Home TV News Live-Action ‘Addams Family’ TV Series In Development From Tim Burton

Live-Action ‘Addams Family’ TV Series In Development From Tim Burton

by Dave Elliott

Live-Action ‘Addams Family’ TV Series In Development From Tim Burton

Master of the macabre, Tim Burton, is looking to develop his first-ever live-action TV project, as news lands that he is working on a new series based on classic hit ‘The Addams Family’.

For those of you that, somehow, don’t know ‘The Addams Family’, it follows the lives of a close-knit group of relatives with decidedly macabre interests and supernatural abilities. They include the wealthy and enthusiastic father, Gomez who is besotted with his stunning and refined wife, Morticia; Their highly intelligent daughter Wednesday, who loves to torture (sometimes literally) her older brother Pugsley; And Gomez’s older brother Uncle Fester, who spends a lot of time with experiments (which usually result in things exploding). They are joined by Lurch, the family butler, the extremely hairy and unintelligible (to outsiders) Cousin Itt, and Thing… a disembodied hand.

The characters were originally created by American cartoonist Charles Addams in 1938 as one-panel gags in The New Yorker. However, most people will know them from their various screen versions. There have been two previous live-action tv series, in the 60s and 90s, along with animated series in the 70s and 90s. Additionally, there were two feature film versions in the 90s starring Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Christina Ricci, and Jimmy Workman, and most recently, a CGI animated version in 2019, which has a sequel due out in 2021.

According to Deadline, who broke the news, this new iteration is said to be taking a slightly different tack and “would be set in present times and be from the perspective of Wednesday Addams and what the world would look like to her in 2020.”

The marriage of Burton and ‘The Addams Family’ seems like a perfect fit. It totally suits Burton’s dark, macabre humour, as seen in his previous work such as ‘Beetlejuice’, ‘Edward Scissorhands’, ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, ‘Frankenweenie’, and many other projects. Burton is in negotiations to exec produce, and potentially direct all the episodes, with Alfred Gough and Miles Millar set as writers, EPs, and showrunners. That duo are best known as the people behind ‘Smallville’, ‘Into The Badlands’, and ‘The Shannara Chronicles’.

The potential project is being funded by MGM TV, who are holders of ‘The Addams Family’ IP. It is still early days in development right now, so there is no network or streaming service attached, but, as you might expect, it has garnered a lot of interest from various broadcasters. We’ll let you know when we hear more.

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