The Decision That Saved Jenna Ortega's Character In Wednesday

Wednesday Addams has always been a walking rain cloud. The Addams family's only daughter was prone to strange and macabre humor long before Jenna Ortega took on the role of the raven-haired goth teen in Netflix's new series "Wednesday." Back in 1944, when Charles Addams' original "The Addams Family" cartoons appeared in "The New Yorker," one featured a punchline in which mother Morticia encouraged her daughter to commit attempted murder. "Well don't come whining to me," she tells her presumably bullied daughter. "Go tell him you'll poison him right back."

When she first made the leap from the funny pages to the TV screen, Wednesday was just as morbid as ever, albeit also adorable as embodied by child actor Lisa Loring. In the 1960s "Addams Family" series, pint-sized Wednesday plays with explosives and a guillotine, while in the '90s, Christina Ricci's version of the character straps her brother to an electric chair just for kicks. Dark comedy has always been a through-line for the lovably sadistic character, but when it comes to the latest iteration of the franchise, Wednesday's macabre one-liners almost got the axe.

Series writer-creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar spoke to Geek Vibes Nation ahead of the show's release, and revealed that executives weren't initially on board with the character's signature dark humor. "One executive wanted to cut all the jokes out," Millar revealed. The pair wrote four of the season's eight episodes. "All the black humor, all her references to murder and suicide and death. [We were] constantly getting notes to just eliminate all the jokes." 

The first season of the teen mystery sees Wednesday kicked out of her public school for throwing piranhas in the boys' pool, and that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the girl's penchant for darkness.

But as Millar says, "That's the essence of Wednesday," and the pair tells the outlet that they ignored all the notes about cutting the show's dark humor. The version of the show viewers ended up with isn't afraid to make light of the bleaker side of life, like when Wednesday reminisces about the time the carousel brakes stalled at her eighth birthday, or says that her visions "come on without warning, and feel like electroshock therapy, only without the satisfying afterburn." It's clear that Millar and Gough's take on Wednesday and her pitch-black humor comes through in the final product.

The pair also credit Tim Burton, who executive produced the series and directed several episodes, for keeping that integral balance between humor and horror intact. "It's interesting, and obviously it takes someone like Tim Burton to be able to pull off that tone," Millar says. Gough, meanwhile, says the pair kept that marriage between horror and comedy in mind while writing the script, telling Geek Vibes Nation that "the thing with comedy and horror is about timing and rhythm. They're actually very similar." He points out that he and Millar, who have also worked together as writers and co-creators on "The Shannara Chronicles" and "Into the Badlands," have "always kind of mixed tones in everything we've done."

Ignoring those studio notes apparently paid off, as Netflix claims that "Wednesday" turned out to have the biggest premiere week of any English-language Netflix original. By those metrics, which are admittedly not made public by the streamer but are instead self-reported, "Wednesday" had an even bigger debut than "Stranger Things 4." The show's first season follows Wednesday as she attends Nevermore Academy, a school for "outcasts" including sirens, werewolves, and in her case, burgeoning psychics. Soon after she enrolls at Nevermore, strange and violent occurances begin, and it's up to Wednesday to figure out who's responsible for the attacks on her fellow students.

While "Wednesday" is more of a young adult drama or a mystery series than a comedy, the show is still shot through with the dark humor Millar and Gough maintained from the script they initially handed in to Netflix. Admittedly, "Wednesday" would be lost without it. Ortega imbues the character's most disturbing lines with a perfect deadpan delivery, and makes her a protagonist worth rooting for, even if her favorite past-times are the sort that would make God-fearing normies (as the show calls non-superpowered people) run for the hills.

As for that balance between humor and horror, Gough says it came naturally, like Wednesday's knack for bloodshed and mayhem. "For executives it was scary, but for us it wasn't," he tells Geek Vibes Nation. "Wednesday" season 1 is now streaming on Netflix in its entirety.