Even though the title character of Wednesday was never really associated with the murder-mystery genre, the new Netflix series adds whodunit elements for her stint at Nevermore school. The mystery of the season revolves around who – or what – was killing students, and Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) sets out to investigate on her own. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the duo of showrunners, Al Gough and Miles Millar, talked about their influences and mentioned one particular story that they’ve been wanting to tell for a long time.
In the interview, the Smallville creators revealed that they tried to make a young Miss Marple series for years. Marple is a character created by murder-mystery legendary author Agatha Christie. Much like Hercule Poirot (seen in the movie franchise starring Kenneth Branagh), Marple is a formidable investigator and her stories also happen in her later years. A “Young Miss Marple” series would give new and old fans the opportunity to witness her transform into the great detective from the novel series. Millar explains:
“Well, we tried for a long time to get a young Miss Marple [series going], and maybe that influenced us with the whodunnit element [in ‘Wednesday’], but it’s certainly something that was intriguing as a character who you always see. There’s something about whodunnits and mysteries that it’s a great puzzle for a writer to solve. So, I think that was something, to see how she evolved into sort of the nosy old lady in Agatha Christie was something we talked about for a while.”
Gough and Millar Have Played With Whodunit Tropes For Decades
Even though we may not get to see young Miss Marple any time soon, at least Gough and Millar got to exercise their whodunit whims with Wednesday. The difference is, on the Netflix series the murder-mystery plot also features supernatural elements, which adds extra layers of mystery for the audience to try to figure out. In their previous show, the long-running CW series Smallville, it was also fairly common for the duo to throw in investigative storylines for Clark Kent (Tom Welling) to figure out.
Wednesday premiered on Netflix on November 23 and quickly became one of 2022’s biggest hits. The show remained among the Top 10 most-watched titles on the platform ever since its premiere, which might mean that we’ll get to see the Addams heir investigate a lot more cases.
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 a trailer for the series below:
