‘Wednesday’s New Season Is Death Warmed Over. That’s A Compliment

Warning: contains spoilers for Season 1 of Wednesday.

A Gothic boarding school especially for outcasts. A gossip-blogging werewolf roommate with a candy-colored bob. A new friend with the power to control insects. A principal who’s a shapeshifter. The protagonist’s most trusted compatriot: a disembodied hand. Yes, she’s being stalked by a monster whose hunting grounds are the woods by her school, but that’s just part of the mystique: Wednesday has made battling for your life look and feel aspirational.

When Wednesday dropped on Netflix way back in November 2022, it arrived to huge pre-release buzz and quickly became a hit, surpassing even Stranger Things. This probably shouldn’t have been a surprise, since Wednesday is spun off from IP that is, fittingly, immortal. Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons about the Addams family had already spawned a sitcom, two live-action movies in the ‘90s and two more animated movies in 2019 and 2021. Wednesday relocates the family’s famously deadpan titular daughter, played here by Jenna Ortega, to Nevermore Academy. It’s a boarding school for “Outcasts” like the ones in its four main cliques: “Fangs” (vampires), “Furs” (werewolves), “Stoners” (Gorgons) and “Scales” (sirens). It’s also the alma mater where Wednesday’s parents, Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), met and fell in love. 

In the first season, Wednesday is determined to be an outcast even among Outcasts, stomping around campus in a custom-made gray and black school uniform since the standard bright purple version would inflame what her mother Morticia says is an allergy to color. Smallville co-creators and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice co-screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar are the credited co-creators here, with Executive Producer Tim Burton, maestro of the macabre, directing several episodes. In short: This is The Addams Family meets Harry Potter meets Veronica Mars, with notes of Daria, Frankenweenie and Emily the Strange.

Wednesday is initially determined to escape Nevermore, as she has every other school that’s ever tried to hold her, but when another student tries to bludgeon her with a falling gargoyle before getting killed himself by an enormous monster, Wednesday decides to stay and solve the mystery. She eschews such tools as computers and smartphones, though she does get assistance from periodic psychic flashes. In the course of her investigation, Wednesday encounters a boy whose drawings come to life, a shapeshifter and a Hyde, as in Jekyll And. The last of these is the monster who’s been killing people in the woods, and after a couple of mistaken accusations, Wednesday figures out that in human form, the Hyde is Tyler (Hunter Doohan), the sheriff’s son. He’s only half Hyde on his late mother’s side, but he could still be groomed to carry out the orders of his master, Marilyn Thornhill (Christina Ricci), fka Laurel Gates. 

Marilyn/Laurel is a descendant of Joseph Crackstone, the founder of nearby Jericho, Vermont, and she is determined to continue his campaign against Outcasts. Tyler and Marilyn enter secure psychiatric facilities, but as Wednesday is heading home for the summer, she gets a message from someone letting her know they’re still watching her. “Were Laurel Gates and Tyler just pawns in a bigger game?” she wonders.

When Wednesday returns for a new semester in Season Two Part One (Part Two drops September 3rd), some things have changed. Her roommate Enid (Emma Myers), who finally fully wolfed out in the Season One finale, has embraced her werewolf community, drifting away from her Gorgon boyfriend Ajax (Georgie Farmer). Wednesday has a smartphone now — a gift from Xavier Thorpe (Percy Hynes White), whom she wrongly accused of being the Hyde before figuring out the truth — and her stalker continues using it to send her threatening messages. Wednesday’s brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) is starting Nevermore as a freshman, on strict orders from Wednesday to stay out of her way. 

The rest of the family is going to be around a lot more, too: New principal Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi) takes a break from trying to get his Outcast Pride slogan to take off to ask Morticia to chair a fundraising gala committee; to keep her close for the ongoing work, he’s given her the use of the school’s gardener’s cottage, so she’s close by to haunt Wednesday. Tyler the Hyde’s incarceration in nearby Willow Hill hasn’t stopped the supernatural violence: In the premiere, a private investigator is pecked to death by a murder of crows. Could someone be controlling them, even though there hasn’t been an Avian at Nevermore in years?!

Giving the rest of the Addams family bigger roles in Season Two serves purposes both creative and, probably, practical: Ortega’s career is keeping her increasingly busy (not to mention she has, by her own admission, pushed back against some of the writing for her character), so beefing up the material for other members of her family could prepare for a possible future in which Wednesday’s Wednesday steps back in or entirely exits the franchise; there is, after all, a Fester (Fred Armisen) spin-off in the works already. 

The evolution also has the potential to deepen the story. There has been serious friction between Wednesday and Morticia. Wednesday bristles at what she sees as Morticia’s attempts to remake Wednesday in her own image, while Morticia believes Wednesday is being reckless by ignoring her advice about her psychic gift. Putting them together more often in Season Two gives them the chance to spar, both verbally and physically, as in the third episode’s blindfolded fencing match. It also lets the show’s writers spread out the creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky jokes and gags among all the family members. Pugsley can slaver over the live bugs in his trail mix; Gomez, showering, can mistake the attention of a hungry zombie for his amorous wife.

As one would expect of a show Tim Burton’s worked on, the production design is lavish. (The show has even, like other megahits Stranger Things and The Witcher, gotten its own custom “Tudum” screen: Thing runs through a Thing-scale graveyard and snaps twice next to an “N” formed by leaning tombstones, lighting it up in Nevermore purple.) In addition to the gardener’s cottage, from which Morticia eradicates all evidence of Marilyn’s shabby chic decorating in favor of her own Goth style, the third episode brings an overnight camping trip with Burtonesquely asymmetrical tents in eye-popping colors. A new coffee cart in the quad makes drinks with towering whipped cream domes; no word whether the extra pump of steak sauce Enid requests costs extra. The new season also introduces a new class of Outcast: Da Vincis, who can create and build objects, like a bonfire pyre topped with a branch raven that takes flight once it’s burning. 

Though it’s clear why younger viewers would be eager to spend time in this world, this adult sometimes feels like the aesthetics are a distraction from a lack of character development. There are students in Enid’s extended group of friends who may not even have more than one trait each. (Divina? What’s your deal?) The most underserved in this batch of episodes is the potentially compelling Bianca (Joy Sunday), who feels conflicted about using her siren song for mind-control purposes, particularly since her mother Gabrielle (Gracy Goldman) has been enlisted to use hers to recruit members to a cult. Proof of how little attention has been paid to most of the student characters — Enid excepted — is that Xavier was written out (possibly due to alleged sexual misconduct and other off-screen controversy on White’s part) and I didn’t miss him at all.

The aesthetics must be important to the show’s intended demographic, who may be waiting for a real-life Nevermore theme park if they’ve already tired of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Ultimately, these are the viewers the show is for: the kids, teens, and tweens who already know which character they’ll embody for Halloween; who try to copy Enid’s elaborate coffee confections; who write their own fanfic like Wednesday writes her Viper de la Muerte mystery novels. (To any parent who let their child live their full fantasy by getting them a manual typewriter and living with the noise: good for you, and let me know where to send the Advil.) 

It’s great if adults are tickled by new guest stars like Buscemi, Thandiwe Newton, Joanna Lumley and Billie Piper who will mean nothing to Gen Alpha. (That’s possibly excepting Buscemi, if they recognize him from his meme.) It’s just probably unnecessary from Netflix’s point of view whether you or I get on board. Let the kids enjoy it on their own, and when they complain about having to wait until September for the rest of the season, you can tell them what a “time slot” used to be.