Right now, Netflix certainly doesn’t regret the decision of making a whole series centered around Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega). According to the streamer, this week Wednesday managed to remain among the most-watched TV series on the platform, with over a billion view hours clocked in by subscribers. Even though The Addams Family is a pretty powerful IP, series creators Al Gough and Miles Millar knew that focusing the story on one member of the family was a risk, but fortunately it paid off.
In an interview to The Hollywood Reporter, the duo revealed why they decided to center the series around Wednesday, and, more importantly, why they wanted to take her away from her family’s surroundings. Gough explained that it’s all about allowing themselves to be curious:
“It was a character that we all really loved, and nobody had spent a lot of time with. And it’s a character we’d only seen really as a 10-, 11-, 12-year-old, who is part of a family and would have a funny line in the scene, but we didn’t know much about her. Her sort of fearlessness and her ability to always be herself with something, that was interesting, and we thought, well, ‘What if she was a teenage girl? And then what if you took her out of the family and put her in boarding school, which is ostensibly a new family? How would she react?’”
Wednesday Needed to Be Alone to Thrive
Of course, that decision didn’t come easily. Gough and Millar had to go back and forth with ideas and try to figure out what would work. But as the project took shape, they realized that it was really important to put Wednesday in new and unexplored territories. Millar reveals that once they decided to put the title character in Nevermore, it helped develop the story of the whole family at the same time:
“We wrestled with that initially, in terms of, if we’re doing the teenage Wednesday Addams, is it funny if she’s the fish out of water in a regular high school? But then we felt like every day should get back to the family, and we sort of wanted her out of the family. And then the other thing about the boarding school offered was boarding in the world of the Addams Family. So you see, where did Gomez and Morticia go to school? What is that? How do these people exist in this real world? So, it excited us in terms of opened and expanded the world of the Addams Family, and that’s something, I think, certainly, people have been intrigued by.”
Wednesday follows the title character as she navigates a new boarding school for outcasts like her. Once she gets to the school, she realizes that Nevermore students are getting killed, and she decides to investigate who could be behind those killings.
Aside from Ortega, the cast also features Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia Addams, Luis Guzmán as Gomez Addams, Isaac Ordonez as Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley, Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester, Christina Ricci as Marilyn Thornhill, George Burcea as Lurch, Gwendoline Christie as Principal Larissa Weems, Riki Lindhome as Dr. Valerie Kinbott, Jamie McShane as Sheriff Donovan Galpin, and Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay.
You can stream all episodes of Wednesday on Netflix now. Check out the trailer for Season 1 below: