(M) ★★★★
Showrunners: Alfred Gough & Miles Millar.
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Gwendoline Christie, Riki Lindhome, Jamie McShane, Hunter Doohan, Percy Hynes White, Emma Myers, Joy Sunday, Georgie Farmer, Christina Ricci, Moosa Mostafa, Victor Dorobantu, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Iman Marson, Isaac Ordonez, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, William Houston, Fred Armisen.
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| Watching The Cure live in concert is always more fun as a family. |
The secret to a good cover song is finding the things that make the original unique and great, and doing those bits right. You can throw out everything else so long as you nail the ingredients at the heart of the song. Then you're on a winner.
The same is true of a reboot. Case in point - Wednesday, a reboot of The Addams Family, which began life as a newspaper cartoon in the 1930s before becoming over a dozen different TV shows, movies and animated series across the past 60 years or so.
Yes, there are the kooky characters, including Uncle Fester and The Thing, which require a certain level of fidelity to the source material. But at its core, The Addams Family was about a love of the macabre and a fascination with the darker aspects of human nature, all the while being true to your weird self. And that's what Wednesday never loses sight of, even when its taking its nearly-century-old characters into uncharted territory.
What better way to hone in on those darker pockets of society than through a teen drama focusing on the Addams' daughter Wednesday, where the heightened emotions of adolescence can really help dial the darkness up to 11? Throw in a murder mystery and a Hogwarts-like school that celebrates not being "normal", and you have the perfect setting for Wednesday Addams' latest adventure.
Wednesday, played with perfect unblinking goth grimness by Jenna Ortega, is as unsettling as you would hope, but by placing her in a school filled with other outcasts, her weirdness is less bracing. This is part of the series' success. The show is less interested in Wednesday as an anachronism in the modern world, and as a result is able to focus more on who she is and what makes her tick. If Wednesday is too weird for the weirdos of Nevermore School For Outcasts, then why is that, can she ever be accepted, and what happens when other people actually understand what she's going through?
The Addams Family's central conceit has typically been based around the spooky clan's abnormal interactions with the real world, but they've always been able to retreat to their weird mansion at the end and wallow in their own kookiness. In Wednesday, there is no retreat for the titular character, which raises the stakes and makes her interactions all the more engrossing. While the film's core mystery - there's a killer on the loose - motivates Wednesday throughout, its how she deals with the unavoidable people in her life and the expectations of her school and society that provide the real drama.
From her colourful werewolf roommate Enid (Myers) to the strident headmistress Ms Weems (Christie), plus a couple of boys taken with her aloof ways, Wednesday is constantly threatened by the scariest beasts of all - friendship, romance, and small-town America. And then there are the murders to solve.
Much has been made of the presence of Tim Burton as a director on the first four episodes, and he certainly sets the tone in a way you might expect from the director of Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow. The requisite misty forests and gothic architecture are present, as is a Danny Elfman score, and Burton's love of "outcasts among the normies" is a key theme throughout.
Wednesday runs the risk of becoming just another teen TV series with a supernatural bent, or just another faulty reboot merely trading on brand recognition. But it's neither of those things, instead throwing a mixture of familiar ingredients into its cauldron to brew up something suitably creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky.
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