Back to Netflix's beguiling world of Wednesday
When Netflix repackaged The Addams Family as the series Wednesday in 2022, it was described by some as 'the spin-off we deserve'. Jenna Ortega had the unenviable task of taking Wednesday Addams – a character established by a legendary Christina Ricci performance in the first Addams Family film in 1991 – and making it her own. Ortega, a former Disney child star, rose to the challenge, and Wednesday became one of only three Netflix titles to get more than a billion hours' worth of views in its first month (alongside Squid Game and Stranger Things 4). Now, after a three-year hiatus, the show returns with its second season.
Wednesday begins with its eponymous character having just finished her summer break, relating how the six-week holiday culminated in her tied up in a serial killer's basement. It was 'an eventful summer', she purrs, deadpan. It was a time of psychic breakthroughs, tracking down murderers and pursuing her 'favourite passions: torment and humiliation'. One suspects this was, for Wednesday, genuinely restorative.
She arrives back at Nevermore Academy, a school for outcasts, where she's a grudging celebrity on campus, having saved the institution at the end of the previous semester. For her bravery, she must now suffer the indignity of recognition. When handed a pen and notebook for an autograph, she replies: 'I only sign my name in blood.' When that doesn't evoke enough fear, she adds: 'I never said it was my own.'
This interplay between the sardonic and the sinister helps the show find its groove quickly, as does executive producer Tim Burton's instantly recognisable aesthetic: the buildings are gothic, Nevermore adorned with leering gargoyles, and the sky perpetually overcast. It's all very Edward Scissorhands. The costume designer Colleen Atwood ensures Wednesday is resplendent in sharp tailoring reminiscent of Rick Owens or Comme des Garçons. The script, too, is whip-smart, if at times a little cringe-inducing ('I was the last in my family to wolf out').
All of this is testament to Wednesday's world-building. We're reintroduced to Nevermore's campus cliques – the Fangs, Furs, Stoners and Scales – each of whom have their own supernatural skills. Joy Sunday's Bianca, meanwhile, remains the queen bee of the Sirens. Her storyline, which involves blackmail and intra-species politics, unfolds with venomous flair. Also making a triumphant return are Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, who play Wednesday's parents, Morticia and Gomez. Returning in all their eccentric fabulousness, the pair feature more prominently in season two.
The show has an internal logic that is cogent, consistent and in harmony with the otherwordly environment Wednesday and her cohort inhabit. It is largely a joy to be immersed in it with them. However, if you're arriving fresh to it, without having seen the first season, you may find yourself scrambling to make sense of some things, as I did. Wednesday's trip to a psychiatric hospital to visit a character from the first season goes largely unexplained, and the circumstances necessitating Wednesday 'getting a new guide' (whatever that means) are vague. But minor mysteries like these are not entirely to the show's detriment. There is enough expository dialogue to plug most of the gaps, and more than enough charm to pull the uninitiated along.
In a streaming landscape cluttered with half-baked fantasy and anthropological reality shows, Wednesday is an oddly elegant anomaly: a carefully constructed story that embraces the macabre without abandoning narrative coherence. For those already enthralled by the show's dark sensibilities, its second series continues to be an enticingly disturbing watch. For newcomers, it's a steep climb into a fully realised world, but one worth the effort. It's clever without being smug, stylised without being hollow. And if, like Wednesday, you enjoy 'torment and humiliation', then Nevermore remains an irresistible place to dwell.
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