Netflix is planning to expand the Wednesday universe with a new spinoff series focused on the character of Uncle Fester.
Wednesday, which debuted on the streaming service in November 2022, was itself a reboot of The Addams Family, which began as a comic in the New Yorker in 1938 before being adapted for television in the Sixties and as a film series in the Nineties.
The gothic comedy series follows psychic teenager Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) during her school years at Nevermore Academy. It was created by showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, and executive produced by Tim Burton.
It proved to be a massive hit for Netflix, and currently ranks as its most popular English-language series with 252.1 million views, almost twice as many views as the next most popular television season on the service.
As Bloomberg reports, Netflix has commissioned both a second season of Wednesday and another series based around Uncle Fester, who is played by former Saturday Night Live and Portlandia star Fred Armisen.
Armisen appeared as a guest star in just one episode of the first season of Wednesday, playing the brother of Wednesday’s father Gomez Addams (Luis Guzman).
Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester in ‘Wednesday’
(Vlad Cioplea/Netflix)
He memorably stepped in to revive Thing, another fan favourite character who is a disembodied hand played by the right hand of Romanian actor Victor Dorobantu.
The Independent’s TV critic Nick Hilton was less than impressed with the first season of Wednesday, writing in a two-star review: “This is a world where everyone talks in zingy one-liners, where the creature design is too scary for children but too cartoonish for adults, where the performances are more two-dimensional than the New Yorker comic strip in which the characters first appeared. For a show about vampires and werewolves, it has very little bite.”
It was previously reported that the second season of Wednesday will move production from Romania to Ireland.
In a wide-ranging interview last year, Armisen told The Independent that he feels most at home in England. “Any small town where a street curves a little bit, and it’s all cobblestone, and there’s a little white shop,” he said wistfully. “There’s a Boots nearby, and a coffee shop. You can hear the sound of cars and people talking. It’s a little chilly. I’ve got my jacket on. That’s the perfect spot. That’s where I want to be.”