By TATIANA DIAZ
Staff Writer
The news that Tim Burton would be directing half the episodes of Wednesday, Netflix’s new dramedy about the Addams Family’s death-obsessed young daughter, piqued interest. It would be Burton’s first real television work in nearly 40 years since he directed episodes of Faerie Tale Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And Burton, an often magical storyteller attracted to off-kilter material, seemed as if he might be a good match for Charles Addams’s macabre cartoon family. But neither Addams nor Burton appears to be the primary force behind Wednesday, whose eight episodes premiere on the appropriate day this week. The show was created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, best known for the young Superman series Smallville, and the sensibility of Wednesday lines up with that earlier work of high-minded teenage melodrama. More focused on morbid humor, for sure, and, like Smallville, reasonably well-executed and entertaining. But still, teenage melodrama. Toward that end, the rest of the Addams Family is mostly absent from the show, though the actors playing those well-known characters are the big names in the cast. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, as Wednesday’s parents, Morticia and Gomez, feature largely in just one episode; the same goes for Fred Armisen as her Uncle Fester. Besides Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday, the one family member with a regular role is Thing, the disembodied hand.