Tim Burton is officially revisiting The Addams Family.
Netflix has handed out a straight-to-series, eight-episode order for Wednesday, a live-action offshoot of The Addams Family, from director Tim Burton and showrunners Al Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville, Into the Badlands).
The series is described as a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy. Wednesday’s attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.
Related Stories
Burton is attached to direct and exec produce the series. Gough and Millar will serve as showrunners and exec produce alongside Andrew Mittman (The Addams Family, Alphas), Kevin Miserocchi (Tee and Charles Addams Foundation), Kayla Alpert (Code Black, Up All Night), Jonathan Glickman for Glickmania (Addams Family 2) and Gail Berman (The Addams Family, Alphas). The series hails from MGM/UA Television.
Wednesday was taken out to market late last year and became the source of a bidding war between streamers, with Netflix edging multiple other bidders for the property that marks Burton’s first live-action TV foray. Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Sweeney Todd, Batman) was previously attached to direct a 3D stop-motion animated take on The Addams Family nearly a decade ago, but the feature never came to fruition.
Created by cartoonist Charles Addams in 1938, the comic has been adapted for film and TV multiple times over the years. John Astin and Carolyn Jones starred in a live-action TV series for ABC in the ’60s. An animated series followed in the ’70s before the famed family was revived in the ’90s with a pair of features starring Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia and Christina Ricci (as Wednesday). That feature inspired an animated TV series with Astin reprising his role. In the late ’90s, Tim Curry and Daryl Hannah starred in a direct-to-video feature and short-lived live-action series. More recently, Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth brought The Addams Family to Broadway.
For Gough and Millar, meanwhile, Wednesday marks the latest franchise the duo have brought to television. They famously told the origin story of Superman on The WB Network/CW’s Smallville and previously adapted best-selling book franchise The Shannara Chronicles for MTV. The longtime collaborators most recently ran AMC’s Into the Badlands. They’re repped by WME.
Burton, also repped by WME, counts features Dumbo, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Alice Through the Looking Glass and countless others among his impressive roster of credits.
