Of course, Wednesday Addams was my feral spirit animal when Jenna Ortega was just a gleam in her father’s eye. During my childhood, when my local network affiliate filled afternoons with reruns of old TV shows, I spent summer days watching the 1960s version of The Addams Family and basking in the weirdness of the clan that played together with high explosives. So, I was on tenterhooks to see Netflix’s Wednesday, which focused on the eldest Addams kid. Sadly, my film-criticism duties prevented me from catching the first season until it had already become the talk of TV fans, but now Season 2 arrives during the doldrums of summer to make me feel like I’m 10 years old again.
Except it’s better, because this Wednesday Addams is older and more developed as a character. Maybe Ortega doesn’t have the last ounce of pure creepiness that Christina Ricci (who’s in this show, too) brought to the character in the 1990s Addams Family movies. Ortega has nevertheless struck a chord with a new generation of fans, playing Wednesday Addams as a polyglot, cello-playing, kung fu-kicking, colonialism-bashing goth girl who faces down the scariest monsters with expressionless sangfroid and then dances like nobody is watching. In the pantheon of sociopathic TV antiheroes, I’ll take her over Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Tommy Shelby. She’s less obsessed with money and power and consequently a lot more fun.
The second season has her returning to Nevermore Academy, this time with her younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) as an incoming freshman. After saving the school in the first season, she is now horrified to find that she is a campus celebrity, with the uncool new principal (Steve Buscemi) commissioning bad art to commemorate her heroism. Fortunately, there’s better news: Someone is sending her threatening notes and luring her into traps meant to kill her, and a murder of crows is murdering the citizens of the nearby town, including the disgraced former sheriff (Jamie McShane). Wednesday needs to save her best friend and roommate Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) after her psychic visions give her a premonition of Enid’s death. She does not tell Enid out of fear that she can’t handle the news, because in typical fashion, Wednesday underestimates the people around her.
I would point out one more thing that’s different: Both Pugsley and her apiculturist fellow student Eugene (Moosa Mostafa) have grown much taller than her. As happened with Stranger Things, Netflix took so long between seasons that puberty noticeably kicked in with the young actors. Where the first season gave the main character an uninteresting love triangle with two boys, this one ventures into more fruitful territory by placing Wednesday in more contact with her family. Pugsley has his sister’s heedless bravery without her intelligence and gets into trouble as a result. With Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) spending more time at Nevermore’s campus as the new fundraising chair for the financially strapped school, Wednesday’s difficult relationship with her mother becomes clearer. Fred Armisen is more secure in the role of Uncle Fester as well, and it’s a particularly inspired touch that Wednesday’s being stalked by a crazed 13-year-old fangirl (Evie Templeton) who can turn invisible.
Unfortunately, all this comes rather at the expense of the guest stars who’ve climbed aboard this successful show. Haley Joel Osment pops in a role (as a doll-obsessed serial killer) that’s meant to be a black joke and nothing more, but Buscemi is surely overqualified to portray the petty manipulator that his character has been so far. The same goes for Thandie Newton as the director of the local insane asylum and Billie Piper as Nevermore’s new music teacher.
Possibly some of these issues will be addressed in the second batch of this season’s episodes, which drops on September 3 — a Wednesday, of course. For now, it’s enough that showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar keep their eye on their title character’s shortcomings amid her badassery and surround her with people equipped to deal with her crap. The first half of the season ends with Wednesday not only getting badly hurt trying to intervene but accidentally freeing all the inmates from the asylum, including the ex-boyfriend (Hunter Doohan) who wants to kill her and Enid. How she gets out of this pickle remains to be seen, but I’ll be spending August waiting for the resolution, accompanied by Ortega’s invigorating disdain for the foolishness of us lesser mortals.
