{"id":320751,"date":"2025-08-05T20:55:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T20:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/320751\/"},"modified":"2025-08-05T20:55:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T20:55:14","slug":"showrunners-preview-thing-one-liners-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/320751\/","title":{"rendered":"Showrunners Preview Thing, One-Liners, and More"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alfred Gough and Miles Millar<\/a> have been writing together ever since they met at USC\u2019s Peter Stark producing program in the early \u201990s and sold their first script (\u201cMango,\u201d about a cop and an orangutan) to New Line Cinema.<\/p>\n

After countless movies (\u201cBeetlejuice Beetlejuice,\u201d \u201cSpider-Man 2\u201d) and TV<\/a> series (\u201cSmallville,\u201d \u201cCharlie\u2019s Angels\u201d), this week they premiere Season 2 of their popular series \u201cWednesday,\u201d<\/a> executive-produced by Tim Burton, on Netflix<\/a>. Having sampled the first four episodes (which will premiere on August 6, followed by the final four episodes on September 3), I can attest that Season 2 is even more delicious than Season 1.<\/p>\n

\"'Alien:<\/a> \"BOYS<\/a> <\/p>\n

For one thing, for budget reasons, the showrunners had to trim some Season 1 subplots, thus relying more heavily on young star Jenna Ortega, now age 22, in the title role of Addams daughter Wednesday<\/a>, an amateur supernatural detective in her first year at outsider school Nevermore Academy. This time around, with Netflix loosening the purse strings, the series expands with new characters including eager-to-please Nevermore Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) and Grandmama Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley), while giving more time to Wednesday\u2019s parents Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzm\u00e1n) as well as\u00a0her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen), and Thing (Romanian magician Victor Dorobantu).<\/p>\n

Until the pandemic, the partners, who both live in the Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles, would meet every day to write from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. with an hour off for lunch. \u201cWe\u2019ve worked literally seven days a week for 20 years,\u201d said Gough, who thanks several mentors, including the late great Laura Ziskin and Leonard Goldberg, for steering them in their early years.<\/p>\n

\"AlfredAlfred Gough<\/a> and Miles Millar<\/a>Mark Von Holden\/Variety<\/p>\n

\u201cWednesday\u201d came to them in 2018 after they had just finished five years of running two shows, \u201cThe Shannara Chronicles\u201d and \u201cInto the Badlands.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cOne was shot in New Zealand, one was shot in Ireland,\u201d said Gough. \u201cSo we\u2019d just gotten back, and we were looking for a smaller show set in America, present day. We were looking around for a character again, like \u2018Smallville\u2019 [Superman]. Is there a chapter in their life that nobody knows? And so we came on Wednesday Addams.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was elevated,\u201d said Millar. \u201cIt was a satirical look at Norman Rockwell America.\u201d They got approved by the Addams estate and MGM and created a series bible featuring Wednesday as a detective chasing down Nevermore mysteries. \u201cShe\u2019s very funny, of all the characters in the Addams family<\/a>, she\u2019s always the most memorable,\u201d said Gough. \u201cAnd she brought an interesting worldview to the table. She\u2019s not Nancy Drew, right? She does things because she believes she\u2019s the smartest person in the room. She\u2019s the only one who can solve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Wednesday\u2019 Season 2JONATHAN HESSION\/NETFLIX<\/p>\n

In 2019, they pitched their series everywhere. No one wanted it. Only Netflix, but they couldn\u2019t close a deal with MGM. \u201cWe thought it was dead,\u201d said Gough. Then during the pandemic, MGM stepped up with money for a virtual writers\u2019 room, and the writers broke out the first season and started writing episodes. They sent the series to Tim Burton, who never does TV, and four days later, he jumped on board. (He could tell they wrote it for him.) At first, he wanted to direct every episode, but they kept him to the pilot and a total of four.<\/p>\n

When the writers took \u201cWednesday\u201d back to the same people with the scripts and Burton attached, they got the same result. \u201cThere was a lot of turmoil going on at some of these streamers,\u201d said Gough. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t own the whole thing; they didn\u2019t own the ancillaries, the products, and the toys.\u201d<\/p>\n

Netflix did make a deal this time. And the series was a hit. And for Season 2<\/a>, they got a budget bump. And the showrunners had the confidence to go for broke with pithy one-liners, from Uncle Fester\u2019s heartfelt goodbye to his snaggletoothed romantic interest: \u201cOf all the women I\u2019ve used, you\u2019re my favorite!,\u201d and Wednesday\u2019s \u201cI don\u2019t have FOMO, I have a fear of being included\u201d \u2014 she\u2019s horrified by her overwhelming popularity \u2014 to her comment on her werewolf roommate\u2019s Beowulf t-shirt: \u201cNothing like a bad pun to throw dirt on the coffin of epic poetry!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get notes like, \u2018Nobody will understand,’\u201d said Millar. \u201cWe don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Wednesday.Joanna Lumley in \u2018Wednesday\u2019OWEN BEHAN\/NETFLIX<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t care,\u201d said Gough. \u201cWe\u2019re like, \u2018Literally, Google it.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like, \u2018Most 16-year-olds wouldn\u2019t say that or know that,’\u201d said Millar. \u201cWell, most wouldn\u2019t, but she would. We\u2019re not 16-year-old girls, we\u2019re not 20-year-old girls, we\u2019re men of a certain age. And we bring that level of experience and cultural awareness to that character, and that\u2019s who she is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also have, between us, four daughters,\u201d said Gough. \u201cYeah, right in the demo, by the way, between 18 and 25.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is partly why the writers leaned into Wednesday and Morticia\u2019s mother-daughter conflict. \u201cCatherine is having a ball,\u201d said Millar. \u201cIt\u2019s rare that you get to do so many different things. The show definitely dances in a lot of different tones. So, she goes from a very emotional scene with her mother and daughter to a sword fight.\u201d <\/p>\n

And Thing is more front and center in this series; he even gets drunk in one episode. Back in Season 1, the writers saw how audiences responded in Episode 7 when Thing got stabbed. \u201cPeople were so shocked. \u2018Is he going to die?’\u201d <\/p>\n

When they were prepping Season 1 in Romania, they did extensive auditions for Thing. \u201cWe auditioned people who had dexterous fingers,\u201d said Gough. \u201cSo we auditioned pianists, cellists, and magicians \u2014 they had the card tricks. We sat with Tim in a conference room in the studio, and all these people came in and did a little walk on the table. And some had fingers that were too fat or too thin or too long. And then Victor Dorobantu came in. His fingers moved in a naturalistic way and added some humanity to it. Our visual effects supervisor Tom Turnbull spent four weeks with him in Thing boot camp, just trying to figure out what he could do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Wednesday.Thing in \u2018Wednesday\u2019 Season 2HELEN SLOAN\/NETFLIX<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not signing, which requires two hands. \u201cHe does his own language,\u201d said Gough. \u201cSometimes, you can understand the gestures and emotions. It\u2019s a risk to put so much weight on him as a disembodied man. But he brings a reality and veracity to it.\u201d Usually shot by a second unit crew, on set, Dorobantu is wearing a full blue suit with his hand exposed. About 5 percent of the shots that he can\u2019t do physically are filled in by CG.<\/p>\n

Happily, Burton got to play with stop-motion animation for the first time in a while, telling the story of the Corpse Tree via his \u201cCorpse Bride\u201d team at Stockport\u2019s Mackinnon and Saunders,<\/a> He designed the head of the boy.<\/p>\n

Next up: <\/strong>Gough and Millar are already in the writers\u2019 room with five other scribes on Season 3<\/a>. And Burton will be back. \u201cOnce he\u2019s into something,\u201d said Gough, \u201che\u2019s invested in it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have been writing together ever since they met at USC\u2019s Peter Stark producing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[116201,77,466,116202,451,116203,382,16,15,7038],"class_list":{"0":"post-320751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-alfred-gough","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-interviews","11":"tag-miles-millar","12":"tag-netflix","13":"tag-the-addams-family","14":"tag-tv","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wednesday"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114978155802895469","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}