In a 2016 interview with Bustle, Burton defended the fact that his past projects have been extremely white by saying, “things either call for things, or they don’t,’ when asked about diversity. The quote gets so much worse. “I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black,” he said. “I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.” Burton’s quotes were referencing his film Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children in which the sole Black character, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is also a villain. The quotes give us a glimpse into the way Burton has approached Black characters in the past – that it’s offensive to him to include nonwhite people in his stories and that he apparently thinks his movies are the white equivalent of the Blaxploitation genre. It’s not surprising then that the Black characters in Wednesday don’t feel like there was any intention behind their Blackness. As much as I loved seeing them included, they feel like they weren’t written to be Black, just to check a diversity box so Burton wouldn’t have to deal with questions about the show’s lack of it.
