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The tried-and-true recipe for a series hit of autumn’s hot-cocoa, under-blanket evenings?
Just take a school for teenagers with supernatural abilities, pour in a pinch of Tim Burton’s signature macabre, and pour in two ladles of Dark Academia-style costumes. Add to that an ounce of creatures not of this world, a good handful of riddles from the past and a mysterious prophecy. Sprinkle the whole thing with Danny Elfman’s music and stir – only carefully – so as not to disrupt the structure established by pop culture. And finally – to catch the attention of the crowds – throw the pale-faced offspring of the eccentric Addams family into the middle of this brew. Voila. Here’s how Netflix creates an elixir to induce all-night binging.
Wednesday – Netflix’s new hit is bit by bit another product of nostalgia fashion, a macabre teen drama in a gothic anthropology, and a metaphor for the hardships of adolescence and the painful (here even bloody) process of self-discovery.
From the 1930s to 2022, the characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams have come a long way. The ghastly clan representing a satirical inversion of the ideal American family first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in a series of comic strips maintained in the climate of black comedy. Nearly thirty years later, he made his debut on the small screen, and in the nineties, thanks to Barry Sonnenfeld, he found his way into theaters. Now the still madly in love Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), their son Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) and daughter from hell Wednedsay (Jenna Ortega) become the characters in a story closer to Chilling Adeventures of Sabrina or Harry Potter than anecdotes about a baked-in cake stripper from a feature-length film.
The series is linked to 1991’s The Addams Family by Christina Ricci – there playing the black-haired Wednesday, here she returns in the role of a teacher at Nevermore, a school with a long tradition of educating teenagers gifted with paranormal abilities, to which the title character is sent after an incident at her previous high school. In an act of revenge for her brother’s bullying by sadistic thugs on the swim team, the girl let piranhas into the pool. Now the only thing she regrets is that in the end no one died and that her mother sends her to the school where she was queen 20 years ago. For although – like the young wizard with the lightning bolt on his forehead before her – Wednesay ends up in the same house as her parent one thing is certain – she will not follow in her footsteps. Instead of taking part in , “tribal teenage platitudes,” she will sip coffee as black as her thoughts and sharpen axes on her enemies, and in passing she will make friends, experience her first love, investigate and confront a bloodthirsty monster.
The creators of the series draw fully on established clichés. Wednesday is a bit of a young detective Veronica Mars, the chosen one who, like Harry Potter, can save the magical world and the successor of Sabrina the teenage witch developing the ability of precognition. Her uniqueness at times is won over on notes of the grotesque: a petite girl with pigtails independently digs up corpses from the grave, conducts autopsies, roams creepy crypts in the middle of the woods at night, and defeats enemies with blows worthy of a Kill Bill heroine. Such a pop-culture Frankenstein wouldn’t exist if not for Jenna Ortega – with her icy stare, characteristic upright posture and face that is alien to any emotion or uncontrolled movements – Wednesday in her performance doesn’t even blink. On the one hand, she’s a heroine who fits into Burton’s kaleidoscope of characters – a misunderstood outsider functioning somewhere on the fringes of society, at once childishly naive and endowed with exceptional sensitivity; on the other, she’s the epitome of otherness, a challenge to the traditional status quo. Emphasizing her contempt for socially acceptable patterns, Wednesday prompts the others to redefine their views – it is her horror that releases the monsters tormenting them.
Black and white like an Instagram filter, the heroine has many more shades than the supporting characters. There are an average of two character traits for each of the other students of Nevermore: from Wednesday’s feline roommate (Emma Myers), whose character is more like a golden retriever, through an artist tormented by existential pain (Percy Hynes White) and the Popular One (Joy Sunday), because, as you can see, every teen drama needs its Queen B, up to the Handsome One (Hunter Doohan), who at first sight develops feelings for the raven-haired girl. Only Gwendoline Christie as the school’s headmistress transforms herself and reveals more facets – perhaps because she is one of the few here to represent the complicated and undiscovered adult world.
In Wednesday, metamorphoses, monsters and unbridled supernatural powers are primarily a metaphor for adolescence, fitting the series into the trend of coming-of-age stories. As the protagonist notes: . “Nevermore is a teenage purgatory”. – its inhabitants are suspended between childhood and adulthood – wandering through labyrinth-like corridors and boundless forests, they slowly discover their identity – this self-discovery in the fantastic world will be paid for with pain and blood, in the real one with anxiety and tears.
Compared to the movie The Addams Family, the Netflix series has lost its parodic character – by the way, what was surprising twenty years ago has long since become part of the mainstream. The series does not try to surprise with originality and resurrect the hooked spirit – rather, it is meant to meet the standards of family entertainment: the black humor has been smoothed out, and the graceful audacity of the film version has been called to order and put in the service of moralizing. Netflix’s mission to carry the message of simply being yourself rings out loud and clear, the motto being repeated at least a couple of times in each episode. Wednesday teaches the other kids not to worry about the opinion of others, and she herself slowly and very reluctantly discovers that being , “a lonely well-fortified island around which sharks swim” also has its drawbacks.
There is little bravado and originality here, criminal puzzles are also not among the most difficult to be solved, but the adventures of a black-hearted teenage girl provide a lot of fun. There is a lack of exaggerated melodrama and exalted ethical dilemmas, and the protagonist’s somewhat shaken moral compass leads to many comic situations. The killer declarations contained in the dialogues will probably soon feed the gif bases and become the foundation of many memes. Wedneday is too polite to write herself into the ghastly history of the Addams family, but catchy enough to live to see a second season. The question is, is there anything left to add to her story?
Review: Dominika Laszczyk-Hołyńska
Photos: Press materials/ Netflix
English translation: Natalia Kalinowska
Polish version here.
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