges had been sanded off for wider general consumption.
And I get that feeling from a lot of the US-produced Netflix series these days, to be honest.
On the flip-side, I also watched 1899, and despite being a bit flabby in the middle, it turned out to be really quite good!
I’m hoping that gets a second series, given how it ended.
I just hope it doesn’t get quite so up itself as Dark.
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For the same reason that The Nightmare Before Christmas is associated with him, although it was the brilliant Harry Sellick who directed it… Burton has greater name recognition, and so anything sort of lightly goth stuff he’s somehow associated with is going to be known as being “by him”…
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Yeah they do that a lot of times with producer credits or someone who helps with the initial spark of the creation, but they have very little to do with most of the show/movie, to the point that you get confused on who actually did the thing. The actual directors and writers should get more of the credit but they are overshadowed by the big name attached.
Like Taika Waititi and Reservations Dogs, he gets a co-creation credit even though it is Sterlin Harjo who did the bulk of writing and directing.
Or Steven Spielberg and Back to the Future. For the longest time I thought it was his film, but he only Executive Produced it.
Or Kevin Willmott’s dark comedy indie film CSA: The Confederate States of America eventually got a “presented by Spike Lee” credit to try to give it more legs, even though he had zero interaction with the film until after it was finished.
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yeah that makes sense. and they gave him ( re: @Mister44, below ) an executive producer credit ( along with a horde of other people ) … probably in exchange for using his name so much 
speaking of him, and new goth netflix flicks, i just watched wendell and wild. it looks like it’s for kids, but definitely not younger kids. harder emotional themes than most stop motion movies. really great art and animation though
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We really didn’t like the show. 
Unpopular response, but here we go…
The Addams Family movies were brilliant: clearly hundreds of Hollywood creative types were running the asylum and loving it. There was genuine and fun chemistry between actors, and the family themselves was portrayed as “weird” (in a way that we in my family rather aspire to) but, underneath that, a family of loving and genuinely caring and affectionate people.
This show was missing the depth and the chemistry, the cast almost seemed like they didn’t to want to be there. The director should have known the difference between “deadpan” and “wooden” in delivering a line. I got no feeling of affection between the family members. Wednesday was just… hard to sympathize with; she wasn’t “kooky” or “spooky”, just petulant and a bit dull.
The Addams Family series and movies, for me, were about the fun in being just that little bit out in left field, but at the core still good and loving people.
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Yeah, we just watched it too, at my house… what an excellent film! I loved it!
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I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it makes more sense than one might suppose, but it’s more complex and subtle than “Death and murder are good actually”.
In the Sonnenfeld movies and in the TV series, they may have been involved with death and murder, but that didn’t make them lie down and accept being murdered. Or injustice.
They’ll happily accept and remember a good death or a meaningful death, but a senseless death upsets them. A death has to be for something. It has to mean something. They’re not genocides, they’re connaisseurs. They’ll respect someone for doing their time (“Monk?” “Prisoner”), but that doesn’t mean they want to be imprisoned. It’s not that Wednesday is upset at the thought that Gomez might be a murderer, but that nobody told her about it. If her father had killed someone for the right reasons, she could respect that. But if nobody ever spoke about it, that meant they were trying to hide it, and that made her suspicious.
It’s not that their morality is inverted, as that it’s a bit sideways. They see the beauty in the darkness. But they still find some dark things monstrous, just as something can be bright and colourful and cheery and monstrous as well.
And the antagonism between Wednesday and Morticia is because Wednesday isn’t a little girl any more. She’s at an age where she’s striking out to find her individuality, and she and her mother are alike in too many ways and different in too many ways for her not to chafe until she figures out her own boundaries. It’s not that her family are comparing her against her mother, she is. And she has to learn who her mother is, as much as figure out who she is herself.
I don’t know I’m explaining myself well.
I’m autistic. I have a very full understanding of the combination of powerful feelings under a flat affect. Wednesday Addams, and this portrayal of her, is one of the most relatable characters I know.
I thought her family was replete with affection. They would literally kill for each other. That they express it differently than most doesn’t change the feeling behind it. (“You’re soft. You’re weak. You won’t survive without me. I give you a month.” “I’ll miss you too.”) And I don’t know if it’s me, but I thought Ortega pushed a lot of emotion and character growth through the stricture of that “wooden” delivery. I saw determination, regret, anger, sadness, even at times happiness. (And not just the smile when the piranhas hit the water.)
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