What is the best phrase that sums up Tim Burton's Netflix Wednesday series cast? What is your unedited opinion about it?
08.06.2025 06:39
The fact is, when popular culture phenomena get reinvented at different times, it’s because they are a response to those times. And this is true of every such phenomenon: you can’t go [original decade] again.
For a start, she is not primarily motivated to do terrible things to people. She does have the usual Addams family relish in topsy-turvydom. At the beginning of one episode, she is kidnapped, and comments in voice-over:
This Wednesday’s main motivation, filtered through her Addamsian relish for the painful and unpleasant, is that she is offended by the idea that anything is going on which she can’t figure out.
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Nevermore Academy, where Wednesday goes, is indeed a bit of a knock-off Hogwarts, but the show gets plenty of mileage out of the relationship between Wednesday and her blonde and perky roommate, Enid, played by Emma Myers.
It’s certainly more interesting than making her a one-joke callous psycho, which Christina Ricci pulled off very well in the movies, but which was partly funny because she was so young at the time, and Wednesday was a pre-teen supporting character. Wednesday in the show is 15–16, and Ortega herself is 22, so that wouldn’t fly.
This has led to a humongous degree of shipping among the show’s fans, who are dying for Wednesday and Enid to get together in season 2. I have no dog in that particular race, if that’s even the metaphor I’m looking for: I like the Wednesday/Enid friendship fine without needing to make it complicatedly romantic.
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In this context, a Wednesday Addams who lived, as the Christina Ricci version of Wednesday lived, only to wreak havoc, would not have been an interesting character to place at the centre of a TV series.
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Jenna Ortega as Wednesday and Emma Myers as Enid.
But this, also, shows how this show has been welcomed by its audience: they want a Wednesday who is not a cute psychopath, but who is gruff, weird, potentially violent (at one point in the show, Wednesday blithely prepares to torture a suspect for information) but who is, deep down, a good person.
It’s a bit disingenuous to complain that Wednesday is boringly more cuddly than the 90s movies. The Addams family has always been a loving, model American family. Wednesday sets up a certain conflict early on, with Wednesday being resentful that her parents are packing her off to boarding school, but it doesn’t last.
I’m not persuaded. That, to me, is the ageing hipsters at AV Club mourning for their teens in the 90s, when Christina Ricci was their dream girl.
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Quite a large part of the population seemed to be motivated by nothing more noble than pissing off the rest of the population, and the oddness was that both parts thought that it was the other part that existed to do that.
She wants to be on top of every situation. Hence Ortega’s permanent unsmiling glare, her inability to unbend and enjoy herself, which becomes funny when, no matter what shit comes her way, she gets impatient with people who think that she can’t handle it.
But also, the Jenna Ortega Wednesday is a different character.
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Is your spectral vision impaired? Ortega snaps, sweating and weak from loss of blood. I’m dying.
Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams.
Enid comes from a family of werewolves, but for most of season 1 she has not yet ‘wolfed out’ and actually transformed into one, which makes her a disappointment to her mother.
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In a phrase? Social Justice Wednesday.
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It opened in 2022, the Biden presidency, when America was tearing itself into mutually exclusive parts.
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When she is drafted into serving fudge in the awful ‘Pilgrim World’ theme park in the local town, Wednesday informs a group of tourists in her fluent German that the cacao bean industry is based on exploitation and that fudge wouldn’t be invented until hundreds of years after the 17th century anyway, and who wants some? I like ‘Wednesday as deadpan killjoy for vacuous tourist attractions’.
Throughout the show, Wednesday gets repeated visions of a 17th century ancestor, Goody Adams, who gives her cryptic advice. Late in the season 1 finale, Wednesday gets stabbed in the gut, and Goody appears to her and tells her what she has to do next.
And that’s one of the things that I like about it.
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I was poring over volumes of 50s New Yorker cartoons when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. My parents had a copy of Charles Addams’ Dear Dead Days. I knew that Addams’ cartoons had represented, even then, an inverted mirror image of the model American household.
Ricci is in Wednesday as one of the teachers in Wednesday’s school, which should be a massive red flag to anyone wondering why she would take a relatively supporting role. It’s not as memorable as her other great current TV role, Misty Quigley in Yellowjackets, but Yellowjackets is a grownup show and this is very much a show for teenagers.
I really warmed up to Ortega’s performance when I realised that she was basically playing Wednesday as if the character were a crusty middle-aged man. It’s not easy to communicate shades of meaning when your basic expression is a death glare, but she does it.
Of course we can tell that Enid’s good spirits and cheerful nature will eventually wear Wednesday down, as indeed they do—that’s part of the charming predictability of a show like this.
The Addams family in the cartoons appeared to be a bunch of weird freaks, but were actually rather sweet. I still recall an early 50s cartoon of the family in their mansion, sitting in the window, watching a horrendous storm outside, and the father exclaiming It’s days like this that make you feel good to be alive!
In the meantime, I think the basic joke of making Wednesday a permanently cynical, disenchanted, pain-relishing snarker who is like that because the world continues to fail to live up to her standards, is rather a good one. When some local boys pull a Carrie on the school dance and flood the sprinkler system with red liquid, drenching the students, everyone freaks out except Wednesday, who looks rather pleased—until she tastes it, realises it’s paint, and grumbles Couldn’t even spring for real pig’s blood.
It was the 90s films, rather than the cartoons or TV show, that codified Wednesday’s character by means of Ricci’s performance as an unnerving comedic sadist.
Wednesday the series, however, came along in a very different time.
Back then, Wednesday seemed like a truth worth saying out loud.
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The 1993 sequel was more of the same: unlike the Bush dynasty, who did nasty shit but spoke in bland, tedious platitudes, the Addams family wore its dark, ugly side like a badge of pride.
In short: I greatly enjoyed this show as undemanding fun. Looking forward to bingeing season 2.
I have read some criticism of the show, notably by the AV Club website, which complained that they want Wednesday Addams to be a sort of agent of chaos, spreading fear and mayhem wherever she goes—not this stiff, awkward, scowling do-gooder that is the Jenna Ortega version.
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There was enough surface havoc going on in real life, from people who didn’t think that what they did was even havoc, or who caused havoc and then blithely pretended that they hadn’t. At least the Ricci-era Wednesday never pretended to have not done all the bad shit she did.
In 1991, Barry Sonnenfeld’s movie The Addams Family resurrected the TV show’s version of them as a deliberately psychopathic swipe at the vacuous surface blandness and subterranean violence of Bush-era America.
That was the year of the Gulf War, a war fought basically in order to cheer America up and make it feel like it meant something. It was fucking idiotic, but there you go.