Fans of director Tim Burton have been looking forward to his series, Wednesday, based on the Addams family’s only daughter, played by X star Jenny Ortega. It seemed like a perfect match of material and meister, so to speak, a gothy director turning to the gothiest of families in American culture.The Netflix series hits just in time for Thanksgiving, and for some corporate reason too late for Halloween. Now the steamer released a new Wednesday featurette where the creators go into the direction the series is taking and explain how it’s going to be more of a long movie than a TV series.The IGN featurette about Wednesday - a much-storied idea that has left fans both excited (and not) as various pieces of information trickles in - has dropped. It opens with the producers going on about Burton's much lauded (and often imitated, including by Burton himself) aesthetic as if anyone thought the series would be lacking in witchy production design and was going to be short on striped outfits and curlicues. No less than the costume designer (longtime Burton collaborator Colleen Atwood) and Morticia herself (Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones) go on about how colorful and quirky Burton is visually.
The producers go on to say that Wednesday is something special to Burton and the director himself says that the Addams family represents how Burtons feels about families in general, his feeling overall being that families are strange (as can be seen in his movies as a recurring theme). He goes on to say that Wednesday shares his worldview and that he wanted to create a heightened reality for the series (one assumes he means as opposed to all the hyperrealistic realities present in his movies so far). The cast and crew go on to discuss the visuals once again and then mention that Wednesday is more of a longer-form movie.
Whenever the people behind a TV series say something is more like a long movie than a TV show, it’s always an iffy proposition. There can be exceptions, such as when a filmmaker like David Lynch brings in Twin Peaks: The Return, but more often than not it means that a show is overlong, meandering, and not made up of the typical act structures that provide weekly closure and plot movement that a regular series has going for it. It’s an even iffier proposition if that extended movie is coming courtesy of Tim Burton, a director who’s gotten rotten Rotten Tomatoes reviews (from critics and audiences) on more than half the stuff he’s made since the year 2000.
Wednesday drops on Netflix on November 23rd, 2022.
Source: IGN/Twitter