If hell is a teenage girl, Wednesday Addams takes that as a compliment. The pigtailed, death-obsessed daughter of everyone’s favourite goth dynasty would relish any comparison to the underworld – it was at that intersection of teen melodrama and supernatural haunting that Wednesday found such gobsmacking success with its first season in 2022, racking up a billion hours of viewing in a month to become one of Netflix’s biggest hits. Three years later, it’s back.
Wednesday (Jenna Ortega, surly and monotone) has had a productive summer break – what are holidays for if not scalping serial killers? – but school is back in session. And to Wednesday’s horror, her valiant efforts in saving her classmates from Christina Ricci’s maniacal teacher, in the first series, have landed her at the top of Nevermore’s social pyramid: the subject of innumerable fan letters and stalker-esque staring. It’s easy but apt to draw comparisons to Ortega’s real-life discomfort with her own sudden fame; if only the actor could deal with her overeager zealots in the morbid but effective ways of her character.
In season two, the writers are asking much the same question as they did in the first: what if Nancy Drew was a goth? And had psychic powers? The latter plays a more existential role this time around with Wednesday’s precocious abilities suddenly on the fritz. A similar thing happened, we learn, to her aunt and Morticia’s mad sister Ophelia – whose ill fate forms a twin mystery to the show’s central one, which revolves around Wednesday’s premonition of her bestie Enid’s (Emma Myers) violent death.
Nervous about Enid’s impending demise, Wednesday sidelines her friend while investigating the spooky goings on at Nevermore and the nearby Willow Hill psychiatric hospital for mentally ill outcasts. It’s a move that may upset the duo’s stans, who had hoped the characters might become girlfriends after growing close in season one.
But another irrepressibly peppy sidekick waits in the wings. Played by the saucer-eyed, Tim-Burton-sketch-come-to-life Evie Templeton, Agnes is a wannabe Wednesday eager to please and ready to assist. There is also a new headmaster in town (Steve Buscemi, wasted), and the exit of one Nineties icon (Ricci, unmasked as season one’s evil mastermind) makes way for another in the form of Billie Piper, who enters as the school’s new music teacher Miss Capri.
As Wednesday, Ortega does what she does best, which is to say not very much. There is a lot of staring and glaring and seething. Your enjoyment of the script, by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, will depend on your capacity for zingy one-liners and deadpan humour. Voltaire quotes and murder puns can get a bit stale four hours in. It’s why this second season benefits greatly from a stronger family presence, with the other Addamses afforded more screen time. Particularly enjoyable are Catherine Zeta-Jones’s mordant matriarch Morticia and Joanna Lumley’s doyenne of death Hester Frump. Fred Armisen is on fantastic form as Uncle Fester.
There are some funny moments, such as when Gomez (Luis Guzman) mistakes the attack of a brain-hungry zombie for the S&M comings on of his wife (“Ooh, axe play…”) or when Wednesday receives a letter from the publisher of her manuscript (“Please seek help”), but mostly the show relies on style to get by. Hollywood’s resident weirdo Burton returns to direct half of the episodes, and his sensibilities are all over this. There is something deeply satisfying in seeing his world of misfits and monsters built out across eight hours. That is, though, the only upside of a runtime that yawns way past what’s necessary.
At its heart, which is far less oozing and dark than it professes, Wednesday continues to be frightfully formulaic: a fish out of water, coming of age tale with a side helping of murder mystery and scoop of the supernatural for good measure. Soap opera machinations drive the plot exactly where you think, when you think. What seems on the surface shiny and new is really a Frankenstein’s monster of countless teen hits: Emily in Paris meets X-Men meets Veronica Mars meets Riverdale, all stitched up in style.
