Apparently, even Wednesday Addams can grow up. If only a little.
It’s been three years since we last saw Jenna Ortega’s macabre take on the classic Addams Family character in Netflix’s “Wednesday,” and that seems to be the amount of time the wildly popular show needed for a glow-up. Yes, the first season was Netflix’s most-watched English language series ever and spawned countless TikToks of its viral dance number, a thousand Halloween costumes and a lot of puns using the word “woe,” but it also at times felt incomplete and shallow. It was the first draft of something, with greatness peeking in around the edges.
Season 2 (Part 1 now streaming), however, finds its footing. There are marked improvements over the first season, from the expanded roles for characters like Morticia Addams (the always-wonderful Catherine Zeta-Jones) and a de-emphasis on teen romance (“Twilight” this is not), but also a general confidence and watchability that was lacking in Season 1. It’s as if producers Al Gough and Miles Millar and director Tim Burton woke up and found the soul of the series locked in a cupboard, preferably an antique black one with bars and rust.
Season 2 brings viewers back to Nevermore Academy, the gothic high school for supernatural scamps that Wednesday enrolled in last time around, and subsequently helped save from Season 1 villains Tyler (Hunter Doohan) and Marilyn Thornhill (Christina Ricci, a one-time Wednesday herself). Now she’s back, more popular than ever for her resting ghoul face and faced with a new, elusive enemy threatening the campus, and her bubbly roommate Enid (Emma Myers). But Wednesday is also at her weakest, as her psychic powers become unreliable and she wilts under the steely gaze of her mother Morticia, an indefinite guest at the boarding school.
The story this time is far more streamlined and, quite honestly, interesting. Wednesday is drawn into the mystery because she has real skin in the game, not because it just happens to be there. Her personal stakes make a huge difference in developing sympathy and affection for the character, and more importantly, making the audience care about the mystery she’s trying to solve.
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The characters around her become more developed as well, particularly teens Enid and Bianca (Joy Sunday), who were so vaguely sketched in Season 1 they resembled vibes more than people. New characters played by Billie Piper (“Doctor Who”), Heather Matarazzo (“The Princess Diaries”), Thandiwe Newton and Steve Buscemi are adding something substantial to the tale, not just cameos for the sake of one more famous name in the credits.
There’s an urgency and verve to the series that wasn’t there in the almost lackadaisically paced first season, which seemed to going for a paint-by-numbers approach to plotting and stakes. Everything has been tightened and sharpened this time around, and the series is so much the better for it.
There was a perfect pleasantness and bland likability to the first season of “Wednesday” that perhaps led to its immense popularity but likely would have deeply offended the character for which the show is named. It was fun and slight, but nothing special. Season 2 drops that air of placidity and adds spice, genuine horror and feeling to the proceedings.
It’s enough to almost crack a smile on Wednesday Addams’ skeletal face.
