‘Wednesday' review: Netflix's Addams Family spin-off returns with a lot of big names – but the second season doesn't live up to the hype

Irish Independent

a day ago

So what, exactly, is the point of Wednesday (Netflix, now streaming), which takes the character (played by Jenna Ortega) from cartoonist Charles Addams's celebrated cartoon strips for The New Yorker – as well as from the multiple TV series and films, live-action and animated, they spawned – and thoroughly defangs her?
Addams's original one-panel cartoons were small, satirical gems that upended the image of the traditional American family.
Wednesday, which is filmed in Ireland (our little country has never looked less like itself!), couldn't be any further from that simple concept, or indeed from Barry Sonnenfeld's two entertaining Addams Family movies from the 1990s, which at least seemed interested in honouring Addams.
At best, season one of Wednesday paid Addams lip service. It yanked the character from her natural habitat and dropped her into Nevermore, a special school for outcasts and the alma mater of her parents, Gomez (Luis Guzman) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones), where she had to solve a mystery.
The result felt like what you might end up with if teen detective Nancy Drew had accidentally enrolled at Hogwarts. Wednesday was one of the streamer's biggest hits in 2022, racking up 341 million hours watched in its first week, beating Stranger Things Four.
Its success is understandable: it's a teen comedy horror, and teen comedy horror is, as we know, one of Netflix's most popular genres.
But if you strip away the Gothic production design, the supernatural trappings and the cachet of having Tim Burton as an executive producer (once again, Burton directs the first four episodes), it's not really a lot different from all the other Netflix fish-out-of-water high school fare it pumps out year after year.
The new season, which has been needlessly split in half (four episodes now, four in September), opens with Wednesday relating how she spent her summer break catching a serial killer called the Kansas City Scalper, gamely played by Haley Joel Osment.
Then it's back to Nevermore. Having saved her classmates last time from the maniacal teacher played by Christina Ricci (Wednesday in the 90s movies), she returns to find herself the school's top girl – a celebrity, in fact.
Wednesday professes to hate all this, yet makes a pretty good job of continually drawing attention to herself. Soon, though, there are other things to occupy her. She has a stalker. And she's having visions of her friend Enid (Emma Myers) dying horribly.
Someone or something is going around murdering people and relieving them of their eyeballs. Just when Wednesday needs her psychic powers more than ever, they begin to fail.
In other words, season two offers more or less the same lumpy, underwhelming mixture as season one. There some mild improvements, mind you.
Burton, who's directing last time was so anonymous it could have been anyone behind the camera, seems a little more engaged.
A brief stop-motion sequence tied to a subplot involving Wednesday's brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), who is also now attending Nevermore, accidentally waking a zombie, sparks warm memories of Burton's Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie. Sadly, it also reminds you that he's been off his game for years.
Gomez and Morticia are given more to do this time, which helps a little, and the cast has been bolstered by big-name additions. Steve Buscemi is new principal Barry Dort, an Edgar Allen Poe lookalike (which is explicitly noted and could be a clue to something) who might not be as cheery as he seems.
Billie Piper plays new music teacher Miss Capri, Joanna Lumley is 'Grandmama' Hester Frump, and Christopher Lloyd, who played Uncle Fester in the 90s films, pops up as the school's longest-serving teacher, Professor Orlock.
Overall, though, Wednesday is a pretence to being dark, morbid humour rather than actual dark, morbid humour, and the character's relentless stream of withering one-liners is even more exhausting than before.