WEDNESDAY, SEASON 1 (2022)
review by BK MUNN
When I was a kid, like everybody I watched reruns of The Addams Family on tv. In retrospect, it’s amazing that the show existed at all, a family sitcom based on some macabre, downright antisocial and perverse cartoons printed in the high-toned New Yorker magazine, but in the context of the times it doesn’t seem out of place. The post-Kennedy, post-Cuban Missile crisis 1960s was a time of high-concept tv shows with increasingly fantastical premises (and The Munsters premiered at the same time, for Christ’s sake). As a show, it still holds up as a goofy, only partly moronic example of 60s culture. They made some good logical decisions, shoe-horning Charles Addams’ disconnected cartoons into a network format, essentially bowdlerizing it for a mainstream audience (not that The New Yorker isn’t mainstream, but you know what I mean). It’s no smarter than Gilligan’s Island or Hogan’s Heroes, and it’s not without its own boring, repetitive schticks and annoying tics, but it lucked out with a few things, like a catchy theme song, great casting, and some creative characterizations that paid off. And for better or for worse, sixty years later the tv show is still the basis for a massive pop culture enterprise.
As an adult I think of the work of Charles Addams, including the roughly 150 cartoons and drawings he did that can be at least tangentially identified as “Addams Family” cartoons, as something like a holy text, my Bible or Shakespeare, and in many ways the epitome of comics art. I have to admit I’m a bit snobbish about them, and hold them close to my heart (I’m sure Addams was much less precious and, like Charles Schulz, was happy to cash any checks for prostituting his creations). These days, I think of the tv shows and movies as, at best, easily-forgettable aspects of the Addams legacy and, at worst, as something like a hideous boil on the face of the Mona Lisa (maybe like something you’d find in the Addams Family portrait gallery?). That being said, I’m still able to think about the original drawings and their ancillary spinoffs as separate things, and have even watched parts of the movie franchises over the years with a clean conscience (as a kid I also liked the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning animated show!).
Like all pop-culture properties, The Addams Family has been seized on as something endlessly franchise-able, to be mined and re-imagined and transformed into a myriad of formats and genres; a universe (dare I say multiverse?) unto itself. Our modern sophisticated tastes demand more than some Boomer artifact, and so we have this new Wednesday show, which takes one of the least-developed, most projected-upon, parts of the universe, essentially a blank slate, and posits her as a teen heroine in a sort of Harry Potter meets Nancy Drew milieu, as a goth Hermione, if you will, in one of these now stereotypical fantasy private schools. The slow addition of *actual* supernatural aspects to the "mythos", above and beyond Addams’ bedrock surrealism, placed front and center, is the novelty here, giving some kind of superpowers to all members of the clan, and special precognitive witchiness to both Morticia and Wednesday, etc. (The full scale “magic-ization” I think very clearly takes away from what made the original concepts unique, but whatever.) I turned off most of my grumpy critical nitpicking and enjoyed this (almost too long) short series. The casting was mostly good, the plots not too moronic (gleefully full of plot-holes, lacunae, and “traveling at the speed of plot” tv tropes), and overall those things I expected to dislike (dancing to The Cramps, Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester) instead were almost charming. It’s for kids but I’m adult enough to admit I’m basically a big baby and we live in an infantile society. Tim Burton, who has been making shit like this his entire career, had a hand in production and development, and directs half the episodes (the poster says this conglomeration of cliches and half-assed plots comes "from the imagination of Tim Burton" which is quite the self-own but also, which part?), and I can’t really say I hate it.
