WEDNESDAY

Arriving on Netflix through the mind of Tim Burton, the series WEDNESDAY focuses on the titular, deadpan daughter of television’s most adoringly reviled family.

The first twenty seconds of the trailer features a slowly ascending line of pitched percussion, juxtaposed with a quietly building frenzy of strings underneath. There’s an audiovisual blackout at 0:23. Addams steps out to her brother’s swim practice with—of course—piranhas, nonchalantly letting them loose to the tune of Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1960), with the obvious insinuation that Wednesday indeed regrets nothing of her actions. Indeed, as the music pauses momentarily on the dominant note in the strings, this tension is mimicked as Wednesday visibly stifles a gleeful smile in response to the piranhas ensuring one of said swimmers will never have children. If we couldn’t guess the maker of that mayhem, we see a card with a reference to “the mind of Tim Burton.”

As we’re introduced to Nevermore Academy, Wednesday’s new school, the music takes a marked shift into epic fare. It takes a standard technique among trailers in introducing a known popular song as-is and then gradually (or, in this case, quickly) adding the resounding percussion and other elements we’ve come to expect. At 1:20, the dominant prolongation from earlier is repeated, this time culminating in a one-liner (“I do like stabbing”), after which the Piaf music resumes.

Notice the addition in this final sequence of some synch points (such as Wednesday swatting the spider at 1:35) or of the judicious inclusion of a scene with her playing cello just when a cello vamp is brought to the fore in the musical arrangement.

It would seem by the main title card at 1:50 that the editors managed to create an entire trailer for an Addams Family spinoff series without musical reference to one of television’s most famous themes, but at 1:55 we’re treated to the iconic double-snap. It’s remarkable that while many franchises can lay musical claim to a certain melodic fragment, for the Addams Family it’s more of a certain rhythm and tempo. It’s also a way to hearken back to the deep history of the series (originating in The New Yorker in 1938 as a series of cartoons) without distracting too much from the aesthetic overhaul and modern sensibilities achieved in Tim Burton’s vision.

WEDNESDAY arrives on Netflix November 2022.

— Curtis Perry