Having grown up watching Barry Sonnenfeld’s spooky comedy classics The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993) on VHS, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to accept anyone other than Christina Ricci as the family’s morbid daughter, or Angelica Houston as the gothic mater familias Morticia (or Raul Julia as the suave Gomez… ). But Wednesday, the new Netflix series helmed by Tim Burton, is a pleasantly beastly surprise.
We meet Wednesday, played by Jenna Ortega, emptying a bag of rabid piranhas into her high school’s swimming pool to avenge her bullied brother Pugsley (depicted here as a more sensitive character than the one seen in the Nineties films). This, inevitably, gets her expelled and her doting parents decide to send her to Nevermore Academy – a boarding school for outcasts, which also happens to be the place of first meeting for Morticia and Gomez, here played with lip-smacking enjoyment by Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán.
