SummaryWednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) discovers mysteries in town and about her parents, while learning to control her psychic powers at Nevermore Academy, the boarding school she is sent to after being kicked out of her public high school.
SummaryWednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) discovers mysteries in town and about her parents, while learning to control her psychic powers at Nevermore Academy, the boarding school she is sent to after being kicked out of her public high school.
Ortega kills as the gifted, nihilistic teen who’d rather hang out in a crypt than a club. ... Gimmicky callbacks to the films and the 1964 TV series are rare and strategically deployed in this streaming iteration of the franchise. ... Burton’s sensibilities and style are all over this irresistibly quirky, sardonic whodunit. ... “Wednesday” is brilliant on every level.
It loses something by not setting Wednesday against normality, as the films did, and by having a more fissured version of the Addams clan. The love and unity of the family against the world was always one of the great pleasures, in whatever incarnation you met them. But it has enough wit, charm and propulsive energy for that not to matter as much as it might have.
It is often delightful, despite its deliberate darkness, but “Wednesday” is many things, including a murder mystery, a teen romance and a boarding-school soap opera with a quasi-macabre curriculum. Its heroine is all over the place and it does feel as if eight episodes weren’t enough to quite nail down what the tone of her character and story will eventually be.
The plotting sets up numerous arcs that feel promising. And then “Wednesday” succumbs to what plagues so many Netflix shows—narrative wheel-spinning, a lack of momentum, and that sense that this would all have been a better film than a TV series. It never completely loses 100% of the energy of its premiere, but the ingenuity of the first hour fades as the season progresses like all of the colors in the wardrobe of Wednesday Addams.
Shockingly good casting (and a typically Gothic score from Danny Elfman) aside, there’s little to recommend about Wednesday. It feels like a reconstituted mush of Tim Burton’s late-career apathy, the vagaries of the Netflix streaming show model, and the unholy resurrection of the corpse of IP.
The show’s dialogue is flavorless at best and laughable at worst. ... Though she has zero to work with, horror-movie fave Ortega does what she can with her character, nailing the deadpan delivery Christina Ricci perfected in the ’90s movies. ...Others caught up in this dreck include Gwendoline Christie, Riki Lindhome, and Fred Armisen. What’s more, horror legend Tim Burton directed half the season’s episodes; but the show’s visual language is so flat that you’d never know.