Review of the Netflix series Wednesday

I will admit, I never expected to actually care about the Wednesday adaptation. I say the term adaptation loosely, because I think Wednesday is inspired by The Addams Family, but doesn’t actually follow the characters and storylines established from the previous reiterations. Jenna Ortega is Wednesday Addams in this adaptation, and people are going nuts for her portrayal. I understand that, she does a good job, but I have some qualms—mainly with how the character is portrayed in the script.

There’s a lot to unpack in this show, so let’s just dive right into it.

Wednesday Addams is sent to Nevermore as a monster roams the woods.

Season one picks up with a new plot to the Addams Family. Wednesday and Pugsley, after attending a normal high school for regular teenagers, find themselves in a situation. After Pugsley is bullied one day at school, Wednesday decides to take revenge by dumping piranhas into the pool that the guy is swimming in with his team. He only loses a testicle, but Wednesday is sent away to her parent’s alma mater: Nevermore. She is given a roommate who is a werewolf, Enid, that her personality clashes with immediately.

However, at the same time, a monster is roaming in the woods and attacking people in the nearby town and students. Wednesday runs into it after a classmate tries to kill her and gets killed by the monster. The rest of the series is her trying to figure out who and what the monster is, while entering a love triangle with a barista boy in town and another one of her classmates. There are other moments thrown in throughout because they really needed something to keep this show going for eight episodes.

There’s a class tournament that’s honestly kind of lame, bee boy, family night where we find out Wednesday’s father killed a guy while at school, and Wednesday attempting to solve all of this with Thing, the hand that follows her around. Honestly, I don’t know how they stretched this much for eight episodes. It goes quick, but it starts to get a little old after a while. I think Wednesday’s one-liners are good, but they become repetitive and predictable after about episode five.

The final plot twist here is the monster, who ends up being one of the boys in the love triangle, is being controlled by the botany teacher. The botany teacher apparently wants to revive her ancestor, the head Pilgrim guy, that hates anyone who wasn’t fully human. She does revive him, kills the principal, Weems, and then there’s this epic takedown. An implication for season two thus comes up at the end, as monster boy, Tyler, seems to escape the van he’s being contained within by police.

There’s a lot to think about the decisions made during this show. I have a couple major points that had me very confused throughout watching this show.

Isn’t the point of the Addams family to show how much of the family they are while defying the expectations of the nuclear family? The Addams Family was created in the thirties and named as popular culture in the sixties. Yet, in this show, Wednesday is fairly isolated from her family members and actually has a riff between her mother and her.
Why is a Black mayor concerned about the Pilgrims? Also, why does Morticia say to him that he doesn’t understand what it means to be understood or believed by people? There is a very specific connotation when you say that to a Black person.
If Nevermore is such a school for outcasts, why are its students so normal?
What was the point of the love triangle? Wednesday is mean to both of these boys and they’re obsessed with her. The show then unfolds like a Y/N fanfic—I literally was counting the fanfiction tropes that were appearing throughout the episodes.
The writing just seems kind of lazy at some points. I think the characters were fleshed out in a way they could in such a short time frame, but they feel so static and archetypical.

Overall Thoughts

It’s just a mediocre series at the end of the day. I did really like the dance scene where there was blood raining down on everyone—that felt like such a group Carrie moment. But besides that, I was not impressed. I think the creators should have just fully embraced the craziness and camp that can come with the Addams Family, but this feels like such a watered down adaptation. I did stick around for the eight episodes, which is impressive considering I will quit a show if I hate it enough. It was an entertaining show, don’t get me wrong. But I think it simply goes down the wrong path.

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