When WEDNESDAY debuted on Netflix three years back, I caught the first episode. Perfectly competent, didn’t really interest me … though it’s interesting that it exists at all.
Charles Addams’ cartoons in the New Yorker about a ghoulish, creepy family came to the small screen as The Addams Family in 1964 (first season review here, second here). 90 percent of what we associate with the Addams came from TV: names, characterizations, the searing passion of Gomez and Morticia. The premise of the show was that the Addams see themselves as a perfectly nice suburban family like anyone else, always friendly, helpful and considerate; half the time they don’t even notice everyone around them is freaking out. Lynn Spigel argues that like most 1960s paranormal sitcoms the characters stand in for “what if Irish or Italians moved in next door?” which was no longer an acceptable premise, and also subvert and twist the standard family sitcom tropes.
After a Saturday morning cartoon a few years later, the Addams vanished except in syndication (syndicated network reruns on local TV stations used to keep old series running for years) and the occasional special (Screen Rant has a good list) but then the 1990s gave us the movies Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Impeccably cast (Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Christopher Lloyd as Fester) it kept the characters but made them much closer in tone to the original cartoons. This family really did seem ghoulish and creepy. The movies are fun but my heart will always be with the original TV show.
The breakout star of the movies was a young Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, here ghoulish and slightly murderous to boot, all delivered in a deliciously deadpan tone. Her star turn elevated Wednesday from the kid of the original series to a central character … which is how we wound up with Wednesday.
Jenna Ortega delivers a great deadpan performance as Wednesday, shipped off to the Nevermore boarding school where her parents met; retaliating against the jocks bullying her brother Pugsley (they were swim team, she put piranhas in the pool) has convinced them leaving her to mingle with “normies” isn’t wise. Nevermore is home to Outcasts — witches, werewolves, sirens, gorgons, making it feel a lot like Monster High (here’s a more detailed breakdown). Inevitably the dour, tart-tongued Wednesday is paired with sunny werewolf Enid (Emma Myers) as her roommate, the perfect dioscuri for her (unsurprisingly Enidsday gets shipped a lot).
Where the original TV series was intrusion fantasy — the Addams were one weird paranormal thing in an otherwise normal world — Wednesday is much more urban fantasy, where our world is host to lots of different supernaturals, even if the normies don’t see it. Part of my lack of interest after watching E1 (“Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe” — all episodes have “woe” in the title somewhere) was that while it was well done it wasn’t “my” Addams Family.
And probably that teenage drama interests me less at my age than it did a few decades back, even when it’s well-executed. Plus the producers are Gough and Millar of Smallville and that never worked for me either.
Also I’ve always preferred Thing reaching out of the box in the original show to the detached hand running around. Yes, classic Thing was cheap special effects but that hand was definitely attached to Something we never saw; that’s creepier.
But regardless, when I learned there’s a type of Outcast called a “hyde” — a seeming ordinary human who mutates into a grotesque monster under stress — I binged S1 this week. It’s not a major entry in Jekyll and Hyde, but I like to catch even the little ones.
At the end of S1, Wednesday spots a monster murdering a student. In the best tradition the body disappears and nobody, not even perky Enid, likes Wednesday enough to believe her. Naturally she starts investigating, with occasional support from friendly teacher Thornhill (Christina Ricci). It soon becomes obvious something bad is going down … but what? The mystery makes this even more Monster High: we have a Hyde as villain, and its handler plans to destroy the school the way Eddie Hyde did in the Monster High movie.
As there’s more Hyde stuff in S2 I may give that a watch, if I have time. If not, I think I’ll be fine as is. “Dead people are notoriously bad at returning calls.”
