The first trailer for Netflix’s new series, Wednesday, based on the Addams Family daughter, dropped a few days ago. Some aspects are done well, but there are some glaring problems it has with the Addams Family premise itself. Slick as anything Netflix does, and hewing closely to Tim Burton’s late-career ethos of having solid production design if nothing else, it fits what fans would expect out of a Burton version of the famous family.

That said, compare Wednesday to Rob Zombie’s upcoming take on The Munsters. No matter how one feels about the latter's visuals, it's impossible to deny that the feel of The Munsters is present. The characters look like the characters from the 1960s TV series, the humor is hokey, and the surf rock soundtrack still fits. Burton’s Wednesday, on the other hand, seems to undercut the Addams Family and the very premise of the original show.

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When The Addams Family first started (and no, it wasn’t when Uncle Fester farted) they were a series of cartoons drawn by the cartoonist Charles Addams for the New Yorker, one-panel ditties about an ugly, eclectic family of ghoulish people in between his regular one-offs. Eventually Hollywood came knocking and Addams would go on to help create a TV series about his then-unnamed characters, concocting such monikers as Gomez and Morticia for the parents, Wednesday and Pubert (later changed to Pugsley), Uncle Fester and Grandmama, Thing, Lurch, and Cousin It.

Munsters Addams Family

Unlike The Munsters at the time, the Addams Family weren’t trying to fit in. The Munsters tried to fit in with middle American values and ended up scaring their white-bread neighbors every time they did so. The Addamses, however, were the Addamses, and they didn’t care whether anyone liked them or not. It was why so many other subcultures saw themselves reflected in the Addams family, from Jewish people, to the LGBTQ community, to any number of other immigrants ever since. The Addamses were a family who’d always been here, and it was society who needed to either welcome them or stay out of their way. They weren’t about to bend or compromise themselves to fit in with the local PTA. They were Addamses!

Cut to Tim Burton taking a crack at the creepy, kooky, and altogether ooky family, and the result is Wednesday. Some things seem to have been done right — Luiz Guzmán as Gomez, continuing in the tradition of casting Hispanic actors as the character, gives audiences perhaps the most comic-accurate Gomez yet, a round little guy. Meanwhile, unlike the internet outroar claims believe, it’s Catherine Zeta-Jones’s more hourglass and less arch looking Morticia that’s the off one of the pair, but overall the casting looks about right.

It’s in the small details where things get weird. Thing is now some sort of Frankenstein-esque, stitched up hand. It seems that the idea of just a hand — which has always been a hand, with no explanation as to how — isn't good enough. Similarly, the violence has been massively increased.

Wednesday The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values Christina Ricci (1991-1993) Tim Burton, Netflix

The Addams Family series and movies have always had lots of gallows humor, morbid humor, dark humor, et cetera. The premise of whistling past the graveyard is well-known to the Addamses. Like in the Charles Addams cartoons that inspired their world, however, the humor is always implied and never shown. The Addamses may have a pot of boiling tar ready to dump on unwanted Christmas carolers, but we never see screaming burn victims running all over — just the family tipping the cauldron and later a series of splash marks around their front door. Burton goes much more gruesome, though, with a scene of Wednesday dumping piranhas into the school swimming pool during a team practice — a very Addams thing to do. The camera follows the fish and ends on frothing blood from her intended victim — an image not at all in line with the Addams family ethos. This is followed by her reasoning: the guy had been bullying Pugsley, and only she gets to do that. While this feels slightly Addams-ish, it’s also off. The Addams kids guillotine each other’s toys, blow each other up, and put each other in electric chairs for fun. There’s no amount of outside torment someone could do to an Addams member that they wouldn’t shrug off as something they engage in for actual recreation.

This is all a set-up, though, to get to the payday of having Gomez and Morticia enroll Wednesday in Nevermore, a school for Addams-like kids to attend. Nevermore feels exactly like what anyone would expect a Tim Burton gothic fantasy school to look like. It has the visuals of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Dark Shadows, and the feel of Lemony Snicket doing Hogwarts. It may delight fans of Burton's earlier work, but the entire premise begs the question: If such a school existed, why weren’t Wednesday and Pugsley enrolled here in the first place? Why put them through a bland, regular high school if the school where Gomez and Morticia first met was waiting there the whole time? It undercuts the entire premise of the series — the Addams kids can’t fit into a normal school — by turning their entire saga of not fitting in into a drawn out plot point.

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The final thing the school does to the series is to create, like Harry Potter does, an underground society of Addams-type people. After all, there have to be a lot more mysterious and spooky families out there to necessitate their own gothic boarding school — but this undercuts the Addams’ uniqueness in their own world. They’re no longer THE Addams Family, they’re one of a series of Addams Families. The Addamses have any number of other relatives — Flora and Fauna, Lumpy Addams, etc. — but the key takeaway is that they’re all Addamses. The school undercuts that premise by creating tons of other families that, even if they’re named the Poes or the Lovecrafts, dilute the specialness of the Addams Family proper.

The Addams Family doesn't hide in a world of similar people. They boldly enter into the “normal” world and drag it along in their wake. That’s where the new Wednesday trailer falls down. The earlier bits can be chalked up to the creators incorporating only the looks of the Addamses as opposed to their humor or behavior. But creating a special secretive world of other Addams-alikes strips their uniqueness, erasing the message of marching to beat of one's own drum no matter what others think.

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