Wednesday review: Tim Burton’s Addams Family reboot makes weird normal

Wednesday Addams, a stern, blunt and macabre figure, is a role model for all aspiring Goth girls. The only daughter of the creepy and kooky Addams family, Wednesday has a legacy of her own, from Charles Addams’ early comics to Christina Ricci’s take on the character in the 1990s movies to fan imaginings and Halloween costumes.

A new Netflix show centered around a teenage Wednesday going to a spooky boarding school — and directed by Tim Burton, Hot Topic King — sounds like a nightmare come true. But does Wednesday work when she’s not with her eclectic family? The better question might be: Is the Addams family capable of working when their lives are expanded beyond what they know? The result — much like the family themselves — is a little weird and might not work for everybody.

[Ed. note: This review contains some slight setup spoilers for Wednesday.]

Image by Netflix

WednesdayWednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega), is expelled from her current high-school after she set up a school made of piranhas for the volleyball team. She had shoved her brother in a locker. Her parents decide to send her to their alma mater — Nevermore Academy, a school for outcasts, where she ends up investigating a series of mysterious deaths, while also dealing with the hell that is high school. Why her parents didn’t initially send her to Nevermore Academy in the first place is never explained, but Wednesday resists going and following in her mother’s footsteps. Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones) and Wednesday have some problems with their relationship. This is also not really explained. It becomes a constant theme that people don’t understand. Wednesday. The show’s central problem is that while it has wonderful characters and grabby plot points, it never really dives deeper into the greater world, and the overarching plot feels stifled.

So, Wednesday Keeps the story alive: This is a testament to the greatness of the Addams characters. They’re just a bunch of macabre oddballs in a normal world, and every new bit of information (like when Morticia mentions she majored in Spells and Hexes in one of the ’90s movies) just served to make them even weirder in the best way. However, the nature of Wednesday These questions must be addressed. It’s difficult to find the perfect balance between being too open and too private.

Photo: Vlad Cioplea/Netflix

Where? Wednesday focuses on Nevermore Academy and its strange traditions and eccentric students, it’s an utter delight. Visually, Nevermore is a cozy, Gothic school — really putting the dark into dark academia to the utmost degree. It’s a boarding school for magical students that prides itself on being weird, which means that the annual canoeing competition also involves theming the boats after Edgar Allen Poe stories and the student cliques are based around what supernatural species they are. They are all characters in any drama for teens, with the fun Tim Burton supernatural twist. Siren Bianca (Joy Sunday) is the school’s mean girl, while Wednesday’s werewolf roomie Enid (Emma Myers) provides a lovely plucky contrast to stony Wednesday.

Even the most exhausting teen drama trope — the obligatory love triangle — gets a funky refresh that makes it more engaging: Tyler (Hunter Doohan) is a soft-hearted normie barista from town, while Xavier (Percy Hynes White) is a tortured artist, the son of a famous psychic. Both look identical, a perfect example of the big-eyed and narrow-faced Tim Burton drawing (thanks to the casting team). Initialy, the love triangle can be a bit irritating. Especially when one of them has only a partial crush on her. It becomes more interesting the more you add supernatural elements to it. It’s a testament to how the school drama turns into something cool and new with paranormal flavor, and how the students and the academy itself really work when they’re just existing in their own little kooky ecosystem.

Image by Netflix

But step outside school grounds and the story becomes too ambitious for a world we’re just getting to know. Many of the conflicts stem from the notion that those who are outcasts have to be at odds with their oppressors. We never learn. WhatAn outcast is someone who has no explicit powers. It seems like a catch all term for magical beings like werewolves and vampires, but there’s a handful of labeled outcasts — Gomez Addams (Luiz Guzmán) and beekeeper Eugene (Moosa Mostafa) among them — who have no explicit powers. Wednesday herself doesn’t reveal her emerging abilities to the school staff, or even her own parents, so what qualified her as a student? Again we never get any further clarification, but we do know that there’s tension between normies and outcasts. The tension is only superficial. Although you could infer the religious devotion of the Pilgrims that founded Nevermore, it is not clear how much. It is why it persists so deeply. These are all questions that don’t necessarily need to be answered right away, especially since shows need time to find their footing and establish the world. WednesdayTo speed-track the story, however, it tries to pack all of these larger themes into one package.

The show’s real charm is its ability to slow down and explore its strange little world. The Addams family aren’t the only oddities in this version, which simultaneously gives them more to do while also stripping away a bit of what makes them charming. The 1960s were full of interesting stories about the Addams family. It’s weirdThese were their family members when they were being compared with the usual sitcom. However, in a world that is more accepting of weirdos where does one place them? The show doesn’t do much to interrogate that. The plot would be more compelling if it had more time to investigate this bizarre setting and the strange dynamics. If the plot had more breathing room, it could grow. But as it stands, there’s a lot of cracks in the foundation that detract from what could be one gorgeous neo-Gothic building.

WednesdayNetflix launches Nov. 23.