Mark Ace

I was suuuuper excited that there was new content coming out based off the Addams family. I remember watching their cartoon and TV series when I was little, and recently with their animated films I also had a blast. This is not the Addams family. I am sure that plenty of people are going to love this show (by the reviews this much is obvious) but for every bit they get right, they get more of it wrong. The casting IS phenomenal. Morticia, Gomez, Wednesday, and the rest of the family are all played by excellent actors whom fit the roles perfectly. Thing is also animated quite well and the environments are unequivocally perfect for an Addams family show. With that said, this is a poor CW teen drama show. The quirkiness of the family is gone and in its stead is a dramatic mystery with relationship woes and attempts at suspenseful foreshadowing. While Thing is animated wonderfully, the prosthetics are far below par for even for a budget TV show, and animation for anything they plan to show for less than a minute is of a painful quality. The characters are rewritten in what seems like an attempt to make them fit with a teen drama dynamic. Rather than Morticia and Wednesday's loving yet at times adversarial relationship that still comes across as being very close to each other, they've cranked the adversarial part to 11 and turned both Gomez and Morticia into a type of "The adults you must rebel against". With this you no longer have the Addams family vs. The world, but rather Wednesday and her band of misfits Vs. The non understanding adults and the mean kids at school (I.E. Every Teen Drama). Speaking of her family, we also have Pugsly. Pugsly and Wednesday have always gotten into shared antics with Wednesday usually coming out on top. These were ways to highlight both of their near invulnerability while also having fun and showing their sadistic side in a cooky and zany way. Well, now Pugsly is instead this squeamish incapable child, who is mostly just used as a catalyst to have Wednesday unleash her wrath upon someone. Look, if you're looking for the new edgey CW teen drama with all the twists and turns of an M.Knight Shamalamadingdong story, and the magic and mystery of the most recent Game of Thrones competitor, then this is gonna be your bag. If you're looking for something that brings you back to the Addams family, skip it. I don't give it one star because it has good points and again, people will enjoy this. But it didn't need the Addams family moniker, as it doesn't really have anything to do with them.