Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’ Doesn’t Commit the Crimes You Think It Does

Netflix’s Wednesday returned for its second season last week, dropping the first four episodes (with the remaining four episodes launching Sept. 3). Time will tell if the decision to stretch the season out in parts was a mistake, but so far there doesn’t seem to be nearly the amount of online chatter around the return of Netflix’s biggest English-language show as I’d expect (though that’ll probably change when Lady Gaga makes her entrance in part two). Of course, Wednesday doesn’t need the buzz anyway; Netflix already renewed the series for a third season ahead of the season two premiere. Tim Burton’s take on the famously spooky family of outcasts isn’t going anywhere. And that - kinda like the show - is just fine.

For the most part, season two is more of the same. Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) returns for another year at Nevermore Academy, only to find a new local murder mystery that demands her attention: A murder of crows has murdered Galpin, the former sheriff and her ex-boyfriend/monster Tyler’s father. Her psychic gifts reveal that the mystery may also be connected to a potential tragedy involving her roommate, Enid, and then her powers inexplicably vanish. Can Wednesday fix her powers, save her friend, and solve the crime, even if it means - ugh - going on a school camping trip? It’s a familiar if overstuffed mix of school hijinks and shadowy threats, and if the logic doesn’t always hold, at least there’s another new wrinkle arriving quickly to distract you. It’s, you know, fine.

Despite season one’s gargantuan success, season two has made some very obvious tweaks to the formula that seem designed to address the biggest criticism aimed at the show: that Wednesday isn’t faithful enough to “The Addams Family.” This point is raised in a lot of reviews I’ve read, including Pajiba’s own review of season one, which stated that Wednesday “falls apart thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding, likely thanks to the show’s creators, of what “The Addams Family,” and its creepy/kooky members, represent.”

The first, most obvious change this season is that the rest of the family members have been promoted to series regulars. Wednesday’s little brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), has enrolled at Nevermore, while their parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), are hanging around campus as chaperones and fundraising gurus. And sure, one way to make Wednesday feel more “Addams Family”-ish is to actually have the family present, but ticking that box isn’t quite enough. What matters is how the family relates to each other, and that’s a hard target to hit in a show that is still ultimately about Wednesday’s own solo journey. The result is a few more plotlines to follow as the show justifies the family’s increased presence - Pugsley makes a zombie pet! Morticia has to call her mom for money! - but these stories don’t really connect back to Wednesday at all. And when they do, like Morticia’s interference with Wednesday’s quest to master her psychic abilities, it may still be a miss for some fans who are used to seeing the Addamses as a united front. For a family that bucks normalcy, is there anything more basic than a teenage girl getting mad at her overbearing mom? Still, it’s nice to see more of those characters, so I ain’t mad at it. It’s - and I cannot say this enough — fine.

The second change is the total elimination of Wednesday’s love triangle from season one, and in fact any hint of romantic tension at all (beyond what fans read into her relationship with Enid). This is a great change, if only because season one never managed to make Wednesday’s supposed attraction to either Tyler or Xavier feel believable in the first place. Not through any fault of the actors, mind you, but just because this teenage version of Wednesday isn’t interested in people, period. She is a deliciously dour, savvy, self-interested loner with zero patience for interruption or interaction, and season two has finally freed our little freak from the genre demands of “high school romance.” Was this also in response to criticisms of the first season? Perhaps, but not entirely. Tyler (Hunter Doohan) is still around, shackled in an asylum after the reveal that he’s a Hyde and the culprit behind season one’s mayhem, so his storyline isn’t quite finished. Based on his interactions with Wednesday so far, however, the love is gone - and in its place is a far more convincing brand of lunatic obsession.

Xavier is another matter: He’s simply gone, transferred to a different academy in Germany or something, where he’ll never be seen or heard from again. The actor who portrayed Xavier, Percy Hynes White, was accused of sexual assault and predatory behavior toward minors by an anonymous Twitter user in 2023. He denied the claims, but Netflix announced that he was dropped from Wednesday season two in 2024. In an interview with Vanity Fair that year, Ortega said that with so many new characters joining in season two, she thought Xavier’s absence “will kind of get lost.” And you know what? She was absolutely right. So long, moody artsy guy. If only all teenage girls could be free of your ilk so easily.

Speaking of new characters, season two has almost too many guest stars to name (or spoil), but the big ones are Steve Buscemi as the new principal of Nevermore; Billie Piper as a new music teacher; Thandiwe Newton as Tyler’s doctor at the asylum; Joanna Lumley as Granny Frump, Morticia’s mother; and Christopher Lloyd as a talking head in a jar! He joins Christina Ricci as another “Addams Family” alum hopping aboard this new iteration. And as I mentioned, Lady Gaga is playing somebody at some point in the next batch of episodes. The show is very good at giving you at least one DiCaprio-Pointing reaction every episode, so that’s something!

As you can tell, I think Wednesday season two is, what’s the word? Oh yeah: “fine.” It’s fine! It’s adequate! It’s entertaining enough! It improves on season one in a few ways and maybe not in others (I’ll be honest, I don’t remember a lot of season one other than a vague impression that is was also fine). I’m far more interested in the critical response to the show and its perceived failures to the intellectual property that is “The Addams Family,” however, so let’s talk about that for a second.

I’ll be the first to admit that Wednesday plays like something you’d read on Archive of Our Own. It’s fanfiction - “What if Wednesday Addams was a teenager and went to Hogwarts For Monsters?” But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing; or at least, it’s unavoidable. Creating a show about Wednesday Addams is an exercise in filling in a blank canvas. “The Addams Family” began as a series of single-panel New Yorker cartoons created by cartoonist Charles Addams. They depicted these familiar characters - Morticia, Gomez, Pugsley, Wednesday, Uncle Fester - in everyday situations. The gag was always either that the Addamses were engaging in a normal activity in an abnormal way, or a strange behavior in an utterly banal way. Lizards as pets, borrowing a cup of cyanide from a neighbor instead of sugar, and yes, pouring boiling oil on carolers - The Addams Family was an examination of everything we take for granted when we think about what “normal” is, and how functional strangeness can be. It did not, however, have a plot.

In 1964 The Addams Family sitcom premiered, a black-and-white 30-minute show that brought the characters to life with a catchy-as-hell theme song. When people talk about what “The Addams Family” is fundamentally about, they’re usually talking about traits that started in this show and carried through into the pair of ’90s films from Barry Sonnenfeld. Whether it’s the internal functions of the Addams family unit or their culture clash with the outside world — or even their names! — here is where it all came into focus. Charles Addams himself didn’t seem to care much for the show beyond the royalties it paid, reportedly saying that the characters were “half as evil” as his cartoon versions.

So what exactly is Wednesday supposed to adhere to? There is no template for a teenage Wednesday Addams. In all the previous iterations, she was a child. And unless you’re comparing Wednesday to the original cartoons - which, again, were single-panel gags - then it hardly seems fair to complain that it’s fundamentally misunderstanding the franchise. Arguably, the franchise itself was created out of such a misunderstanding, and we’re all the better for it. I’m not here to defend Wednesday — it’s doing, ahem, FINE on its own — and I certainly don’t think every creative decision the show has made has been successful. Does Wednesday Addams really need a whole special outcast school to provide mystical context for her exploits, or could she have been better served as the weirdest of the weird out in the real world? We’ll never know. I just think we can discuss the show’s lack of creative vision, or obvious business-minded adherence to young adult entertainment tropes, while also acknowledging it has every right to depart from the text, so to speak, since there is no definitive text at all.