I found it way too light on lore/backstory. Because I don't really know the Addams Family. So I constantly felt like I was missing stuff that I was supposed to know. Through the series I learned...
I found it way too light on lore/backstory. Because I don't really know the Addams Family. So I constantly felt like I was missing stuff that I was supposed to know. Through the series I learned very little about Wednesday or her family. Why is she like she is? What are the rules of the world they are in? Why is... everything?! It's not that I want everything spoon-fed to me, I am fine with figuring stuff out as we go along - but there wasn't very much of that either. It felt like the show assumed prior knowledge a lot of the time.
It's not that the show was particularly bad, it just didn't have a lot of depth. Or at least it didn't explain any of the depth I assume the Addamsverse already has. So it felt a bit weak in terms of character and story. Enid was the most fleshed out and developed character and even I know she wasn't in the original show/movie/etc.
Fred Armisen was amazing though. Completely stole every scene he was in, as ever. How is that guy so good?
In the end I thought Fate: The Winx Saga was a rather better supernatural teen drama (and honestly, I do love a supernatural teen drama) and that was a TV show based on an animated advert for a line of dolls.
Apparently Thing was almost all practical FX. Dude in a green suit to the wrist, matted out later. So much better than doing things with CGI.
I've watched the 1960s sitcom, the 1990s live-action movies, and the 2020s animated movies, as well as done some occasional online research into the Addams Family franchise. There is no...
Through the series I learned very little about Wednesday or her family. Why is she like she is? What are the rules of the world they are in? Why is... everything?!
I've watched the 1960s sitcom, the 1990s live-action movies, and the 2020s animated movies, as well as done some occasional online research into the Addams Family franchise.
There is no explanation about why any of the Addams family are the way they are. They just... are. They're a gothic, weird, but loving family plonked down in the middle of suburbia without any explanation of why they're there, where they came from, or how they came to be. We don't know why Fester can illuminate light bulbs in his mouth, or why Wednesday is sadistic, or why Morticia is gorgeously gothic, or why Thing is just a hand. That's just who they are. There's no lore, no backstory (apart from the love story of Gomez and Morticia). You just have to accept them on their own terms. Take it or leave it.
There's also a large extended family behind Morticia (nee Frump) and Gomez - lots of strange and weird and only semi-human relatives, ranging from the famous all-hair incomprehensible Cousin Itt to Morticia's sister Ophelia, with flowers literally growing in her head - and none of them have any explanations, either. They just are the way they are.
The depth you're looking for wasn't missing from this new show, because that depth was never there in the first place.
The Addams Family was never about why the Addamses are the way they are. The franchise was always about how the Addamses respond to normal suburban life - and how normal suburban people respond to the Addamses. Plus, the love that the Addams family members have for each other.
Oh, OK. I suppose it's nice to know I wasn't missing out on things because they weren't there in the first place. But it does raise the question of why not tell some more of those stories? I...
Oh, OK. I suppose it's nice to know I wasn't missing out on things because they weren't there in the first place. But it does raise the question of why not tell some more of those stories? I thought Wednesday was potentially a really good, interesting character - but they didn't really do much with her. Perhaps in season 2+ they can flesh things out a bit more.
how normal suburban people respond to the Addamses
There wasn't a huge amount of this. Might have been a bit more interesting if there was.
I don't mean explaining like "what precise series of events led to Uncle Fester having no hair" or that level of thing - more about fleshing out characters. It's OK to just have the standard...
I don't mean explaining like "what precise series of events led to Uncle Fester having no hair" or that level of thing - more about fleshing out characters.
It's OK to just have the standard sitcom setup where everything exists as seen and resets at the end of half an hour and nothing progresses or changes, but that's not as interesting to me. I prefer deeper and more complex stories and one way to do that, as well as build up the universe they live in, is to tell us some of their history and some of how the world works. It's just a preference. I like lore.
They do it in the show a little with some backstory on Morticia and Gomez, and a suggestion that the Addams family story goes back to Pilgrim times. Hopefully we'll get some more of that. Not too much, but some. A bit of depth would make the show better, I think.
Cool. So maybe the Addams Family, and its associated spin-offs, aren't for you. Not everyone has to enjoy the Addams Family shows.
It's OK to just have the standard sitcom setup where everything exists as seen and resets at the end of half an hour and nothing progresses or changes, but that's not as interesting to me.
Cool. So maybe the Addams Family, and its associated spin-offs, aren't for you. Not everyone has to enjoy the Addams Family shows.
Sure, but a 8 episode run of 45 minute long episodes is very unusual for a sitcom. Also the lack of gags was a dead giveaway. A sitcom would be fine. I believe that's what the original was. Or...
Sure, but a 8 episode run of 45 minute long episodes is very unusual for a sitcom. Also the lack of gags was a dead giveaway.
A sitcom would be fine. I believe that's what the original was. Or even a soap opera. I probably wouldn't watch either but there's nothing wrong with that sort of TV. But in format, style and tone, Wednesday was clearly trying to be something a little more involved and I think it didn't quite manage it. I'm hopeful it will do better in later seasons.
A fairly amusing supernatural teen drama that is OK, except that it gets damn near everything about Aadams Family lore (whether comics, OG TV, or movies) wrong, with few exceptions, notably thing,...
A fairly amusing supernatural teen drama that is OK, except that it gets damn near everything about Aadams Family lore (whether comics, OG TV, or movies) wrong, with few exceptions, notably thing, as I was informed by my loving wife daily as she watched through it,
The tl;dr of the rants my wife made as she watched the show is that the Aadams universe is not one of Vampires and Werewolves. That's The Munsters. The family dynamics were all wrong. Pugsley was never 'weak'.
Even in the original show there was witches, ghosts, sentient meat-eating plants, sentient taxidermy, Thing, Lurch, Cousin Itt, and references to various other monstrous family members... so is it...
Even in the original show there was witches, ghosts, sentient meat-eating plants, sentient taxidermy, Thing, Lurch, Cousin Itt, and references to various other monstrous family members... so is it really that much of a stretch to go from all that to werewolves and vampires?
And depending on if you take the cartoons, movies, and TV remakes as canon, there are undeniably clear references to the existence of various other supernatural creatures in the Addams family universe.
This is not a stellar show but fiction is often not about right or wrong. It's just a different version, another take on the IP. That doesn't mean it's "wrong".
This is not a stellar show but fiction is often not about right or wrong. It's just a different version, another take on the IP. That doesn't mean it's "wrong".
Semantics. Of course it's subjective, I wish people would just presume that by default in discussions about fiction. It's wrong to us, which is really the only wrong that matters, and I shared...
Semantics. Of course it's subjective, I wish people would just presume that by default in discussions about fiction. It's wrong to us, which is really the only wrong that matters, and I shared that thought.
The single most important core to the IP is that the Aadams family is very strong and loving one, it's just somewhat supernatural and loves the macabre. And the show did poorly at the former and was inconsistent with the latter.
J.J. Abram's Star Trek also got Trek wrong, and that's hardly a minority viewpoint.
It could just be an interpretation of an older Wednesday we haven't seen before. My partner has an intensely close relationship with her family, but during her angsty high school years she had a...
The single most important core to the IP is that the Aadams family is very strong and loving one, it's just somewhat supernatural and loves the macabre. And the show did poorly at the former and was inconsistent with the latter.
It could just be an interpretation of an older Wednesday we haven't seen before. My partner has an intensely close relationship with her family, but during her angsty high school years she had a very similar, strained relationship with her mother. Not saying your feeling is invalid, but I think it's common that kids can yoyo a bit in the hard hitting puberty years. Agreed on Pugsley though, I remember him being a prankster and blowing things up.
I would go a step further. The show is centered around a teenager. The rest of the family are on the periphery. From a teenagers perspective, the mother is annoying and controlling and nosey, the...
I would go a step further. The show is centered around a teenager. The rest of the family are on the periphery.
From a teenagers perspective, the mother is annoying and controlling and nosey, the Dad is a helpless buffoon, the brother is an idiot to be tormented, and the uncle is cool and thinks you are cool too.
I was surprised to see that Tim Burton directed half the episodes, his style is generally more pronounced and easily recognizable. I was even more surprised to learn that Tim Burton didn't direct...
I was surprised to see that Tim Burton directed half the episodes, his style is generally more pronounced and easily recognizable.
I was even more surprised to learn that Tim Burton didn't direct the 1990s Addams Family movies.
It's an okay show, and wouldn't be worthy of mention if not for Jenna Ortega. She really is brilliant.
That was Barry Sonnenfield who also directed Men in Black and the Kevin Spacey talking cat movie. He did do a Netflix show though, the highly underrated Series of Unfortunate Events.
I was even more surprised to learn that Tim Burton didn't direct the 1990s Addams Family movies.
That was Barry Sonnenfield who also directed Men in Black and the Kevin Spacey talking cat movie. He did do a Netflix show though, the highly underrated Series of Unfortunate Events.
It had more hype when it was announced in 2015, and even had a fan made teaser that went viral. Somehow that didn’t translate to hype when it came out. The first season got a lot of attention but...
Somehow that didn’t translate to hype when it came out. The first season got a lot of attention but by the time the third season came around nobody cared about it anymore.
I found it uncomfortable to watch, yet extremely interesting. It's rare to see a show take on absurdist themes so wholeheartedly. Season 2 lost me some, but Season 3 cranked the quality up and I...
I found it uncomfortable to watch, yet extremely interesting. It's rare to see a show take on absurdist themes so wholeheartedly. Season 2 lost me some, but Season 3 cranked the quality up and I was brought back in.
I was glad to have watched it, and I'll never watch it again.
What would Wednesday have been like without the dark humor One executive wanted to cut out all the dark humor on the editing floor. I guess it was lucky that Tim Burton directed half the episodes?...
What would Wednesday have been like without the dark humor One executive wanted to cut out all the dark humor on the editing floor. I guess it was lucky that Tim Burton directed half the episodes? Because while there is nothing intrinsically important references to a more efficient guillotine, I am not sure the show would have been the same without Wednesday being the lovable psychopath she clearly is?
I would have absolutely hated it if they did that. Humor is the cornerstone of the whole Addams Family concept; it literally started off as a series of comics. To be honest, the whole whodunnit...
I would have absolutely hated it if they did that. Humor is the cornerstone of the whole Addams Family concept; it literally started off as a series of comics.
To be honest, the whole whodunnit mystery plot combined with "Wednesday goes to Hogwarts" felt a little bit forced to me, so if they cut out the jokes it would have been Riverdale season one levels of bad.
In article form, for those who prefer that. Relevant part:
In article form, for those who prefer that. Relevant part:
Dark humor is a signature trait of not just the character of Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) but the entire "Addams Family" franchise itself, going all the way back to the morbidly funny gag cartoons by Charles Addams beginning in the 1930s. But in an interview with Geek Vibes Nation to promote "Wednesday," series writer-creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar revealed that one executive suggested removing most or all of it from the series in what would have been a particularly fatal cut. "One executive wanted to cut all the jokes out," said Millar. "All the black humor, all her references to murder and suicide and death. [We were] constantly getting notes to just eliminate all the jokes."
Thankfully, Millar realized the importance of this element to "Wednesday," but he credits executive producer Tim Burton, who also directs four out of its eight episodes, with nailing its grimly humorous tone. "[O]bviously it takes someone like Tim Burton to be able to pull off that tone," Millar said.
Fans of "Wednesday" and of "The Addams Family" in general are almost certainly glad that the unnamed executive who suggested cutting out such gems as Wednesday's description of her psychic visions as feeling "like electroshock therapy, only without the satisfying afterburn" from her own TV show did not see their advice followed by the makers of the show.
Jenna Ortega's acting as Wednesday is utterly brilliant, and completely makes the show.
I found it way too light on lore/backstory. Because I don't really know the Addams Family. So I constantly felt like I was missing stuff that I was supposed to know. Through the series I learned very little about Wednesday or her family. Why is she like she is? What are the rules of the world they are in? Why is... everything?! It's not that I want everything spoon-fed to me, I am fine with figuring stuff out as we go along - but there wasn't very much of that either. It felt like the show assumed prior knowledge a lot of the time.
It's not that the show was particularly bad, it just didn't have a lot of depth. Or at least it didn't explain any of the depth I assume the Addamsverse already has. So it felt a bit weak in terms of character and story. Enid was the most fleshed out and developed character and even I know she wasn't in the original show/movie/etc.
Fred Armisen was amazing though. Completely stole every scene he was in, as ever. How is that guy so good?
In the end I thought Fate: The Winx Saga was a rather better supernatural teen drama (and honestly, I do love a supernatural teen drama) and that was a TV show based on an animated advert for a line of dolls.
Apparently Thing was almost all practical FX. Dude in a green suit to the wrist, matted out later. So much better than doing things with CGI.
I've watched the 1960s sitcom, the 1990s live-action movies, and the 2020s animated movies, as well as done some occasional online research into the Addams Family franchise.
There is no explanation about why any of the Addams family are the way they are. They just... are. They're a gothic, weird, but loving family plonked down in the middle of suburbia without any explanation of why they're there, where they came from, or how they came to be. We don't know why Fester can illuminate light bulbs in his mouth, or why Wednesday is sadistic, or why Morticia is gorgeously gothic, or why Thing is just a hand. That's just who they are. There's no lore, no backstory (apart from the love story of Gomez and Morticia). You just have to accept them on their own terms. Take it or leave it.
There's also a large extended family behind Morticia (nee Frump) and Gomez - lots of strange and weird and only semi-human relatives, ranging from the famous all-hair incomprehensible Cousin Itt to Morticia's sister Ophelia, with flowers literally growing in her head - and none of them have any explanations, either. They just are the way they are.
The depth you're looking for wasn't missing from this new show, because that depth was never there in the first place.
The Addams Family was never about why the Addamses are the way they are. The franchise was always about how the Addamses respond to normal suburban life - and how normal suburban people respond to the Addamses. Plus, the love that the Addams family members have for each other.
Oh, OK. I suppose it's nice to know I wasn't missing out on things because they weren't there in the first place. But it does raise the question of why not tell some more of those stories? I thought Wednesday was potentially a really good, interesting character - but they didn't really do much with her. Perhaps in season 2+ they can flesh things out a bit more.
There wasn't a huge amount of this. Might have been a bit more interesting if there was.
Why do the Addamses need explaining? Why can't they just be?
I don't mean explaining like "what precise series of events led to Uncle Fester having no hair" or that level of thing - more about fleshing out characters.
It's OK to just have the standard sitcom setup where everything exists as seen and resets at the end of half an hour and nothing progresses or changes, but that's not as interesting to me. I prefer deeper and more complex stories and one way to do that, as well as build up the universe they live in, is to tell us some of their history and some of how the world works. It's just a preference. I like lore.
They do it in the show a little with some backstory on Morticia and Gomez, and a suggestion that the Addams family story goes back to Pilgrim times. Hopefully we'll get some more of that. Not too much, but some. A bit of depth would make the show better, I think.
Cool. So maybe the Addams Family, and its associated spin-offs, aren't for you. Not everyone has to enjoy the Addams Family shows.
Sure, but a 8 episode run of 45 minute long episodes is very unusual for a sitcom. Also the lack of gags was a dead giveaway.
A sitcom would be fine. I believe that's what the original was. Or even a soap opera. I probably wouldn't watch either but there's nothing wrong with that sort of TV. But in format, style and tone, Wednesday was clearly trying to be something a little more involved and I think it didn't quite manage it. I'm hopeful it will do better in later seasons.
Aristotle talked about that in The Poetics. To quote THE Philosopher: "Dude! What happens before the story doesn't matter!".
A fairly amusing supernatural teen drama that is OK, except that it gets damn near everything about Aadams Family lore (whether comics, OG TV, or movies) wrong, with few exceptions, notably thing, as I was informed by my loving wife daily as she watched through it,
The tl;dr of the rants my wife made as she watched the show is that the Aadams universe is not one of Vampires and Werewolves. That's The Munsters. The family dynamics were all wrong. Pugsley was never 'weak'.
Thing was good though, best part of the show.
Even in the original show there was witches, ghosts, sentient meat-eating plants, sentient taxidermy, Thing, Lurch, Cousin Itt, and references to various other monstrous family members... so is it really that much of a stretch to go from all that to werewolves and vampires?
And depending on if you take the cartoons, movies, and TV remakes as canon, there are undeniably clear references to the existence of various other supernatural creatures in the Addams family universe.
This is not a stellar show but fiction is often not about right or wrong. It's just a different version, another take on the IP. That doesn't mean it's "wrong".
Semantics. Of course it's subjective, I wish people would just presume that by default in discussions about fiction. It's wrong to us, which is really the only wrong that matters, and I shared that thought.
The single most important core to the IP is that the Aadams family is very strong and loving one, it's just somewhat supernatural and loves the macabre. And the show did poorly at the former and was inconsistent with the latter.
J.J. Abram's Star Trek also got Trek wrong, and that's hardly a minority viewpoint.
It could just be an interpretation of an older Wednesday we haven't seen before. My partner has an intensely close relationship with her family, but during her angsty high school years she had a very similar, strained relationship with her mother. Not saying your feeling is invalid, but I think it's common that kids can yoyo a bit in the hard hitting puberty years. Agreed on Pugsley though, I remember him being a prankster and blowing things up.
I would go a step further. The show is centered around a teenager. The rest of the family are on the periphery.
From a teenagers perspective, the mother is annoying and controlling and nosey, the Dad is a helpless buffoon, the brother is an idiot to be tormented, and the uncle is cool and thinks you are cool too.
I was surprised to see that Tim Burton directed half the episodes, his style is generally more pronounced and easily recognizable.
I was even more surprised to learn that Tim Burton didn't direct the 1990s Addams Family movies.
It's an okay show, and wouldn't be worthy of mention if not for Jenna Ortega. She really is brilliant.
That was Barry Sonnenfield who also directed Men in Black and the Kevin Spacey talking cat movie. He did do a Netflix show though, the highly underrated Series of Unfortunate Events.
I always thought that their Unfortunate Events adaptation didn't get much mindshare. It's got Neil Patric Harris doing some of his best performances!
It had more hype when it was announced in 2015, and even had a fan made teaser that went viral.
Somehow that didn’t translate to hype when it came out. The first season got a lot of attention but by the time the third season came around nobody cared about it anymore.
I found it uncomfortable to watch, yet extremely interesting. It's rare to see a show take on absurdist themes so wholeheartedly. Season 2 lost me some, but Season 3 cranked the quality up and I was brought back in.
I was glad to have watched it, and I'll never watch it again.
What would Wednesday have been like without the dark humor One executive wanted to cut out all the dark humor on the editing floor. I guess it was lucky that Tim Burton directed half the episodes? Because while there is nothing intrinsically important references to a more efficient guillotine, I am not sure the show would have been the same without Wednesday being the lovable psychopath she clearly is?
I would have absolutely hated it if they did that. Humor is the cornerstone of the whole Addams Family concept; it literally started off as a series of comics.
To be honest, the whole whodunnit mystery plot combined with "Wednesday goes to Hogwarts" felt a little bit forced to me, so if they cut out the jokes it would have been Riverdale season one levels of bad.
In article form, for those who prefer that. Relevant part:
Ooooh! Nice find.