Martyn Conterio | On 03, Aug 2025

 Season 2 premieres on 6th August 2025. This review was originally published in November 2022 and is based on Season 1.

Creepy and kooky? Check. Mysterious and spooky? Definitely. All together ooky? Sure, why not. Tim Burton’s foray into the world of streaming is, a couple of annoying script quibbles aside, going to please his fans. Beloved weirdos the Addams Family do feature, but the main focus is, as its very title suggests, on Wednesday Addams (played by Jenna Ortega), here removed from the ensemble and put centre stage in a gothic melodrama set in a boarding school.

A student at Nancy Reagan High School (but not for long), in the opening sequence Wednesday drops bags of piranhas into the school swimming pool during practice, on account the team is bullying her little brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez). As Wednesday quips, justifying her actions to the school principal: “That’s my job.”

Packed off to the same fee-paying establishment her parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), once attended, it doesn’t take long for Wednesday – rebel and perennial outsider that she is – to butt heads with classmates (all of them possess supernatural abilities) and authority figures, such as Principal Weems (Gwendoline Christie) and the local town sheriff. All the while, she plays sleuth in a case involving distant relative Goody Addams (also Jenna Ortega), accused of witchcraft in pilgrim-era America, the 1990 murder of a local boy deeply infatuated with Morticia and, in the present, a bug-eyed monster picking off Wednesday’s peers one by one. They couldn’t all possibly be related… could they?

Jenna Ortega aces her role as Wednesday, taking over the title, more or less, from Christina Ricci, who played Wednesday in the much-loved 1990s movies (Ricci co-stars as “normie” schoolteacher Miss Thornhill – “normie” is slang for those sans supernatural gifts). Ortega’s Wednesday is an emo ice maiden armed with a cadre of deliciously macabre zingers and gloomy retorts any time a person bothers her or attempts to get close or break down the walls of her personality. “Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote ‘Hell is other people.’ He was my first crush,” she states at one point.

Over the course of the series, Wednesday begins to soften – in relative terms, at least. She’ll always be an antisocial type with a line in tongue-in-cheek misanthropic statements, but she does, slowly but surely, befriend Edith (Emma Myers), the annoyingly sunny and chipper werewolf roommate who decorates her half of the dorm in a scheme of glitter and pink. Then there’s Eugene (Moosa Mostafa), a nerdy kid with a penchant for bee-keeping, who helps Wednesday in her ongoing investigation. Wednesday’s relationship with Thing too is another series highlight, the severed hand there to keep an eye (a hand?) on her stay at school, but who becomes as indispensable as a witch’s familiar. They make for a dynamic duo, Thing and Wednesday, as they unlock the mysteries of Nevermore Academy’s violent past and gory present.

Penned in the main by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, the concept – Wednesday at a posh school getting embroiled in a gothic horror yarn – is compelling enough. But they give Wednesday psychic visions, flashbacks and flash-forwards, the latter of which especially feels like narrative cheating, because they are so bluntly deployed for a moment of revelation or hairpin twist to keep the wheels moving. It’s all a little too convenient and, well, lazy, or not crafted to the best of their potential.

It’s fair to say too that more than a few supporting figures feel underwritten or come across as a bit one note, such as Christie’s Principal Weems, who stands around looking stern and repeatedly threatens Wednesday with expulsion, all the while fretting about the fate of the school. The main offender, though, is the visions. They do perform several crucial plot functions – they allow Wednesday a supernatural ability so she can attend the school in the first place, they allow her to time travel and meet persecuted ancestor Goody, vital for the storyline – but things get a bit clumsier when it feels like the writers are pushing a metaphor regarding Wednesday’s coming-of-age and journey towards adulthood. Still, none of the series’ script weaknesses get in the way of the overall enjoyment.

This Wednesday for Gen Z is at its best when our heroine is exploring the misty woods for mutilated corpses, sneaking around the school library after dark searching dusty old books for clues, exploring ancient chapels, murky cobwebbed crypts, finding hidden passageways, stumbling upon sins of the past, crimes of the present, secret societies and lives ruined by religious mania and misogyny. Basically, it’s fun, fun, fun, whenever she’s being a snoop or interacting with Edith, who is obsessed with getting Wednesday to join in school life and hang out with her peers. “I know she has a serial killer vibe, but she’s actually just very shy,” Enid says defending her frosty roomie to fellow classmates who aren’t convinced.

Burton, of course, provides his well-honed attributes and the show’s zippy narrative pace (episodes fly by, it’s such a good time). Indeed, everything here the Hollywood maestro is known for is present and correct. There’s the quirky and gallows humour, the cast of wonderfully eccentric characters (Fred Armisen’s Uncle Fester is a treat), the black-and-white colour schemes in set and costume (Wednesday dressed like a haunted Victorian doll at her school dance makes for a classic Burton sequence), the Danny Elfman compositions, expressionist lighting and tongue-in-cheek frights, the kitschy Americana, the whole Burton shebang. His imprint is so heavily established that when he hands over the reins at the midpoint to co-directors James Marshall and Gandja Monteiro (Burton helmed Episodes 1 to 4), it’s pretty seamless – the tone and style doesn’t suddenly fall flat or make it screamingly obvious Burton isn’t calling action and cut on set. Not at all. Marshall and Monteiro do a grand job directing their couple of episodes each; the quality does not diminish and any script issues were there when Burton was calling the shots.

Back to Burton. He has always been a dab hand at making freakiness beautiful. In particular, he is drawn to outsiders, plainly evident in his films and numerous art illustrations. For decades now, he has brought pathos to the weird and wacky. Think back to Edward Scissorhands (1990) or villainous Penguin’s tragic origin story in Batman Returns (1992), both at once hilariously strange and yet strangely moving. That has long been Burton’s modus operandi and why his films are loved to death by some – because, as well as being a great visual stylist, none of it works without the human element, the capacity to demonstrate empathy for oddballs and those who are just different from the rest.

Wednesday Addams is transformed into a quintessential Burton protagonist. She is a young girl who doesn’t fit in (and never will) but who is essentially good (despite the psychopathic armour she sports), her bloody school adventure and partial thawing of a famously bleak disposition managed without ever radically compromising what makes Wednesday adorably deranged. It ensures this Netflix-back production is entertaining, funny, gripping, brilliantly acted and emotionally affecting.
 

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