Wednesday pulled Tim Burton back from thoughts of retirement
After Dumbo left him creatively drained, Tim Burton was weighing an exit from filmmaking. Then a pilot script about Wednesday Addams arrived, and he said it spoke to how he had felt at school. The result, starring Jenna Ortega, became Netflix's second-most watched English-language series within three weeks.
Burton's history with the Addams clan went back decades. He was offered the 1991 film The Addams Family but passed because of his Batman commitments, and Barry Sonnenfeld took the job. Later he was attached to a stop-motion Addams feature at Illumination based on Charles Addams's original drawings, which was cancelled in 2013 when, by his account, the studio preferred computer animation.
The showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar began developing ideas in 2019, secured the rights, wrote a pilot and sent it to Burton, who surprised them by signing on straight away. Netflix ordered eight episodes in February 2021; Burton directed four, his first real foray into television, and brought his longtime costume designer Colleen Atwood with him. Ortega was cast partly to reflect the character's Latina heritage, and Christina Ricci, Wednesday herself in the 1991 film and its 1993 sequel, returned at Burton's request as a Nevermore botany teacher.
The premise is simple and gleefully dark. Expelled for dropping live piranhas into a school pool to avenge her bullied brother Pugsley, Wednesday is sent to her parents' old school, Nevermore Academy in Jericho, Vermont, a private school founded for outcasts and monsters. Cold and defiant, she clashes with the shapeshifting principal Larissa Weems while discovering she has inherited her mother's psychic gifts, which she uses to crack a local murder case. Her roommate is a werewolf; a disembodied hand called Thing keeps watch over her.
The first season premiered on November 16, 2022, reached Netflix a week later, and went on to win four Primetime Emmys and three Golden Globe nominations. A second season arrived in two halves in August and September 2025, adding Steve Buscemi as a fire-wielding new principal, and a third season was ordered that July.
Source: Wednesday (TV series)
