We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column, published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week: a mostly negative review of Netflix’s Wednesday, with spooky star Jenna Ortega justifying the show’s existence.
If Netflix wasn’t married to its algorithm, Wednesday would have been the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina season three. A part of the Riverdale franchise—that’s turned Archie Comics into a deranged bacchanalia of serial killers, alternate universes, and bear attacks—Sabrina blended high-school melodrama with supernatural menace. It was cancelled in 2020, supposedly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m disinclined to believe Netflix on that front.
The streamer has a habit of cancelling shows right at the crest of their popularity, because it’s always easier to coax new sign-ups with the promise of something shiny and fresh, rather than converting them to what they’ve already turned down. Come to Netflix for Wednesday, then, which blends high-school melodrama with supernatural menace. But this time with the Addams Family. Kaching!
Wednesday, the homicidally inclined spawn of Charles Addams’s ghoulish clan, stars of his New Yorker single-panel cartoons, has grown into her own behemoth cultural figure. It’s a go-to Halloween costume for goth girls. The scene of her in Addams Family Values, serenely clutching a lit match as a fire blazes behind her, is now a popular meme signifying feminine vengeance. I think she might even have been responsible for an uptick in the guillotine’s popularity.
It’s a level-headed business move to make her the star of her own series. A now-teenage Wednesday (Scream’s Jenna Ortega) has been transferred to the Hogwarts-esque Nevermore Academy after getting expelled from her eighth school in two years. She dropped a bag of piranhas in the swimming pool, while defending her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) from bullies—only she’s allowed to torture him, of course.
Nevermore is ruled over by four main cliques: the fangs (vampires), the furs (werewolves), the stones (gorgons), and the scales (sirens). It’ll be Wednesday’s job to shake off her sullen solitude, the one thing that defines her as a character, in order to bring these groups together and solve the murder that’s been plaguing the local town. And that’s all without crossing wires with the place’s icy headmistress Larissa Weems (Gwendoline Christie).
Wednesday’s promotional campaign has pushed the line “from the mind of Tim Burton”. It’s a little bit of a white lie, really. Mainstream media’s king of the weirdos, and moulder of many an outcast tween’s formative sensibilities (mine included), only directs the first four episodes in the series.
The project is hardly his invention—that job goes to former Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Burton actually turned down the opportunity to direct the 1991 Addams Family film, though I still regularly encounter people convinced that he did. Barry Sonnenfeld took the helm on that one. You get the sense Netflix is hoping Gough and Millar will receive the same erasure.
In reality, the Burton touch here is about as impactful as an Instagram filter. You see it a little in the colour palette, that ice-cold pallor where the bright colours of suburban conformity turn sickly and garish. Wednesday’s old school is named after Nancy Reagan, a figurehead of conservative cultural asphyxiation. “I’m not sure whose twisted idea it was to put hundreds of adolescents in underfunded schools, run by people whose dreams were crushed years ago. But I admire the sadism,” Wednesday quips. Occasionally, Danny Elfman’s woozy theremin might kick in on the soundtrack.
Wednesday’s Burton is the exact Burton his harshest detractors talk of—the empty Hot Topic aesthetic, with none of the genuine subversion of Mars Attacks! or Beetlejuice. He and Charles Addams, really, were working off the same idea: that the freaks are the ones with the purest of hearts. Gough and Millar seem clueless about that fact. Not only are the Addamses barely seen together (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán are simply too incidental to the plot for me to judge the heat of their Morticia and Gomez), but Wednesday actively resents her parents. And that outrightly spoils the entire joke of the Addams Family: that for all spooky, ooky, kookiness, they’re actually one of the healthiest and most functional family units in pop culture.
It’s indicative of a certain carelessness in Wednesday, where subtext is forced into text. Our heroine’s chirpy lycanthrope roommate (Emma Myers) tells her that the school is a haven for “outcasts, freaks, monsters – fill in your favourite marginalised group here”. The fierce individuality that’s always been core to Wednesday now comes with a few requisite girlboss buzzwords.
Despite having sworn off online culture (“I find social media to be a soul-sucking voice of meaningless affirmation”), she seems oddly versed in terms like “mansplaining”. Wednesday has always been a feminist character, and it’s a borderline affront to her legacy to claim she needs any kind of 21st-century makeover.
So why make Wednesday at all? Ortega is, at least, a perfect choice. She nails the accusatory but curious stare of one who’s always trying to pinpoint a person’s mortal weakness. And she can do deadpan without creating dead air. There’s something admittedly quite sweet about Christina Ricci’s much-advertised supporting role, as teacher Marilyn Thornhill. It’s a passing of the baton from the Wednesday of the nineties films, who did so much to popularise the character, to someone from the very generation she influenced.
I’m conscious that Wednesday is intended for the teens who might embrace her in the way I loved Ricci’s iteration. It’s just a shame they’re not being shown the true magic of who Wednesday is—a stubbornly morbid soul who takes pride in her difference, and is loved so dearly for it.
