★★★★☆ Wednesday, Season one, created by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, directed by Tim Burton
Great character, disappointing plot
Wednesday, Season one
created by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, directed by Tim Burton et alia
Great character, disappointing plot
Yesterday I watched the final episode of Season one of the Netflix series Wednesday. I had some thoughts I wanted to get down. I will continue to watch Season 2 and will write a more thorough review when that finishes.
First, Wednesday Addams is a wonderful character and Jenna Ortega is spectacular in the role. It is worth watching for her sake alone. Gwendoline Christine is also impressive as the sort-of but not entirely villainous Principal Larissa Weems.
Second, the writing really lets down the character. It’s a school story and takes place mostly at Nevermore, a secondary school for outcasts, which means such beings as vampires, werewolves, merfolk, etc. The plots, sadly, center on the usual themes of TV dramas about high-school kids: relationships (both romantic attachments and friendships), status competition, and parent-child conflicts. It’s all distressingly normal.
“But,“ I hear you say, “werewolves, witches, …” Guess what, those too are now an entirely normal component of high school TV dramas. Buffy did not live in vain, and more recently we have had a dozen Wizarding World movies. Urban fantasy no longer gets you any points for originality.
I felt personally let down by the way the plot handled Wednesday. “Personally?” you say. “Why would you take a script personally?”
Well, I myself am a kind of Wednesday, and I felt the writing, rather than celebrating Wednesday, denigrated her. Here’s a small example. Wednesday is not a hugger. It is clearly shown from the beginning of the series that when someone tries to hug her, she stiffens and steps back. But at the end of the final episode Wednesday accepts and even leans into a hug.
It was clear to me that we were intended to read this as learning and personal growth for Wednesday. (This, of course, is a near-universal theme of high school TV shows.) What bothers me is that, in every one of these cases, Wednesday’s “personal growth” results in her becoming less Wednesday and more normal.
It’s not what I wanted, and it is, I think, a bad misread of the appeal of the character.