TV Review: Wednesday Season 2 (2025)

Wednesday Season 2 (2025) created for television by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar based on characters created by Charles Addams

Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) returns to Nevermore Academy, a school for "outcasts" where she saved the day in the last season. Now she is a campus celebrity, a situation that does not sit well with her. She wants to develop her abilities, especially her psychic ones that helped her hunt down a serial killer over summer vacation. After an intense vision that included the death of her roommate Enid (Emma Myers), Wednesday loses her powers just as new murders start happening in Nevermore and the surrounding community of Jericho. If those were not enough problems, new Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) finagles Wednesday's mom (Catherine Zeta-Jones) into organizing a fundraiser for the school. So mom is around to provide feedback and stress for young Wednesday. Also, her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) starts at Nevermore, creating more social and familial problems.

The show starts off a bit more gruesome than I wanted with Pugsley digging up a legendary corpse who is reanimated but very rotten physically. The gore scales back as the season progresses, more into what I was expecting. The plot moves along at a good pace, though I think it is probably impossible to guess where it is going since the mysterious reveals are pretty outlandish. Ortega and Myers make a good odd couple, especially when they get to play each other in a body-swap episode that is delightful. The acting in general covers the weaknesses in the plot or the wholesale borrowing from other horror classics like The Evil Dead II. It's an entertaining season that sets up the action for the next season.

Recommended if you are a fan of the previous season.

As I write (October 2025), this is only available streaming on Netflix. 

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.

Movie Review: The Addams Family (2019)

The Addams Family (2019) directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon

The macabre family created by cartoonist Charles Addam got a theatrical animated treatment in 2019. The family is driven out of the old country by the typical pitchfork- and torch-wielding locals. In search of a suitably horrible place to live, they move to an abandoned insane asylum in America. They have a happy satisfying life on their lonely, fog-shrouded mountaintop home. The fog starts to dissipate when a TV home makeover star (Allison Janney) builds an idyllic suburban community where the local swamp used to be. She's planning on selling fifty houses to her audience. The fog clearing reveals the dark and foreboding hilltop home, ruining the view of every house in town. The TV star wants to do one more makeover, though the Addams are resistant. They have their own problems. Son Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) needs to perform a sabre dance as his rite of passage into adulthood; he's more interested in explosives than bladed weapons. Daughter Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) is curious about the outside world (they never leave home) and wants to be different from the family.

The movie has the fairly familiar theme of balancing conformity and individuality. The filmmakers do a good job of seeing that tension from many different angles--between parents and children, parents and in-laws, the Addams family and the town, middle school students and each other, etc. Plenty of opportunities for conflict and humor result. The movie has no huge hilarious moments but I did laugh often enough. The odd, exaggerated animation fits the oddness of the characters and the larger-than-life situation. The voice performances were much more average--no one was particularly flamboyant or over-the-top, which would fit the film better. The various plotlines and the ending were obvious and predictable, leaving me with a very average impression by the end of the show.

Mildly recommended--I found it entertaining enough but not a must watch.