Et tu, Tim, you almost want to ask. Now Tim Burton, the father of the eighties-Batman-Movies, the creator of Edward with the scissor hands and resuscitator from planet of monkeys, filmed a Netflix series. It, too, is based on forgotten treasures from the past: The eponymous Wednesday comes from the Addams Family and has existed as a comic character since the 1930s. She loves black, is always in a bad mood and has a morbid streak, which makes her fit into the misfit-loving Burton universe, where death is less terrifying than elsewhere.
Not a cute kid. At the beginning of the new series, she’s even particularly unsweet: classmates abused her little brother Pugsley, and that’s her privilege, so her revenge turns out to be bloody. She dumps piranhas in the high school pool. And for that they ship their parents Gomez and Morticia (happy reunion with Catherine Zeta-Jones) to the boarding school where they met.
Wednesday’s roommate is a cute blonde with a noticeable fondness for pink, at least for a werewolf
Nevermore Academy is outside of Jericho, an old building where children grow up, next to whom the little ones from Hogwarts look like star students. Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) shares her room with a cute blonde who has a noticeable fondness for pink, at least for a werewolf. Everywhere Wednesday is overshadowed by her mother, who was a star here – and she already has typical teenage problems anyway.
The series is a wild mix of Harry Potter, superhero fantasy and crime, Wednesday begins to investigate: Jericho is shaken by a series of murders. The sheriff believes evil is at home at Nevermore Academy. And Wednesday firmly believes that one of those perfectly normal people from Jericho is behind it. It’s the sentence that falls early, but it’s not always all black or white on earth. wednesday creates a wonderfully complex picture of the world – however, the genre melange with many flashbacks and the flood of characters is sometimes a bit confusing.
The old Addams Family, which shook up early television with their series in 1964, only has a few resemblances to do with Burton’s reworking: The whole family is still strange and finds every horror great, without their fellow human beings with all the affinity for carnivorous plants and serious damage to a happy grave mood, the Piranha episode is an outlier. But before that, the family was still trying to get along with their Normalo neighborhood; and only the connoisseur can still hear the familiar music in Danny Elfman’s score for the Burton series.
Times have just changed. Nevermore Academy has few allies in the small town of Jericho, next to which it is based, and when the “Normies” come out as fans of their Pilgrim Fathers past there, with particular reference to their town’s founder, who was a possessed witch hunter, then of course that has something to do with it to do with the rift that runs through American society. And with the density of high school massacres in the United States, you can’t help but wednesday also to see how the fears of American students are dealt with. The images of the freaky kids fleeing through the hallways when the Academy is attacked are just very close to reality – even if these kids get claws and howl loudly under the full moon.
wednesdayeight episodes, on Netflix.
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