NETFLIX has been on a roll recently with its original series, and you can chalk up one more hit to the list – its creepy, kooky and ultimately charming Wednesday.
With a mystery story that centres around Wednesday Addams, the morose and murderous eldest child of the iconic Addams Family, the show manages to walk that fine line between scary and delightful, mostly due to the captivating and spine-chilling performance of its lead star Jenna Ortega.
The role of Wednesday Addams was once synonymous with Christina Ricci, who played the character during previous film adaptations – and who also has a meaty supporting role in this series – but Ortega manages to achieve the near impossible: simultaneously paying homage to her predecessor’s performance while also making the role her own.
We’re first introduced to Wednesday as she attends a regular high school, and it instantly becomes clear that not only does she not fit in with the other kids, but that ‘fitting in’ is the last thing on her agenda.
After a bloody incident that causes her to be expelled, Wednesday is packed off to Nevermore, a boarding school that her parents Morticia and Gomez – deliciously played by Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman – once attended. The situation infuriates Wednesday, who refuses to “live in her mother’s shadow”.
Things don’t get any better once she is introduced to her cheery new roommate, a late-bloomer werewolf named Enid (played by Emma Myers) and discovers that her parents have assigned the family ‘pet’, the disembodied hand Thing, to spy on her.
She immediately makes plans to run away from the school, with the help of a reluctant teen named Tyler (Hunter Galpin) from the nearby town, but everything grinds to a halt when she witnesses a schoolmate being killed by a vicious monster, and she decides to stick around and solve this intriguing – and deadly – new mystery.
Throughout the show’s eight episodes, she soon discovers that everyone is hiding a dark secret, from her classmates to the school’s uptight principal Weems (Gwendoline Christie), and realises that even her parents have a deadly secret that they never told her.
The show does a great job of establishing and nurturing the different red herrings in a way that keeps you guessing as to who is behind the monster attacks. At various points, it seems that everyone is a valid suspect.
And despite trying to remain detached from everyone else, Wednesday also finds herself grappling with the usual teenage high school drama. She (very reluctantly) forms a friendship with Enid despite their completely opposite personalities, finds herself in the middle of an odd love triangle between Tyler and her classmate Xavier (Percy Hynes White) who soon becomes her biggest suspect, and even finds herself battling against a rival, the school’s queen bee Bianca (Joy Sunday).
To make things even more complicated, it appears that Wednesday has a direct link to the town itself, in the form of a long-dead witch ancestor who was persecuted by the town’s founding father.
This much plot would have overwhelmed any other show, but director Tim Burton somehow manages to wrangle all the various threads into an engaging viewing experience, at least up until the final episode. By then, it feels as though several of the once-burning mysteries were just ignored or resolved a little too neatly in order to speed things up. I honestly feel that a couple of them could have been cut out entirely in order to make for a leaner, more Wednesday-focused story.
Fortunately, the show is a visual delight, thanks to its costumes and special effects that make its supernatural world feel extremely believable. This is especially clear in the depiction of Thing, who is truly its own unique character.
But above all, what makes Wednesday stand out are its performances. While Ortega is undoubtedly the star, everyone else gets their moment to shine.
While Wednesday does wrap up its main mystery by the end, it is clear that there is enough left over for a second season (shamelessly indicated by some juicy sequel bait towards the end). Will we get a chance to return to Wednesday and Nevermore for another chilling season? I certainly hope so.
