She’s creepy and she’s kooky (sort of), mysterious and spooky (occasionally), she’s altogether kooky (debatable), the Netflix Wednesday Addams. Snap snap.
Wednesday Addams returns for more middling YA adventure and sleuthing in the second season of Wednesday. Or, rather, in the initial part of the series’ second season, since the streamer has divided its sophomore run in two, with the first four episodes premiering on Aug. 6, and the remaining four arriving on Sept. 3.
Still making death-obsessed wisecracks while operating as a Goth Harry Potter vis-a-vis Veronica Mars, Percy Jackson, and every Tim Burton character in existence (not to mention her various prior print, TV, and movie incarnations), Jenna Ortega‘s Addams Family heroine is as mordant and misanthropic as ever.
She’s re-upping at Nevermore Academy to solve new mysteries involving her classmates, her family, and her educational institute’s hallowed forefathers. Her latest go-round, however, does little to improve upon its unoriginal predecessor, indulging in more of the same tiresomely bleak and sardonic YA drama, which this time around puts an added emphasis—unfortunately—on the rest of Wednesday’s famous clan.
Oozing with plot and attitude but dreadfully short on inspiration, it continues to feel like a training-wheels Burton rehash that’s only fit for viewers under the age of 13.
Wednesday starts strong, with Ortega’s protagonist spending her summer tracking down the Kansas City Scalper (Haley Joel Osment), a notorious serial killer with a fetish for dolls. That prologue suggests a far more interesting direction for the show than the one soon taken, as creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar immediately send Wednesday back to Nevermore, where she’s displeased to discover that she’s now the school’s resident celebrity thanks to thwarting last year’s resurrected-pilgrim menace.
Lycanthropic roomie Enid (Emma Myers) is happy to see her, although she’s presently preoccupied with Bruno (Noah Taylor), a hunky werewolf who’s the object of her affection, much to the dismay of former gorgon boyfriend Ajax (Georgie Farmer). That said, once she learns that Wednesday has a sycophantic invisible-girl stalker in Agnes (Lachele Carl), Enid begins vying for her BFF’s attention.
Naturally, Wednesday can’t be bothered with such sticky social dilemmas, because she has a host of her own problems.
Brother Pugsly (Isaac Ordonez), who can shoot static electricity from his fingertips, is a student at Nevermore. Mom Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) agrees to run the fundraising gala committee and, consequently, moves into a faculty house on campus with dad Gomez (Luis Guzmán).
Morticia is worried about the fact that, whenever Wednesday uses her psychic abilities, she sheds black tears—a sign that the girl is dangerously overexerting herself in the same way that landed Morticia’s long-missing sister Ophelia in trouble decades ago. In response, Morticia steals the book of spells that Wednesday’s spirit ancestor Goody gave to her and is the source of her power, thereby setting up a mother-daughter conflict that’s eventually echoed by Morticia’s strained bond with her own mom Hester (Joanna Lumley).
Without her extrasensory talent, Wednesday finds herself at a disadvantage when it comes to dueling crises: solving the murders of a private investigator and his partner, both of whom were felled by crows; and figuring out the last of her psychic visions, in which she was blamed by Enid for her death.
These are Wednesday’s central whodunits, if not its sole concerns. Thing bristles at being treated as a servant by the Addams Family. Pugsly discovers that a Nevermore tall tale is true, and winds up reanimating a corpse as a zombie. Siren Bianca (Joy Sunday) is coerced by the school’s new principal, Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi), into convincing Morticia to get wealthy Hester to donate to the fundraiser, all as she deals with her on-the-run-from-a-cult-leader mom.
Additionally, there’s the issue of Tyler (Hunter Doohan), Wednesday’s fiendish Hyde nemesis, who’s locked up in Willow Hill psychiatric hospital, whose Dr. Fairburn (Thandiwe Newton) quickly emerges as a prime suspect for the recent slayings—as does Nevermore’s music teacher Capri (Billie Piper).
Wednesday spins its plates efficiently, but it unearths no visual or narrative surprises. Once again behind the camera for multiple installments, Burton performs his old tricks dully, just as the scripts force-feed Ortega a steady stream of macabre one-liners: “I don’t evolve—I cocoon,” “I cause chaos—I don’t’ succumb to it,” and “If you can’t kill them with kindness, try lethal injection” are just a few of the blackly comedic bon mots coursing through the show’s withered veins.
Morticia and Gomez also get their fair share of cutesy dialogue, such that the material turns monotonous—as well as cringe-worthy, primarily courtesy of Guzmán, who manages the impressive feat of being too over-the-top even for these cartoonish proceedings.
Wednesday avoids distension by wrapping up its main storyline in these four episodes, all while setting up a latter half destined to focus on Enid, Tyler, Ophelia, and the evil taking place at Willow Hill. Nonetheless, the series is doggedly unimaginative, its every gothic interior, moonlit forest path, and cobwebby secret passage modeled on innumerable antecedents.
That Gough and Millar are targeting young audiences who aren’t yet familiar with such sinister stuff is a partial explanation for this derivativeness. Nonetheless, it doesn’t excuse their conventional plotting, whose structure and characters are deeply indebted to the works of J.K. Rowling (among others).
As before, Wednesday celebrates Outcasts (as Wednesday and her ilk are known) by pitting them against Normies—specifically, at a retreat that devolves into a heated competition when Nevermore learns that their rented camping ground was also booked by a group of militaristic scouts led by Ron Kruger (Anthony Michael Hall).
“Being an outcast isn’t about what you can do—it’s a state of mind,” coos Morticia early on, but for all its Halloween trappings, the show is as conformist as it gets. Love triangles, parental squabbles, pesky exes, mythic creatures, and unsolved murders make for a hackneyed odyssey, and all the Wednesday glares and eyerolls in the world can’t prevent it from emitting the pungent stench of years-old leftovers.
The brightest spot in this gloomy saga is Fred Armisen as the gleeful Uncle Fester, whose efforts to help his niece are loopy in a way that the rest of the action only aspires to be. Hopefully, he’ll have a bigger role when the season resumes, thus interjecting some uniquely gonzo life into this frustratingly moldy affair.
