Rebooting and reviving established franchises has become a staple of TV in the streaming era. Almost every major platform has a series or two built around a familiar pop-culture heavyweight. Familiarity certainly helps a show attract attention initially, but it offers little protection once audiences actually start watching. Recognizable properties don’t compensate for weak stories, and the success of these revivals of old shows is never guaranteed.
That uneven track record makes Netflix’s Wednesday especially deserving of celebration. Across two seasons and 16 episodes, the fantasy series has become a modern pop-culture powerhouse with an identity that extends far beyond the franchise it inherited. It’s an impressive achievement, especially since The Addams Family remains beloved and is far from dead, having had its own movies as recently as 2021.
Rather than simply retreading the same ground as previous interpretations of The Addams Family, Wednesday introduces viewers to a teenaged Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) as she attends Nevermore Academy and investigates supernatural mysteries. The Netflix series expands the world of The Addams Family into a gothic playground of monsters, secrets, and teenage conflict that’s just as satisfying as the source material despite being remarkably different.
Wednesday Transforms The Addams Family Into Prestige TV Gold
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There’s a lot to celebrate when it comes to Wednesday, but the best thing Netflix did when modernizing The Addams Family was completely changing the franchise’s dramatic structure. Earlier versions of The Addams Family all followed roughly the same formula: a family-focused comedy with a pun-heavy spooky slant. Wednesday takes the franchise’s penchant for oddball characters with a horror-flavored existence and places it inside a supernatural school mystery.
Nevermore may not be the Addams Family mansion, but it’s the perfect setting for a long-running multi-season drama. The mysteries lurking within the school also add to the show’s narrative sustainability. Wednesday’s investigations give each season momentum beyond the succession of wonderfully morbid jokes that buoy the various The Addams Family comic strips, animated series, and movies.
Making Wednesday herself the lead and separating her from her parents and siblings was also a great move, as it allows for friction that’s unique to the Netflix show. At home, Wednesday’s darkness is normal. Sharing a room with the bubbly and optimistic werewolf Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers), on the other hand, forces her to confront her own personality. Her contempt for sentiment remains funny, but the developing friendship gives Wednesday’s disdainful attitude for basically everything consequences. The series makes emotional growth entertaining, but never has its heroine abandon everything that made her a fan-favorite Addams Family character.
Most importantly, though, Wednesday understands that the appeal of The Addams Family extends beyond recognizable costumes, characters, and macabre wordplay. The underlying idea that supposedly monstrous people can still have good hearts survives the shift. The mysteries supply suspense and keep it distinct, but the humor and unconventional relationships make Wednesday inarguably part of The Addams Family legacy. Few TV reimaginings of established properties have managed to walk the tightrope between keeping things fresh and respecting what came before quite so successfully.
The Addams Family Isn’t The Only Franchise Netflix Has Successfully Revived
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The approach the streamer took when transforming The Addams Family into Wednesday is certainly impressive, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This creative overhaul of a classic pop-culture property belongs to a broader pattern of Netflix finding fresh storytelling possibilities in established IPs. For example, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina turned classic ABC sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch into an occult horror drama. Its coming-of-age conflicts became entangled with sinister religious institutions and supernatural obligations. The recognizable foundations remained, but the genre shift supplied a very different experience from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Then there’s Netflix’s version of Lost in Space, which took a comparably liberal approach to the original series as Wednesday did with The Addams Family. The Robinson family’s survival in uncharted space was reworked from a campy 1960s sci-fi serial into a slick, emotionally-rich adventure built around dangerous environments, difficult decisions, and strained family relationships. It kept familiar elements from the original show, but it used them to create a sustained and atmospheric survival story instead of a nostalgia cash-in.
There’s also Cobra Kai, which began on YouTube before moving to Netflix ahead of its third season. Netflix inherited its inspired premise: revisiting The Karate Kid through the complicated adult lives of Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio). The subsequent Netflix-era seasons drew in even more elements from the Karate Kid movies than ever before, taking established characters and putting fresh spins on their story by working them into a long-running drama that made the most outlandish aspects of the films surprisingly grounded.
These shows are just some examples of Netflix succeeding at identifying the elements of a beloved property that need to remain intact and what can be gotten rid of without complaint. However, none stand out quite like Wednesday when it comes to its transformation being substantial without losing the spirit of the source material. With Wednesday, Netflix gave a pop-culture staple room to become something fresh and distinct, ensuring that familiarity with The Addams Family was simply a catalyst for initial interest rather than the only reason to watch.
Wednesday
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