Wednesday & Smallville's Creators Wanted To Tackle Another Iconic Character's Younger Years

People might be surprised to find out that the creative tag team of Al Gough and Miles Millar is responsible for not just one but two of the most influential pop culture reimaginings of recent decades. Their current success story is the Netflix smash hit "Wednesday," which has already been renewed for Season 3. However, long before "Wednesday," Gough and Millar took flight with "Smallville." This Superman-themed prequel series starred Tom Welling as young Clark Kent, and built a whole sci-fi teen drama universe around him and his supporting cast.

Knowing their background and the unfortunate fact that not every TV project gets off the ground, it's not hard to start wondering whether Gough and Millar have ever planned other shows that would give their signature spin on an existing intellectual property. For those wondering, they absolutely have ... and the project they once tried and failed to get going featured a very particular character few people might have guessed. As the pair told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, they were planning a prequel that featured a younger version of Agatha Christie's classic detective character Miss Marple before they started working on "Wednesday." What's more, Millar revealed that one of that project's themes actually made its way to "Wednesday."

"We tried for a long time to get a young Miss Marple, and maybe that influenced us with the whodunnit element [on 'Wednesday'], but it's certainly something that was intriguing as a character who you always see," Millar explained. "There's something about whodunnits and mysteries that it's a great puzzle for a writer to solve. So, I think that was something, to see how she evolved into sort of the nosy old lady in Agatha Christie was something we talked about for a while."

Millar's admission that "Wednesday" features some of the mystery elements he and Gough originally planned for a "Miss Marple" prequel makes a surprising amount of sense when you compare the characters. Jenna Ortega's Wednesday Addams is a loner with a penchant for troublesome situations. She's a talented musician and aspires to be a professional writer, and is a capable athlete who excels at fencing. Even her psychic vision ability can be seen as the paranormal equivalent of a talented detective's observational skills. 

Miss Marple might be an old lady, but she bears considerable similarities to Millar and Gough's take on Wednesday. Astute and independent, Jane Marple is always there when a mystery needs to be solved. While she cuts a kinder figure than Wednesday, she can also be stern when she wants to. She also tends to remain deliberately mysterious when it comes to her past — though she has several relatives with artistic inclinations, and she's mentioned that she was an award-winning fencer back in the day. 

Despite these similarities, it would be wrong to think of "Wednesday" as a consolation prize that Millar and Gough settled for after failing to make their "Miss Marple" prequel. On the contrary, they had a very clear vision about Wednesday Addams and her unexplored potential as a character. "Her sort of fearlessness and her ability to always be herself with something, that was interesting, and we thought, well, 'What if she was a teenage girl?'" Millar said in The Hollywood Reporter interview. "And then what if you took her out of the family and put her in boarding school, which is ostensibly a new family? How would she react?"