Netflix’s Wednesday: 3 things the Tim Burton series gets right, and 1 thing it gets so wrong

Jenna Ortega in Netflix's Wednesday

Credit: Netflix

Under Her Eye


Netflix’s Wednesday: 3 things the Tim Burton series gets right, and 1 thing it gets so wrong

By Kayleigh Dray

Updated 5 months ago

5 min read

The original goth girl, Wednesday Addams, steps into the spotlight in Netflix’s Wednesday. However, while Tim Burton’s much-anticipated spinoff series is incredibly watchable, it misses the entire point of The Addams Family

I have a confession to make: like so many 90s kids, I am a diehard fan of Christina Ricci’s unashamedly creepy, kooky and mysterious iteration of Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Indeed, there was a pretty sizeable period in my tweens when I would pull my hair into two poker-straight pigtails, don a dark dress with a Peter Pan collar and glide through my day with as deadpan an expression I could muster – all the while attempting to ooze sarcasm (as much as a tiny girl can understand the concept of sarcasm, anyway) from every single orifice.

Why? Because Wednesday was cool. Much like her mother, Morticia (Anjelica Huston), she didn’t just refuse to bend to societal norms and expectations – she skewered all those that did so with a seemingly inexhaustive supply of effortless witticisms and one-liners. Plus, she always strived to live by her family’s enviable credo: “Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc.”

Or, for those who don’t speak Latin (and that’s fair enough): “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us.” 

Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams in Netflix's Wednesday

Credit: Netflix

With all of this in mind, then, you can imagine how sceptical I was when I learned that Tim Burton was bringing a new and reimagined version of Wednesday to life in her very own Netflix series – titled, aptly enough, Wednesday

How could anyone, I wondered to myself, ever hope to successfully walk in Ricci’s black-heeled footsteps?

Well, good news: Jenna Ortega – who takes on the eponymous role in the Burton’s series – is a revelation. Indeed, her take on our eternally nihilistic antiheroine is one of the very best things about Netflix’s Wednesday, largely thanks to her impeccable comic timing and her ability to convey a wealth of emotion with just one flash of her dark eyes.

Considering Burton’s series is every bit as dark as the 90s films, the 60s TV series and the original comic books about The Addams Family, this is by no means a bad thing. Especially as we are first introduced to Wednesday when she’s in full vengeance, hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-sister-scorned mode – which, in this instance, looks like siccing a school of flesh-eating piranhas on a boys’ swim team after they mess with her brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez).

“The only person who gets to torture my brother is me,” she tells the terrified teens, who rush to get out of the water before they’re eaten alive.

One of them, the ringleader, isn’t so lucky; he escapes with his life, but seemingly without his penis intact. The injury prompts the slyest of satisfied smiles from Ortega’s Wednesday, and this brilliant line: “I did the world a favour. People like Dalton shouldn’t be allowed to procreate.”

When Dalton’s parents (perhaps understandably) press charges against Wednesday for attempted murder of their son, though, she’s promptly expelled – and sentenced to a few court-appointed therapy sessions, too, for good measure. Because here’s the thing; The Addams Family this ain’t – it’s Wednesday’s show. 

Naturally, then, the pigtailed teen is forced to leave her family home and all of its creature discomforts in the very first episode. Instead, she will attend the illustrious Nevermore Academy, a boarding school which – much like Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children – is attended by outcasts, freaks and monsters. 

Or, to be more polite about it, the extraordinarily gifted.

Up until this point, I was 100% on board with Netflix’s Wednesday. It seemingly had it all; a stellar cast (Ortega is joined by the likes of Gwendoline Christie, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Emma Myers, and the aforementioned Ricci in a fun cameo as Wednesday’s carnivorous plant-loving denmother), a deliciously dark comic undertone and that oh-so-Burtonian aesthetic (which is guaranteed to inspire thousands of Halloween costumes). 

Basically, Wednesday felt refreshingly different to everything else on Netflix – but then Burton forgot the vital element of any Addams Family story: that our creepy and kooky cast of characters work best in American suburbia. 

Wednesday Netflix

Credit: Netflix

Think about it: the various members of Addams clan, Wednesday included, are supposed to be the fish out of water; the weirdly wonderful ones who see through everyone and everything – and who take no prisoners when it comes to calling the world out on its trad-normative bullshit.

In transplanting Wednesday from her familial home to the Nevermore Academy, she becomes less a fish out of water, more… well, more just a bog-standard fish. A bog-standard fish with psychic powers and a number of apocalyptic prophecies to unravel, true, but a fish all the same. In water. Swimming along with countless other fish.

Tim Burton has hurtled Wednesday down The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina route

Personally, I think Wednesday would have worked so much better if Ortega’s darkly excellent eponymous antiheroine had been sent to a very ordinary US boarding school. To college, even. Somewhere, essentially, where she is allowed to shine as bright as the devil in the pale moonlight. Where her metaphorical bite is the sharpest one in the room (something which is hard to achieve if you attend a school filled with vampires and werewolves. Where she stands out and stands up for what’s right – albeit in the least appropriate way possible; see Wednesday’s summer camp antics and her Thanksgiving speech about the US mistreatment of Native Americans, in Addams Family Values via the clip below, if you need an example.

Instead, Burton has hurtled Wednesday down The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina route – not to mention given her a hefty dose of Buffy The Vampire Slayer-branded heroism. And, in doing so, he has rendered one of cinema’s most extraordinary characters deeply ordinary. Hers is just one of so many fantasy high school adventures on Netflix now, sadly. And, while it’s incredibly watchable (I binged the whole thing in a single weekend), Wednesday doesn’t live in my head rent-free like the 90s Addams Family films still do.

It’s a shame, because Ortega deserved so much more. Fingers crossed that a second season, should we get one, will give us much more Wednesday with our Wednesday, eh?

Wednesday is available to stream on Netflix from 23 November.

Images: Netflix

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