TV Review Wednesday (2022)

Wednesday (2022) created for television by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar based on characters created by Charles Addams

Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is thrown out of her school for taking revenge on some boys who bullied her little brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez). "That's my job," she confidently states as she drops piranha in the school's pool where the bullies are swimming. She is sent to Nevermore Academy where her parents Gomez (Luis Guzman) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) met as teenagers. Morticia was a star student, so Wednesday has to live in that shadow--not the good kind of shadow. Even though all the other students are "outcasts" (including sirens, werewolves, and vampires), Wednesday has trouble fitting in, especially with her werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Myers). Enid is more upbeat and colorful than Wednesday. She has her dark moments but hardly lives in the black like Wednesday. Things get dicey when Wednesday is drawn into a local mystery--people are dying in the woods from what the local politicians are calling "bear attacks" though the sheriff and Wednesday both suspect something more sinister is going on. 

The show is about one-quarter focused on the academic shenanigans and three-quarters on the murder mystery. The town has a strained relationship with the school. The town's founder was a persecutor of witches and other "outcasts." The Addams' great ancestor Goody Addams was his victim back in the day. The old problems are paired with more recent ones like Gomez's unresolved murder suspicion and Wednesday's prophesied involvement in the school burning down. The murder mystery takes center stage and pulls the various elements together.

The show follows the comedy angle from the original Charles Addams cartoons and the previous screen incarnations of the family (the TV show, the live action movies, the animated films). The humor is naturally dark, especially with Wednesday's penchant for sarcasm and pessimism. She's almost too unlikeable in the first episode--I almost quit the show. Since it is directed (mostly) by Tim Burton and has had such rave reviews, I stuck with it. The show isn't as funny as I thought it would be and the mystery has the usual string of false suspects until the right one is pegged in the final episode (you can't predict that guilty party with making a random guess, so viewers are along for the ride). Going through the string was a little tiresome and undercut Wednesday's competence at figuring out what was going on. In spite of her attempts to be mature and detached, she is a kid with a lot of foibles and in need of lots of friends. Almost everyone else at the school is a better friend to her than she is to them. She finally clues in at the end with a fun wrap-up of the mystery and the academic situation.

Mildly recommended--I enjoyed it and would watch a sequel, but probably won't rewatch unless a friend or the kids are interested.

As I post this (December 2022), the show is only available for streaming on Netflix.