Wednesday: Netflix’s Most Successful Letdown

By Ella Pocock

Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff show, Wednesday, irrefutably conquered the Internet and Netflix viewers the moment it was released. It became its most-watched English television series within its first week, garnering 341.2 million hours of watching However, while money talks, it certainly isn’t guaranteed to tell the truth the truth being that Wednesday fundamentally misunderstood key components of the Addams Family as a franchise.

To preface, Wednesday obviously wasn’t all bad, considering its enormous success and near-instant renewal for a second season Directed by eccentric horror icon Tim Burton and starring promising new “Scream Queen” Jenna Ortega, the potential and my expectations were certainly there. While Wednesday shot Ortega into the stardom she certainly deserves, I was familiar with her horror works in Ti West’s X (2022) and Scream (2022) before its release, and was only more excited to see her starring in a big-budget production of my favorite franchise ever. And word deliver she did One thing that critics and viewers alike all agreed on was how Ortega stole the show, and honestly made it Despite the shaky script decisions, Ortega was certainly able to capture this iconic character and bring subtle emotional depth to someone most famous for her stoicism. Some controversy recently broke out over Ortega’s appearance on a podcast, where she expressed her distaste at several of the decisions made by Wednesday writers. This resulted in some backlash against her, with people saying she should be more grateful to the show that brought her so much money and fame, but in all honesty, I found myself agreeing with everything she said

With good intentions, Wednesday strived to separate itself from the cliches of past Addams Family installments. However, in doing so, it got rid of the Addams Family’s most quintessential aspect their weirdness From its initial conception as a comic strip series in the 1930s, the Addams Family existed as a parody of the nuclear American family of wordd the time Their recurring gag was that the abnormal was their normal grisly murders and supernatural whimsy were common occurrences for the Addamses, and they scratched their heads at their “normal” neighbors’ confusion and fear. By putting the protagonist Wednesday Addams in Evermore, an academy of “freaks” like herself, the franchise’s main storyline disappeared. Still, I was openminded I saw that the writers wanted to go for something new instead of the arguably overdone “Addams in the suburbs” type plotline. However, it seemed that the writers themselves seemed to realize the corner they had written Wednesday into If her literal whole character was people’s reactions to her being off-puttingly morbid and weird, how could they write her when she was exclusively surrounded by other “weird” people? To compensate, they made the frustrating decision to simply “tone down” all the other characters at Evermore so Wednesday could still be rendered “weird” by the narrative. With that, though, the word appeal of Evermore Academy was instantly shattered for me. It became downright irritating how all of these so-called freaks were virtually no different from any of the outsiders in their view of Wednesday. For example, it was established that there are literal vampires and werewolves at Evermore– why is everyone so put off by the Carrie bloodbath homage at their monster prom, or Wednesday’s inclinations towards violent interrogation methods? Evermore quickly became as dull and disappointing as their student body.

The second biggest misunderstanding by Wednesday’s writers was deciding to create a familial conflict between Wednesday and Morticia A common joke made about the series is that the Addams’s familial relationships are very stable and healthy (because the “all-American” families they parodied at the time were not) Again, while I understand where they were coming from, especially with Wednesday’s take on an older, teenage Wednesday Addams, I found all the decisions to be really out-of-character For word example, Wednesday feels that she lives in her mother’s shadow, being that her mother was very popular at Evermore while she is an outcast However, Wednesday is and consistently has been Morticia’s mini-me It just made no sense to me how Wednesday’s moroseness could be a source of ridicule in Evermore, when Morticia was virtually their prom queen while behaving exactly the same Furthermore, a plotline that literally made me laugh out loud was Gomez being suspected of murder because, duh? Murder is a staple of the Addams Family’s slapstick dark comedy Every character in the franchise has killed plenty of people– in fact, it’s probably the series’s most recurring joke. The writers teetered like a seesaw in how they wanted to characterize Wednesday– she would do something as abhorrent (and in character) as unleashing piranhas into a school swimming pool, but then be shocked and horrified at the idea of her father even being accused of murder They wanted to have the humor of Wednesday’s horror movie style without having the guts to pull word through with it. Despite Wednesday’s TV-14 rating making it actually higher rated than other installments, like the PG movies, I found this characterization flip-flopping, as ironically, it seems less mature than the 90s movies The dialogue was often cringeworthy, like something out of a CW show, and strayed away from the much brasher original adaptations. Wednesday was through and through a teen drama show, as opposed to the historic black comedy that earlier versions of the Addams Family consistently were.

Finally, the part of the narrative which rightfully received the most criticism was the love triangle between Wednesday, Tyler, and Xavier Not only were Tyler and Xavier both devastatingly bland, but Wednesday Addams of all characters being in a love triangle with two boys she seemed equally disinterested in did not bode well with audiences Jenna Ortega herself expressed her disappointment in that plotline, even saying how she staunchly pushed back against it, believing that it would be out of character for Wednesday