Here's Your First Look At The Addams Family From Tim Burton's Wednesday

In the 84 years since they first debuted in a comic strip, the Addams Family has taken many different forms. But this time is a little different: the Netflix series "Wednesday" is Tim Burton's long-awaited take on the macabre family. With the help of his longtime collaborator, four-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood, Burton is returning to the aesthetics first introduced by cartoonist Charles Addams in the pages of the New Yorker. Prepare to embrace Morticia's vampire chic, fancy pinstripes from Gomez, the vintage style of fashion icon Wednesday Addams, and ... shorts, a la Pugsley.

"Wednesday" comes from "Smallville creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, who thought of Tim Burton early on in the process, but didn't expect to get him onboard. That probably has something to do with 1991's "The Addams Family," which was originally pitched to and turned down by Burton. But much like anyone who's ever seen a Tim Burton movie, the co-creators saw all that the director could bring to an Addams Family story, so they tossed the script his way with fingers crossed. "Tim was always the Mount Everest of directors," Gough explained during an exclusive chat with Vanity Fair. They expected to be turned down, but were pleasantly surprised when Burton called them three days later.

And so the work began. As Millar puts it, "The ambition for the show was to make it an 8-hour Tim Burton movie." The result is something that audiences will be able to enjoy later this year, when "Wednesday" premieres in Fall 2022. The series stars Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzmán as Gomez, Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, and Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley. Christina Ricci (who played a young Wednesday in "The Addams Family") is also joining the cast in an undisclosed role.

While the show embraces the original style of the characters, it also comes with a fair share of big changes. Most notably is the fact that "Wednesday" catches up with its eponymous character when she's aged beyond being a morose little girl. She's a teenager now, with more independence and plenty of reasons to brood. One of which is her complicated relationship with her mother. Gough described Morticia and Wednesday as "the relationship that hangs over the season."

Minus the part where she's solving a supernatural mystery, mastering her emerging psychic abilities, and thwarting a monstrous killing spree, Wednesday's problems aren't so different from your average teenager — she's finding herself and learning to live with her family.

In another image from the series (which you can check out at Vanity Fair), Wednesday is seen staring into a locker where her brother is tied up and trapped with an apple in his mouth. She's either rescuing him, or torturing him: that's the nature of their relationship in a nutshell. Miles Millar summed it up by explaining Wednesday's take on her hapless little brother.

"She's allowed to torture him. Nobody else is. That's the difference. She will defend him to the end against bullies or anything else, but she has license to do what she wants. She's protective of him in a very Wednesday way."

Every family has its quirks, but the Addams Family takes that to the absolute extreme. Although she has a tendency to torture her brother, and a love-hate relationship with her glamorous mother, beneath each of these is lots of love. Millar said, "That's ultimately what it's about. They always have each other's backs and that's unconditional love."

"Wednesday" is set to premiere on Netflix this Halloween season, in Fall 2022.