Wednesday: Netflix Wanted This One Line Cut From the Addams Family Spinoff

Throughout the history of the Addams Family, the characters have blended humor with horror in campy and macabre ways, but according to Wednesday showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, Netflix thought one piece of dialogue in the series crossed a line into more overt horror than they wanted. At one point in the series, Enid (Emma Meyers) tells her roommate Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) that she should “take a stab” at being social, only for Wednesday to reply that she enjoyed stabbings. Luckily, the line remained in the series and helped solidify the twisted sense of humor of the beloved character. All eight episodes of Wednesday are now streaming on Netflix.

“Netflix was always very supportive and the executives were huge Addams Family fans,” Gough shared with IndieWire. Despite that support, Millar clarified, “We still did have executives wanting to cut some lines.”

Understandably, it’s a challenge to find the right balance of a character embracing unsettling ideals while also keeping things playful, yet the showrunners noted how, despite objections from Netflix, they thought this reaction from Wednesday fully fell in line with the character’s attitude.

“That’s the whole point of the character,” Millar expressed. “To lose that or dilute that is a betrayal of the character.”

The series is a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy. Wednesday’s attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.

In addition to the challenge of blending humor with horror, the series had to find the right balance of making Wednesday stand apart from her peers yet not merely replicate the fish-out-of-water scenarios we’ve seen unfold in previous Addams Family adventures.

“Because of the Harry Potter of it all [the question was] should she be at a regular school and then be a fish out of water?” Millar posited to the outlet. “But it felt kind of one-note and she’d always have to return home at night to the family that [we] wanted to get away from.”

All eight episodes of Wednesday are now streaming on Netflix.

What did you think of the series? Let us know in the comments or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!