The Addams Family will soon welcome a very fitting guest: Tim Burton. According to Deadline, the veteran Gothic filmmaker is heading to television for the first time ever for a new live-action adaptation of America’s spookiest family.
Sources tell the publication that Burton is negotiating to both executive produce and — get this — possibly direct all episodes of the new reboot. Oh, it gets better: Burton will also be joined by Smallville masterminds Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who will serve as executive producers, head writers, and showrunners of the series.
Additional details are scarce if non-existent at the moment, but Deadline states the show would be set in modern times and would instead follow the point of view of young Wednesday Addams. This would certainly give it a YA slant.
MGM TV is currently shopping the package around to multiple buyers, with Netflix reportedly at the top of the list. Given the talent involved, this would be quite a coup for the streaming giant.
It’s also just a brilliant marriage. After all, Barry Sonnenfeld’s outstanding live-action films of the ’90s were clearly indebted to Burton, so it’ll be intriguing to see how he truly makes this his own vision. What’s more, Gough and Millar are MVPs of serialized television, having stretched the Superman mythos for not one, not five, but 10 whole seasons.
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If all goes to plan, this would bring the Addams back to their natural habitat. Let’s not forget, long before Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston turned the franchise into a blockbuster film, the family lived on ABC from 1964 to 1966. More recently, however, the Addams have gone the animation route, what with last year’s star-studded feature.
We’ll see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, revisit our past season of Filmography in which we spent hours poring through Burton’s entire catalogue, from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure all the way up to 2019’s Dumbo.
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