Tim Burton In Talks to Direct New ‘Addams Family’ TV Show
Creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky — and now back on TV.
The Addams Family have pinballed back and forth from TV to movies (to pinball games) through the decades. They were most recently seen as an animated feature with the voices of Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron as Gomez and Morticia Addams. (A sequel is in the works.) They will now also reappear on TV for the first time in a while, in a new live-action TV series that will reportedly be directed by Tim Burton. The show is being written by Smallville and Into the Badlands’ Alfred Gough and Milles Millar.
Variety has the news:
If the show were picked up to series, it would mark one of the few television projects of Burton’s career. His previous TV work includes directing episodes of shows like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” while he was also an executive producer on the animated series version of “Beetlejuice.” He is best known for his film work, helming critically-acclaimed features like “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman” and “Batman Returns,” “Ed Wood,” and “Mars Attacks.”
This would be the third live-action TV series based on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons. The original show ran for two seasons in the mid-1960s, and starred John Astin and Carolyn Jones as Gomez and Morticia. That show was followed by an animated Addams Family in the early 1970s by Hanna-Barbera. After the massively successful Addams Family movies of the early 1990s directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, the property got a second live-action series that one 65-episode season. (There was also a direct-to-video sequel to the Sonnenfeld movies in there called Addams Family Reunion.)
It’s easy to see Burton’s sensibility jiving pretty seamlessly with the Addams Family’s spooky comic aesthetic. His Dark Shadows movie (based on a different spooky TV show) was already in that same kind of winking gothic style. Variety says “no network or streaming service is currently attached,” but I would expect a Tim Burton Addams Family series to attract significant interest, particularly in the disembodied sentient hand demo.
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