Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Netflix
The Addams Family gets a drearily formulaic makeover with Wednesday, a new Netflix series, premiering Nov. 23, that wedges the family’s mordant goth daughter into a boarding school drama that’s a pale photocopy of Harry Potter—and its lesser Percy Jackson/The School for Good and Evil/Vampire Academy offspring. Misbegotten on almost every front, it mines its name-brand IP for familiar romance and horror, and proves all the more depressing for being the handiwork of the very artist who decades ago pioneered such macabre teen terrain: Tim Burton.
On a purely aesthetic level, Burton—who executive produces and directs the eight-episode series’ first four installments—cut-and-pastes his greatest hits in Wednesday: a bit of Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands here, a drop of Sleepy Hollow and Frankenweenie there. Charles Addams’ The Addams Family was always an obvious influence on Burton, but the auteur brings nothing new to this reimagined adaptation; he’s already done this sort of thing before, and with considerably more inventiveness and flair.
Rather than striving for idiosyncrasy, Burton merely gives everyone what they want—or to be more precise, what they’re expecting, such that the proceedings feel like an imitation (including of Barry Sonnenfeld’s two 1990s feature films) rather than the real thing.