Wednesday misses the Addams Family's point, but found its perfect star

The Addams family may be the most unlikely artistic creation to spawn an expanded universe. Created by accident by an accidental cartoonist, the characters that appeared in Charles Addams' stand-alone cartoons for The New Yorker weren't, at first, a firmly defined family at all.

Instead they were just often-shifting faces, macabre imaginings from a lovely, charming man — who just so happened to decorate his home with medieval crossbows and marry his third wife in the nearby pet cemetery. 

The cartoons themselves reflected that oddball balance: a gentle friendliness spiked with a somehow-endearing violence; a smiling Lurch, Gomez and Morticia pouring boiling oil on Christmas carolers; the happy family fishing on the beach, while terrified swimmers run from whatever Gomez has managed to hook. 

Though those characters show up in only about 80 of Addams's thousands of works, they remain what he's best known for. It was that unique mixture of both the childish and terrifyingly adult (echoed in contemporary Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies and other work, but not much else) that led to an eventual TV series — 1964's The Addams Family, which finally got Addams to figure out those characters' names and relationships to each other. 

What's followed are eleven mainstream remakes and reimaginings (not counting the video games) of the creepy, kooky group — such as with the first-panned, then cult-favourite Broadway musical, and the nearly all-Canadian The New Addams Family, cancelled after a single season.

But every time, what's determined the family's success is their ability to follow the formula: to capture that slightly off-putting vibe, instead of going with the studio impulse of watering down the gruesome for an audience of children. Because what Addams was trying to do with his family of gothic outcasts was always painfully clear. 

"He was very fearful," Addams biographer Linda Davis told NPR. As she explained, making The Addams Family series "was the most psychologically smart thing to do. Because by drawing out his fears, and by making fun of them, he defused them."

That's where the latest Addams entry, Netflix's Wednesday, falls flat. 

The series follows a trend started in 1991's film The Addams Family of focusing more on the young siblings — though Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) drops so far into the background you'd hardly know they cast the role.

Instead, we follow Wednesday Addams — played by Jenna Ortega, whose appearances in Scream and X this year are helping cement her as franchise horror queen — after she's kicked out of a normal school for trying to kill a classmate with piranhas, before being sent to Nevermore Academy. The school is her parents' alma mater, and home to all types of "outcasts" — including werewolves, sirens and one of the most predictable twist villains since The Incredibles 2.

That fish-out-of-water plot leads to some of Wednesday's greatest flaws. Though the setting does draw her parents Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) into the narrative a bit — as Wednesday grapples with an overbearing mother who makes her "nauseous, not in a good way," and is forced to solve a mystery involving their time at the school — they're out of the story more than they're in.

It also sacrifices the fantastically dark showing by Zeta-Jones, one of the series' few excellent performances, though that's not one of the show's two main problems. 

The real issue is that, more often than not, the removed setting puts Wednesday around teenagers who have supernatural trappings all their own, sacrificing the series' inherent point; because if you go to Hogwarts, no one is going to be surprised by your wand. And, as Vulture wrote in their list of the 50 best family TV shows, The Addams Family's "endlessly repeated joke (and insight) was that the regular people were the real oddballs."

That leads to the second problem. Though under the thumb of creator/director Tim Burton (whose The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands are probably the best examples of the style) there's a Netflix sheen to Wednesday that defeats Wednesday's purpose.