WEDNESDAY
NETFLIX
Valuation: 
The black and white Addams Family from the 1960s is one of my absolute favorite series. Along with Little House On The Prairie, Happy Days and Star Trek, it was a staple of my childhood growing up in Italy, the only thing really worth watching on Italian TV.
One of the reasons I loved The Addams Family so much was that it mirrored my own. My mother had more than a touch of Morticia about her: beautiful, elegant, mysterious, aloof.
She looked good in a column dress. My father was very Gomez-like: prone to flamboyant, sweaty behavior and completely infatuated with her.
The black-and-white 1960s Addams Family is one of Sarah Vine’s all-time favorites – and now Netflix has released a new spin-off about the family called Wednesday
I was a dead ringer for Wednesday, an antisocial, introverted kid with black hair, pale skin, and a strong dislike for the outdoors. And as foreigners, we were considered quite peculiar, which in many ways we were.
I remember talking about this a few years ago with director Tim Burton, who also comes from a very strange family and also grew up watching old TV shows.
Now here he is with his very own version of this wonderfully dysfunctional family, Wednesday. And it’s deliciously evil.
Burton has always been a director who celebrates the quirkier side of the human spirit, and Wednesday is the perfect vehicle for his darkly warped vision. Wednesday – played by Jenna Ortega, who bears more than a passing resemblance to young Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s ex-wife – is expelled from school for throwing piranhas into a swimming pool where school bullies were using her beat up brother.
Sarah (pictured) said she identified with the character Wednesday
She is deported to Nevermore Academy, an educational institution for outsiders. It’s a place her smitten parents, who met there, fondly remember – but it also has a fair amount of dark history, not to mention a terrible reputation among locals.
The cast is superb: Gwendoline Christie (aka Brienne von Tarth in Game Of Thrones) plays the mysterious headmistress, with Christina Ricci as Miss Thornhill (specialty: carnivorous plants) and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia – a little bustier than the original, but still excellent.
There are elements of Harry Potter/Twilight in the school environment, with the different tribes of monsters – werewolves, sirens, vampires, gorgons and so on – fighting for dominance.
There’s more than a nod to teen girl sagas like Heathers and Mean Girls (Joy Sunday is great as Wednesday’s Nemesis Bianca), as well as plenty of coming-of-age stuff, including the tantalizing prospect of our heroine falling in love with a ‘Normy’, the son of the local sheriff.
The UK-based journalist believes the characters reflected her own family, comparing her mother to Morticia and her father to Gomez
It’s a lot, but the excellent production values, snappy dialogue, and fast-paced action more than make up for it, and – as with all of Burton’s work – it’s a visual feast. It also has just the right amount of storage to not take itself too seriously; and it’s the kind of show that can be seen by all ages.
The soundtrack is great too: there’s a particularly good spooky orchestral version of The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black. I suspect Burton will have worried about doing justice to the original in such a glittering spin-off. No worries on that front.
IT’S HARD TO CARE FOR CORDENS SIMPLE DRAMA
MAMMALS
AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
Valuation:
Sarah Vine isn’t a fan of James Corden’s (second left) new movie Mammals. She calls it ‘pretentious’ and ‘a bit weird’
I must confess that I find James Corden very smug and irritating in his incarnation as American television supermo. So this review comes with that caveat, and I apologize in advance for any bias.
But the truth is, mammals are objectively awful, the kind of thing you might expect from a man living in a Hollywood bubble of his own supposed fabulousness.
Where to start. It’s pretentious and a little odd (there’s an odd conceit about a whale that I didn’t really get) and the characters are hard to like, being smug, smug, elite big-city dudes with massive aspiration complexes. In terms of writing, it wants to be deep and meaningful, but often ends up being just plain mundane.
Even after being haunted as Corden’s big return to acting, as far as I can see he only plays himself – an overly spoiled, insecure, overrated giant man-baby totally oblivious to his own privilege – thinly disguised as the celebrated Michelin – Star chef.
This is further underscored by the fact that his character is married to someone as drop-dead gorgeous as Melia Kreiling, an achievement that would clearly be impossible in the real world.
The net effect of all this is that we don’t really care that his wife is an adulteress or that his sister is going insane. They are all just as bad as the others.
- Whatever you think about the decision to let Qatar host the FIFA World Cup, does it need to be on TV all over the place? Do we really need to see Ulaanbaatar play Liechtenstein or whatever? Next time, they should just monopolize BBC4 for the duration – and let the rest of us enjoy the schedules as usual.
LUCY, QUEEN OF SECRETS
Lucy Worsley (pictured) stars in a new fact series about Agatha Christie, Mystery Queen on BBC2
In many ways, Lucy Worsley is the perfect television historian and the perfect host for Mystery Queen (Friday, BBC2), a new fact series about Agatha Christie. Lucy is quite odd looking (the eyebrows always fascinate me) but is still attractive and has a quirky, slightly retro dress sense that makes you think she probably collects odd hats.
Her voice is quite odd too, with a funny, breathy lisp that serves as a barometer of her excitement, and she narrates as if reading bedtime stories to naughty children after the lights go out.
There’s a conspiratorial vibe to almost everything she says, which works pretty well in the context of Agatha Christie, since she’s the queen of crime writers. No big reveals here, but loads of fun in an antiques roadshow of sorts.