Season 2 of Netflix's 'ghoulish delight' lands 50,000,000 views in just days
The second season of Wednesday has arrived on Netflix with a bang after reportedly racking up more millions of views in the first few days.
The supernatural mystery drama premiered on August 6 with the first four episodes – the rest of the series will be available to stream on September 3.
Jenna Ortega reprised her role as the titular character, returning to Nevermore Academy for another year and 'fresh foes and woes' alongside fellow students Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) and Bianca Barclay (Joy Sunday).
'Wednesday must navigate family, friends and old adversaries, propelling her into another year of delightfully dark and kooky mayhem,' the official synopsis reads.
'Armed with her signature razor-sharp wit and deadpan charm, Wednesday is also plunged into a new bone-chilling supernatural mystery.'
Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter.
Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you.
The first series was released at the end of 2022 and went on to become the most popular English-language show on the streaming platform, with more than 252m views.
Despite a three-year wait, season two has unsurprisingly soared up the charts on the streaming platform.
In fact, Variety reports that the first batch of the season has earned more than 50million views so far.
According to the outlet, this matches the numbers that season one premiered with in 2022 – but for only half the number of episodes, meaning the figures could get even higher when the rest, which include Lady Gaga, hit our screens.
Critics and fans alike have heaped praise on Jenna and her star-studded castmates, including Catherine Zeta-Jones, Fred Armisen, Luis Guzman, Billie Piper and Gaga.
It currently commands a Rotten Tomatoes score of 83%, and has been branded 'spookier than ever'.
Variety's Aramide Tinubu praising: 'Full of zing and depth, the season remains just as thrilling as the first.'
Lorraine Ali of the LA Times, agreed: 'It's really the performances, casting and artistic flourishes that make Wednesday a ghoulish delight.'
Mashable's Belen Edwards penned: 'Ortega remains the cold, dead heart of the series – and I mean that as a compliment in tribute to Wednesday!
'With one deadly glare and a dry putdown in voiceover, Ortega's Wednesday is still a force to be reckoned with.' More Trending
As Vicky Jessop of the Evening Standard, added: 'Tim Burton's latest work is still deliciously twisted, and goes down like a spoonful of poisoned sugar.
'Something this addictive certainly isn't good for us, but we'll keep coming back for more.'
View More »
Wednesday is available to stream on Netflix now.
Got a story?
If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you.
MORE: Netflix fans rush to binge 'funniest British TV comedy ever made'
MORE: Cate Blanchett reveals how her Squid Game cameo was kept secret – and teases spin-off
MORE: WWE world champion pulled from Raw 'on medical grounds' just hours before show
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
I love how awful My Oxford Year is
The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. 'Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,' complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes. But they're missing the point. My Oxford Year may be a work of accidental genius, but it's a work of genius nonetheless. You will squirm, you will laugh derisively, you will cringe. By the end, though, you will be forced to admit that you secretly enjoyed every moment, for this is the very examplar of a so-bad-it's-good masterpiece. You know it's going to be awful from the very first frame: a still representing the bookshelf of our handsome, clever and poor heroine Anna De La Vega (Sofia Carson) who has come up to Oxford to spend a year doing an MA in Victorian poetry prior to taking up a job at Goldman Sachs. It includes three copies of Dover Beach & Other Poems; two Great Gatsbys; two Mansfield Parks. Yup, they couldn't be bothered to get even that detail right. Luckily, it seems that despite being a driven, brilliant high-achiever, Anna isn't really here to study. No, what she wants is romance. And who better to provide it than the handsome guy with that oh-so-cute way of biting his lower lip whom she first encounters when he splashes her with his sky-blue E-type, then meets again shortly afterwards in the chippy, whose Dick Van Dyke-style proprietor affords much opportunity for hilarious linguistic confusion. By amazing coincidence, lip-biter Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest) happens to be teaching her poetry course because, besides being incredibly rich and the son of a lord with a vast estate, he is also a postgrad with the finest mind of his generation. Not that we see much evidence of this in his seminars, which eschew close textual analysis in favour of insights such as 'Poetry can be taught. But really it should be tried' and 'Allow it to change your life!' These moony-eyed aperçus are directed shamelessly and solely at Anna, but instead of being appalled and asking for their money back, all the 15 or so NPCs at the MA seminar seem to find the flirtation charming and not at all an abuse of privilege or a waste of their course fee. Later, in the pub, Anna encounters the racism with which this mystifyingly unwoke version of Oxford is rife. Someone whose advances she rebuffs clocks her as 'Mexican' (but how? She looks and speaks like an upper-class American) and accuses her of having only got on the course as part of a diversity quota. To cheer her up, Jamie takes her to a kebab van, a gastronomic experience she finds so idyllic that when she later meets an oarsman who doesn't share her enthusiasm for grey-brown mechanically recovered rodent meat wrapped in cardboard and slimed with chilli, she identifies him instantly as a ignorant snob who doesn't even know the kebab man's first name. See what fun it is? It's like a Richard Curtis movie, but shorn of all the smugness, the emetic Blairite politics and any pretensions to be anything other than a compendium of clichés. Everything is here: the Boat Race that everyone from Oxford and Cambridge attends; the glamorous white tie Commem Ball; the montage illustrative of the developing relationship; the cheeky, outrageous gay friend; the will-they-won't-they couple who get it together right at the end just in time to cheer us up when we're feeling a bit sad that one of our protagonists is dying. Sorry for that spoiler, but come on, you can hardly not have expected it. With a generic, bitter-sweet romcom like this, of course they're going to have to wheel out the cancer plot-device to undercut all that weapons-grade saccharine with a properly teary ending. And I respect them for it. This film is tripe and it knows it's tripe. It's so bad, it makes Bridgerton look like Tarkovsky. If only more screen products were quite this endearingly frank. For more off-kilter summer merriment, I'd quite recommend another Netflix series Mandala Murders. It's about a pair of detectives – Rea Thomas (Vaani Kapoor) and Vikram Singh (Vaibhav Raj Gupta) – in the fictional town of Charandaspur in Uttar Pradesh, on the trail of whoever has been committing a series of grisly ritual murders possibly involving supernatural forces. I'm not suggesting that it's significantly better quality than My Oxford Year, but because it is made and set in India you really don't care. Whenever you tire of the confusing plot and endless flashbacks, you can distract yourself with thoughts like 'Oo, that bright painted room would make a nice boutique hotel interior' and 'Omg, he actually dived into the Ganges. I hope he got danger money for that scene' and 'That roadside chapati snack looks delicious.' Or is it just me who does that?
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
The rise of cringe
No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. 'This music is top-quality trash,' proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. 'We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.' Track titles included 'Epaulette' and 'Latin Flutes'. From what I remember – my copy vanished a long time ago – the music was cheap and very funny: tinny and dumb. I was reminded of White recently because trash is back. Everywhere I go, I find composers producing shamefully terrible music. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. What flavour of terrible? Not ugly or discordant. Not camp. More tonal and naff: works woven from the worn-out and iffy. No bad thing necessarily. The history of classical music is a history of the absorption of trash – the reclamation of forms and sounds once considered stale, embarrassing or wrong. Junk is fuel. And the greatest advances in the artform are often its most bathetic. Take the entry of the dinky, farty Turkish band in Beethoven's Ninth. It should still stop you: this ludicrous sound gatecrashing a world-historical event just as it edges towards transcendence. An outrageous compositional decision – and a clear sign of genius. So we should rein in our instinct to dismiss compositions that have us holding our nose. But the crucial thing with bad music – whether you're the composer, an audience member, performer or critic – is to be in on the joke. Otherwise, you probably are the joke. I'm not sure that composers Tom Coult or Mark Simpson realise their new commissions for the Proms sounded like a joke. They certainly affect a certain seriousness. A certain honesty and sincerity. Qualities that can be a fast-track to cringe. Simpson's Zebra also had a third crucial ingredient: a total lack of inhibition. The work is a prog-adjacent concerto for electric guitar so it comes with the territory. It's also an attempt to paint a drug-induced hallucination, one that Philip K. Dick had in real life in 1974, in which he received 'messages from the Roman empire' and 'visitations from three-eyed invaders'. And as we all know there's little more embarrassing than being high. That the piece came across as one big overexcited overshare, an exercise in premature ejaculation, splooshing and splurging uncontrollably, was perhaps not inappropriate. But the sounds were the musical equivalent not so much of being on a trip but something far worse: someone describing their trip. Then, in the final seconds, a genuinely hallucinatory moment: the sound of a disembodied woman's voice intoning something incomprehensible but sinister over the Tannoy. Incomprehensible by accident. On Radio 3 the words are clear – and the worse off for it. Trips are tricky. But the perils of evoking a bygone age and going full Werther's Original are even more acute. Tom Coult's Monologues for the Curious lay somewhere between Alan Bennett and the John Lewis Christmas ads on the Richter scale of twee. Melodicas, harmonicas, the ghost of a brass band, the slink of a slow dance: all that was missing was a ukulele. The men of a certain age depicted in these four portraits for tenor and orchestra amble around, dewy-eyed with nostalgia, kindly and cloying. Nothing wrong in wanting to conjure up the insufferable – but you ought to do it without being insufferable yourself. Allan Clayton channels Purcell's stuttering Cold Genius in the second movement and the quirky mood briefly lifts but the tenor – looking, as usual, like a homeless Brian Blessed – was soon singing of his fondness for owls and I wanted to run. Award for real wrong-'un behaviour, however, goes to young composer Max Syedtollan. His Prynhawn Da! – which opened at Cafe Oto with some magnificent mummering from a man with a doily covering his face – verges on the evil: a criminal collision of Bavarian oompah, house hits recomposed contrapuntally, a reggae version of the Willliam Tell overture, bagpipes, klezmer, Balkan brass, carols, 1980s TV theme tunes, all sped up then slowed down 'so as not to cause a stitch'. Arranged and performed in a ripely revolting way by the Listening Project, the half-hour work is calculated to cause maximum offence. It had me pained, confused, frequently bursting into laughter, feeling that maybe I would never truly understand the world. Feeling also that Syedtollan – who knew exactly what he was doing – is a force to be reckoned with. Syedtollan is perfectly capable of writing actual good music. Horo povera – stomped out at the start of the night with infectious energy by Search Engine Quartet – is a memorable slice of aggro-minimalism. To risk it all by tipping out a barrel of muck in the second half, however, was a sign of a true artist. The MIDI recording of Prynhawn Da!, by the way, is even better. By which, of course, I mean much worse.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year's prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood's vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s. The Olympics took place in 2021, a year late as a result of the pandemic, but one curious difference has occurred: Zaha Hadid's futuristic national stadium, which in our reality was cancelled at the last minute, was in fact built. This minor change seems to have ushered in other more widespread shifts in politics and culture. Notably, a huge new skyscraper in the middle of the city is to house criminals in comfort and luxury, as part of society's debt to these unfortunate beings. A glimpse into a potential near future (which might be a dystopia or a utopia, depending on your point of view), Sympathy Tower Tokyo has some connections with Yoko Ogawa's excellent dreamlike science fiction The Memory Police (1994), as well as more distant echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Yet this is a wholly distinctive novel, alarmingly prescient and up to date. Controversy arose – and still seems to infest chatter about the book – when Qudan divulged that she used AI to write part of it. She later clarified that AI was employed only to generate specific responses in the text when a character consults a chatbot – a creative touch which, rather than representing laxity or deception, surely carries a Joycean level of authenticity. Sara Machina, a celebrated architect, is to design the building, which is to be officially called 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' – a name which irks Sara, since it uses katakana characters to approximate the English words, a common trend in modern Japanese, rather than the more difficult, but established, kanji script. Kanji are the thousands of intricately complex Chinese-origin characters children (and foreigners) struggle to learn. The more straightforward, phonetic katakana is for loanwords, buzzwords, commercial jargon and the like. Qudan uses this issue to explore how kanji might transmit tradition and certainty, katakana flexibility and ambiguity – but might kanji not also carry prejudice and the burdens of the past, which could be swept away by the invigorating, outward-looking torrent of contemporary katakana, especially when it comes to shifting socio-sexual topics such as global warming, crime and gender? Yet, if the Japanese are to change their language, will they not also lose the distinctiveness of their national identity? Readers who know Japanese will naturally get more out of this than those unfamiliar with the language, but the ideas discussed will stimulate anyone. This is a book which raises profound and ever-pressing questions about the elusive nature of words, their symbolic status, and their multi-faceted, convoluted relationship with geography, history and culture. It explores the relationship between the urban, built environment and our fabricated world of words, between social and linguistic developments, between the kaleidoscopic vogues of language, society and philosophy. And it examines the way architecture, like words, can be destructive as well as creative, while criminals can be victims, too, worthy of love and reward just as much as hatred and punishment. Told from ever-shifting verbal and textual perspectives, with playful nods to contemporary controversies (AI; the Hadid stadium hullabaloo; cancel culture; Covid; Twitter's name change), this is a spirited novel that asks profound questions, impishly worrying about the potentially flavourless future of humanity. The tower itself can re-assimilate persecuted delinquents, making society more equal, more just, (more boring?) – just as AI threatens to steal everyone's jobs and turn vibrant global languages into one bland gloopy soup: harmless but meaningless, safe but insipid. Sympathy Tower Tokyo feels so über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, and it is alive with all the tools (and fools) of modernity. Yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide, merge and inform each other throughout this relatively short novel. A contemporary gem.
