Wednesday stars Emma Myers as Enid Sinclair and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams. Netflix, courtesy of 2022
Netflix's newest popular show The record for the most hours seen in a week of an English-language series on the streamer belongs to Wednesday, a Tim Burton-directed Addams Family spinoff that focuses on the titular deadpan daughter. Fans of the scary, quirky, mysterious, spooky IP (*snap *) and ardent supporters of the main actress Jenna Ortega equally have praised the programme, as have some critics and viewers alike.
While most critics have praised Ortega and other incredible supporting performances, some have attacked Wednesday with the go-to phrase for TV writers: "like something on The CW." A teen girl finds herself in the middle of a vampire love triangle in The Vampire Diaries, and a teen girl learns she is descended from a long line of witches in The Secret Circle, both of which are produced by The CW, the love child of former networks UPN and the WB. The CW also hosts many DC superhero shows. In the past, the network has given well-known IP young, soapy twists, occasionally darkening the tone. Examples include Riverdale (which introduced serial murders and cults to the Archie comics) and Nancy Drew (whose CW incarnation semiregularly communes with the dead to solve her cases). Naturally, the network and its offerings have been reduced to the level of guilty pleasure due to its reputation as a dependable provider of teenage histrionics with a dash of the supernatural.
Because of this, sceptics of Wednesday have used the phrase as a shorthand. It's a way to mock the show for repeating what they view as the CW's classic flaws, such as predictable or unoriginal plots, unrealistic and childish dialogue, and excessive reliance on what Collider calls "boilerplate subplots," such as "rival-school drama, sins-of-the-parents revelations, [and] romantic competition," which makes Wednesday "algorithmically derivative," while CBR calls it "disappointingly
Wednesday takes an indifferent young heroine we all know. It places her in settings that increase her tolerance of the human condition rather than "dragging what should be considered as higher-level Netflix-quality programming down to The CW's level," as Decider contends. And the reason this is hilarious is that she despises others so bitterly. Wednesday amplifies the notoriously enigmatic character of Wednesday Addams by contrasting her love of the macabre and grotesque with the fantastical filler of overdone YA melodrama. This increases Wednesday's hilarious relatability and clarifies the melodrama.
We see Wednesday trapped in a love triangle, unsure how to handle new feelings of arousal. She learns that not everyone is pointless and stupid, not her vibrant roommate (Emma Myers), not the school's queen bee (Joy Sunday), and especially not her parents (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, who are barely present but who nonetheless come off as needlessly intrusive to Wednesday). While coping with a complex family history of persecution and a new superpower, Wednesday saves lives and attends her first school dance. A new powerhouse is continuously emerging. And Wednesday finally pulls off that delightful trick where the friendships turn out to matter more than the relationships. Wednesday begins the programme as a misfit and concludes it as one. Wednesday is an outcast at the beginning of the show and remains one at the end, having truly made friends and a home with other like-minded social outcasts.