Wednesday
Created by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar
Unashamed weirdness
One of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid was The Addams Family. I’m old enough to have watched the original black-and-white show from 1964-1966 and then in reruns for years afterward. The premise of the show, accurately summarized by Wikipedia, is “The Addams are an eccentric old-money clan who delight in the macabre and the grotesque and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening.” That final clause was the appeal. I was a weird kid before the invention of the words “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent.” The Addams Family don’t care that they’re not like everyone else, or if they do care, they’re proud of it.
The daughter of the family, who was a little girl in the TV show, is named Wednesday. In the Netflix series Wednesday she’s a teenager in secondary school. Except for the first episode of the first season, “school” is Nevermore Academy, a private school for “outcasts.” Nevermore is located in Jericho, Vermont. (There is a real town in Vermont by that name, but the Jericho of the show is fictional.) Aside from Nevermore Jericho is inhabited by “normies,” as the outcasts contemptuously call them.
Wednesday is the premiere expression of the “Who would want to be normal?” viewpoint. She’s a genius. She’s writing a novel, is fluent in every language you’ve ever heard of, and is a gifted cellist. (Jenna Ortega learned to play cello for this role.) AND, she is endlessly quotable.
Ortega is awesome in the role. (She was nominated for an Emmy and won other awards.) Half of the episodes were directed by Tim Burton, who is the perfect man to understand what The Addams Family is about. Gwendoline Christie gives a good performance as the ambiguously villainous Principal Larissa Weems.
I wrote a review of Season 1 disparaging its failure, in my opinion, to understand the assignment. Season 2, I am glad to report, does better.