Wednesday Addams deserves better than “Wednesday.”
The hit Netflix series has turned the morbidly deadpan character created by cartoonist Charles Addams into the central figure in a generic supernatural teen drama, seeping away most of what makes her such an enduring presence. That process continues in the second season of “Wednesday,” which premieres its first four episodes on Wednesday.
Just a few months have passed since the events of the first season finale, as Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) and her classmates return from summer break for a new school year at the paranormal enclave of Nevermore Academy. Nevermore remains an off-brand combination of Hogwarts and the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, with an increased emphasis on factions, houses, and the taxonomy of the students’ various preternatural abilities.
Wednesday herself is psychic, and in her opening voice-over she claims to have mastered her unpredictable powers, using them to capture a serial killer known as the Kansas City Scalper (Haley Joel Osment) during her downtime. But no sooner has she returned to Nevermore than her psychic sense starts glitching, causing her to weep artfully designed black tears and experience visions of the demise of her perky werewolf roommate, Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers).
“I can’t believe it’s only Day 2 of the school year and you’ve already involved yourself in some grisly murder case,” Enid laments in the second episode, inadvertently expressing the show’s exhaustion with its own premise. Once again, Wednesday takes it upon herself to investigate a series of murders in the surrounding Vermont town of Jericho, this time apparently perpetrated by flocks of attacking birds. “Murdered by a murder of crows,” Wednesday comments, in one of the many near-jokes that creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar insert in place of actual humor.
But wait, isn’t this a show about the Addams Family? To their credit, the creators seem to have realized that Wednesday isn’t complete without the presence of Addams’s other delightfully gloomy creations, so the rest of the Addamses make more than their token guest appearances of the first season. Wednesday’s brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), is now also a Nevermore student, and he gets his own subplot about reviving a zombified Nevermore alum. Wednesday’s mother, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), takes a fund-raising position that conveniently offers on-campus housing, so she and Wednesday’s father, Gomez (Luis Guzmán), stick around as well.
The problem is that all of these characters are consumed with their own story lines, and the exuberant solidarity of the family that is the hallmark of the best previous Addams adaptations is replaced by bitterness and bickering. Gough and Millar are still beholden to their serialized mystery plotting, so there are multiple threads about hooded killers, secret lairs, and surprise villain comebacks. It’s even more tiresome the second time around, now that Wednesday is firmly ensconced in the Nevermore ecosystem — and has become something of a campus celebrity.
Ortega is still the best possible choice to play a modern Wednesday, and she makes some of the show’s wan attempts at humor palatable. There are no potentially viral moments like the first season’s oddball dance set to the Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” but Ortega still embodies the mix of mischievousness and curiosity that makes Wednesday more than a one-note downer. The rest of the Addams Family is less compelling here, and their expanded screen time often emphasizes the difficulty of properly capturing the creepy yet playful family dynamic.
As he did in the first season, Tim Burton directs four of the eight episodes, although they’re split up so that only two fall in this initial batch. He seemed revitalized as a filmmaker with last year’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (also featuring Ortega), but his style is mostly muted here, fitting in seamlessly with episodes helmed by other directors. He does get to indulge his penchant for stop-motion animation in an origin story for the Nevermore zombie, and he introduces periodic black-and-white flashbacks to the earlier, more whimsical adventures of the Addams Family, which hint at the lively, fun Addams movie he could have made.
Playing a Nevermore professor who exists solely as a head in a jar, Christopher Lloyd becomes the second veteran of Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1990s “Addams Family” movies (after last season’s Christina Ricci) to show up on “Wednesday,” serving mostly as a reminder of how much more clever, funny, and entertaining Sonnenfeld’s movies were. As Uncle Fester, Fred Armisen brings the most comedic energy to any of the show’s members of the extended Addams Family, but he’s relegated to a smaller recurring role.
While the fourth episode wraps up some major plot points before a monthlong break, the arcs for certain high-profile guest stars come to anticlimactic ends, and Fester stands in the background watching the action unfold. If Wednesday deserves better than “Wednesday,” then the rest of her family does, too.
Josh Bell can be reached at [email protected].
