"Wednesday" vis a vis "Adult Wednesday Addams"

The history of the "Addams Family" franchise is a twisty one. Starting life as a World War II era gag-a-week newspaper comic strip, the exploits of this creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky clan expanded into TV, film, and comics. In the internet era, one character in particular has enjoyed a meme-fuelled explosion in popularity.

It's not really surprising. Wednesday had the perfect combination of factors all lined up for her; goth girl, idiosyncratically dark humour using a cute kid, memorable one-liners, if any Addams was going to get the meme treatment it pretty much had to be her. Sorry MILFhunters, Morticia just doesn't hit quite as many key notes.

Wednesday wasn't always the character who gets plastered on forums, though. In the black-and-white show, she was actually the most normal member of the Addams family, her flavour of weirdness not usually going further than a constant miserable expression and some morbid interests. In both the series and the original newspaper comics, she was also the younger of the two (eventually three) Addams children, which put her in a more dependent position toward both her brother Pugsley and her parents.

The version of Wednsday most people remember came into existence in 1991, with the first feature length Addams Family film. She looked the same, and had the same gloomy demeaner (her name is a play on "Wednsday's child is full of woe," after all), but in many respects she was really the opposite of the old version. Instead of being the youngest Addams child, she was the oldest. Instead of being the most normal member of the main cast, she was unquestionably the weirdest and most disturbing.

The second live action Addams Family TV series mostly went with the movie interpretations of the characters. This worked for most of them, but for Wednesday the results were...mixed. The show made frequent nods to the hilarifyingly murderous sadist from the movies, but adapting her back to the often lighter, more slice-of-life-y episode plots meant the writers had to water her down. Sometimes she still put her money where her mouth was when it comes to psychopathy, but most of the episodes made her seem all bark and no bite.

That brings us to the age of the internet, and the memetic Wednesday that draws mostly (but not exclusively) from the movies, who became so popular that she practically drowns out the rest of the Addams family when it comes to cultural visibility.

The Netflix original "Wednsday" series came out just a couple of months ago, in November 2022. I've heard mostly positive things, but also quite a few people whose tastes I trust told me they weren't thrilled about it. This made me curious. Not because I'm super-invested in The Addams Family of all things, but because it just so happens that I was shown another series with a very similar premise almost a decade ago. A small, indie YouTube production called "Adult Wednsday Addams." Both of these series are about an older Wednesday leaving her family's creepy manor and pursuing higher education; at least in summary, the concepts sound so similar that I suspect there was direct inspiration. If there WAS direct inspiration, though, then that would put a very bad taste in my mouth, because the creators of the free YouTube show got DMCA'd by the Addams Family IP holder a few years ago. It's since been reuploaded on different channels, but that doesn't really help as far as my biases go. Of course, it might also just be coincidence, so I'm not going to jump to any conclusions just yet.

So, I'm going to look at the first thirty minutes of the Netflix "Wednesday" series, back-to-back with a rewatch of the first couple "Adult Wednesday Addams" skits. I'd prefer to do the full pilot, but as this is an hour-long TV episode I don't think that's doable within the timeframe I've given myself, so this will have to do. Based on that amount of material, let's see who seems to have done it better.

Wednesday S1E1: “Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe”​

It's a bright, sunny day, scored with dark, ominous music. We open with a panning shot over the entrance of...oh god...the Nancy Reagan Public High School. It looks pretty much exactly how you'd expect, going by the name. Shitty public school trying desperately to make itself look like a posh private school, with a hideous plaster statue of Nancy displayed in the lobby.

Well, fortunately, we have this scene broken up by an eerie monochrome silhouette that strides through the halls, the crowds of teenagers wordlessly parting around it and anxiously closing back in a few meters after its wake like fish avoiding a sea lion. Some of them try to look contemptuous rather than fearful, but they aren't very convincing. A voiceover in Wednesday's traditional cold monotone muses on the concept of high school as it exists in the modern world.

““I’m not sure whose twisted idea it was to put hundreds of adolescents in underfunded schools, run by people whose dreams were crushed years ago. But, I admire the sadism.””

— Wednesday

Ehhhh. I see what it's going for, but this feels like a really toothless critique of the education system and what's wrong with it. It makes the twist at the end feel unearned. Sort of performative, or insincere, like Wednesday is trying to be edgy.

Still, the delivery was good, and I got what they were trying to get across.

As the ominous music continues, Wednesday reaches her locker. It's had a bunch of mean drawings and insults written on it in marker, but she doesn't seem to notice or care; either it's been like that for a while, or she just considers it an unimportant change. When she opens it though, she finds...is that supposed to be her little brother Pugsley, or just some other younger kid? It looks like Pugsley. Anyway, he's tied up in her locker with an apple stuffed in his mouth.

He falls out onto the floor, gasping and wriggling. When she pulls the apple out of his mouth and demands names, he just babbles miserably that he didn't see who they were, it happened too fast, and flinches back from her frustrated glare. She hisses to her brother, who she now identifies by name, that emotions are for the weak, so he'd better stop being weak.

...

Okay no sorry this is just wrong.

If you stuff Pugsley Addams in a locker, he's going to come out smiling and giggling and declaring that that was really fun and it's your turn now. This is like, one of the BASIC Addams Family gags, to the point where it's practically a franchise cliche; you can't bully the men of the Addams family, because they'll just interpret everything you do to them as some kind of friendly gesture or game. Morticia and Wednesday are less consistently shown to react like this, but for Gomez, Fester, and Pugsley it's a staple.

I'm not against changing the characters. As I noted in the intro, Wednesday herself has had major reinterpretations over the years. The problem is that it's not replacing that trait with anything new and interesting either. This version of Pugsley is being written and acted as a completely normal kid. I cannot approve of this.

...

As Wednsday unties him, she suddenly has a...divine revelation? psychic vision? Greenseer trance? There's a squeal like a rusty bike wheel, and Wednesday's eyes roll back as she sees a color-muted vision of some older boys manhandling Pugsley into her locker, with their faces clearly visible to her.

After it passes, her voiceover informs us that she's been having these visions for some time now, and that she's deigned to keep them a secret from her family. She describes the sensation as "like electroshock therapy, but without the satisfying afterburn," which is cute and appropriate. Heh, well, usually the Addamses are more nonchalant about whatever weird possibly-magical powers they happen to be manifesting at the moment, but if this series is taking a less episodic approach than I suppose this works better with that framework.

Anyway, after noting the culprits identified by her The Dead Zone moment there, she starts striding purposefully away. Pugsley timidly asks her what she's going to do, and gets an ominous quip in response. Pugsley, why are you so normal? Stop being normal, Pugsley, you should be able to control bugs now. Wednesday leaves him, and we jump to her walking into the school swimming pool room where the boys' swim team - several members of which are recognizable from the vision - is practicing. There's a long shot of the pool as she approaches it, with a serene Italian serenade background theme that I know is a reference to some famous horror movie scene, but I can't quite recall which. The swim jocks notice her and tell her to gtfo. She advances to the edge of the pool and drops in two aquarium bags full of red-bellied piranhas.

It had to shrink them down a little bit to fit so many in a couple of goldfish bags before letting them expand to life size in the pool. But hey, acceptable sacrifices to the practical props gods.

The fish chase the panicking boys out of the pool, though not all of them are able to make it in time. There's a head-on shot of one of the bullies trying to climb the ladder out before jerking in place as a red cloud spreads around him that pretty much *has* to be a shoutout to "Let the Right One In." Is that the scene that was being referenced all along? I don't recall what kind of musical score that scene in LtROI had.

In continuing her solid performance as Wednesday, the actress looks directly at the camera, screams and howls echoing all around, and does this:

Like I said, no matter how I end up feeling about this pilot by the end, Jenna Ortega's performance will not be one of the bad points. And hey, this version of the character is being established off the bat to not be all talk, so that's also good.

That brings us to the OP! The music is a really clever piece, incorporating parts of both the original black and white show's intro theme and the nineties show's one, while still being very much itself. It has a more campy sinister sort of sound than its predescessors, sort of like you'd expect from the Goosebumps TV show or one of its imitators, which is certainly appropriate for a series focused on the one Addams family member who actually is as ghoulish as she looks.

The visuals...well...it's This Is Halloween from "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Different animation style, but very similar composition and cinematography, and the music hits enough of the same vibes that I can't not think of it. Daaaaw, there's a cute shot of Thing climbing a little staircase, I like it, that part is good. The visual style gets even cartoonier and more Burtonesque at the end, which makes me-

....oh. I see.

Believe it or not, I actually hadn't heard about this going in.

I feel like Tim Burton is simultaneously the exact right AND the exact wrong person to make a show about Wednesday Addams.

Well. Anyway. After the intro, we open on the Addams' black hearse driving along a highway through an autumn New England-y forest. Their license plate reads "ADD-4M5," which is a nice touch. As their Frankensteinesque butler Lurch drives and Pugsley sits in the front seat, parents Gomez and Morticia sing along with the duet blaring from the radio and sloppily make out in the back, and Wednsday sits in the middle, backwards, fixing her parents in a death glare as they neck.

...

I haven't gotten into "Adult Wednesday Addams" yet, but one thing I'll point out here is that - possibly in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid legal attention, possibly for other reasons - the creators never showed any of the other family members. So, seeing them here is definitely a plus. The actors all do a pretty good job making the characters recognizable while still putting their own little spins on their mannerisms.

...

The song ends, and the parents stop making out and finally acknowledge that their daughter has been staring that whole time. They try to get her to stop being so bitter about their recent decision to enroll her at Nevermore Academy, the boarding school they're currently en route to. She refuses to speak to them. They gush at her about how Nevermore will be perfect for her; it's where they themselves went, and where they met. People there will understand her; maybe she'll even make a few friends.

Well, we've turned a full 180 from the 1964 series. There was an occasional subplot back then about Gomez and Morticia being worried about Wednesday acting too social and making too many friends at school. Heh.

Wednsday just keeps being mad and snarky. Morticia's patience wears thin, and she reminds Wednesday that they aren't the ones who got her expelled from her last school, or any of the previous ones. It was all they could do to pull strings and spend bribes to protect Wednesday from attempted murder charges after the piranha incident. Wednesday is still disgusted by the notion of going to her parents' school, and suspects that they were just waiting for an excuse, but at the same time she does have to admit that carrying an attempted murder conviction as a mark of incompetence for the rest of her life might have been the worse option.

This point of tension between Wednsday and her parents is...new. Sort of. This version of it is pretty new. This could go somewhere very interesting, or very boring.

Also, this is apparently a high school aged Wednesday going to a boarding school then, not a college aged one going to, well, college. That context does make this premise quite a bit different from the "Adult Wednesday Addams" one, and makes me less unkindly predisposed toward it. It also means that this is a decidedly TEENAGED Wednesday rather than an adult one, which definitely fits her portrayal thus far. I'm not sure if I like this take on teen Wednesday yet, but I'm at least beginning to understand the logic behind it.

Their hearse continues up the road, and another car coming the other way pulls over and lets a hitchhiker off. The driver, who looks and sounds exactly like an extra from an especially New England-y Stephen King movie, asks the hitchhiker if he's really sure he wants to get off so close to Nevermore. The hitchhiker, who looks and sounds exactly like an extra from this, assures her that he's totally fine with the Nevermore crowd. In fact, he had a counsellor at the summer camp he used to go to who was a werewolf, and they got on just fine. Nevermore is a werewolf school I guess, or at least one with a significant werewolf community among its student body. The driver stares at him in mixed suspicion, fear, and disbelief, and tells him that no, werewolves are dangerous, everyone knows that. He remains unswayed, though, and gets out and walks away through the misty forest.

Let me guess, either a teacher, a monsterfucker who likes 'em young, or both.

In the woods, he sits down and starts helping himself to something in a thermos. There's ominous, Stephen King movie-y cinematography. Then something comes bounding out of the mist in a POV shot and tears him apart with its claws.

Heh, looks like I'll never know if my guess was right lol.

Werewolves being a known quantity in the world that everyone is familiar with and takes seriously is definitely a surprise to me. Combined with the way that Wednesdays new psychic powers are being framed, it kind of feels like this world fits a different genre from the one the Addams family usually inhabits. Hmm. I'll have to see more before I can say more.

Anyway. Return to the Addams' hearse as it pulls into the forecourt of Goth Hogwarts. It looks pretty much how you'd expect.

They have a chat with Nevermore's principle before bringing the reluctant Wednesday to her dorm. In keeping with Wednesday's greenseer powers, the principle is Brienne of Tarth.

As an icebreaker, Brienne asks if Wednesday was named after the day she was born, and is told that no, she was born on Friday the 13th. Morticia then very unnecessarily cuts in and says she named her daughter after her favorite children's poem, and quotes the "Wednesday's child" line from the nursery rhyme.

The gag about Wednesday not being born on a Wednesday is an old one. Morticia actually going meta and explaining the out-of-universe naming process for her, though, is...just kind of cringey.

It turns out that Brienne was Morticia's old roommate when they were students here themselves. Wednesday is disgusted even more than she already was. When her long history of expulsions is mentioned, Wednesday starts making boasts and threats about how no school is strong enough to contain her and that she expects this one to be no different.

Hmm. This Wednesday definitely feels more poser-y than other incarnations. Deliberate snark. Idle boasts and threats that she can't readily substantiate. She actually IS a dangerous monster, as we saw with the piranhas, but she also seems insecure about how dangerous and monstrous she's managing to be. Like she's playing a character and not very confident in her performance. Definitely a different take than I'd have expected.

She's told she'll be staying in Ophelia Hall, and she'll be able to keep getting her court-ordered therapy sessions with a doctor at a nearby town. Wednesday muses on the name Ophelia. The character from Hamlet who was driven insane by her own family. Pretty on-the-nose there, Wednesday. Well, next thing we know, Gomez and Morticia are helping her move into her dorm room, where Brienne introduces her to her roommate, a perky, energetic girl named Enid. After Enid tries to hug Wednesday and is lucky to just be dodged instead of scratched open, the parents warn her about Wednesday's allergy to bright colours (they make the skin and muscle tissue slough off of her body), and Brienne bids her to give Wednesday a tour.

Okay. Let's see if this place actually is any better at dealing with Wednesday than normal society is. The show is setting Enid up as exactly the kind of fake-happy painfully square normie who typically gets humbled (if not something worse than just that) in Addams Family media, but given the kind of school this is I'm pretty sure that's a trick.

The walking tour starts with Enid's summary of school history, which Wednesday brushes off with teenage hipster snark before explaining that she doesn't intend to stay here long enough for it to be relevant to her.

When asked why, Wednesday explains that her parents have been trying to twist her arm into transferring here from the moment she was old enough, and that they're determined to make sure she grows up to be a copy of themselves. Their own school. Her mother's old roommate in charge, and framed photos of her mother as a teenager winning fencing tournaments on the common room wall. She refuses to let them do this to her.

...

Okay now. This? In the previous shows' context, this is actually interesting.

While this series is keeping Wednesday as the older sibling a la the movies and onward, I think it might still be drawing on some of the 1964 aspects of her childhood character. Back then, Wednesday's main point of friction with her family was in being too normal, too desirous of friendships with non-weirdoes, for their liking. Maybe this series is positing that at least some of her gloom and melancholy might not just be her "thing," but also (at least in part) genuine loneliness and frustration. From childhood onward.

So, if she was prevented from being her more normal-ish self as a child, and has been resenting her parents for that ever since...yeah, this makes sense. She leans into the family aesthetic, but she's not happy and bubbly about it like they are, and unlike them she decides to play it all the way to the hilt and be an ACTUAL monster instead of just looking and emoting like one. "If that's what they want, fine, that's exactly what they're going to get." As she moves into her teens, she gets more stubborn, more vicious, escalating further and further in response to their attempts at pulling her back the other way now.

In other words, this version of Wednesday is a human being. Not a walking gag-dispenser like she (and, frankly, most of the other characters) usually were in the past.

Alright. I like this concept. I like the character arc it suggests for the road ahead. However, I'm not sure if "The Addams Family" was the right soil to plant this in. I mean, they literally were a gag-a-week one panel comic to begin with. The adaptations gave them a bit more suggestions of having their own inner worlds, but really not that much. For the most part, the point of the Addams Family has always been to watch and laugh as unsuspecting normies drive themselves insane trying to interact with these incomprehensible cartoon character people. That's also why consistency was never an important factor in previous series; the writers could never let things get too predictable, too comprehensible, too relatable, because then they'd stop being the Addams Family.

"Wednesday" is doing the exact opposite. What if there were people with persistent human feelings and desires under all the camp-vampire nonsense? The word "deconstruction" is badly overused, but I think it might actually be an apt description of this.

Now. Does "The Addams Family" benefit from that kind of deconstruction, and does this story do itself any favors by using TAF as a base? I'm not sure. I'm willing to be sold on it, but it'll take some selling.

...

Eventually, Enid drops the awkward smiley act and tells Wednesday that her scary psycho goth chick schtick doesn't impress her, and won't impress anyone else here either. I'm interested to see what happens next if that turns out to actually be the case. Wednesday keeps snarking, but doesn't push back too hard for now. They go out onto the quad (Wednesday protests that this "quad" is a pentagon. Damn she really is just a teenaged dumbass in this, isn't she) and Enid points out the major social cliques. A group of gloomy looking kids in mirrored shades and a thick layer of sunblock are the vampires, colloquially known as "fangs." At the picnic table after theirs are the werewolves, or "furs." By the fountain in the middle of the lawn are the "scales," or sirens. Lastly, Enid points out the "stones," who smoke a lot of weed.

Okay show, that one got me good.

As Enid starts babbling about some local gossip, which she apparently deals in on a semi-professional basis, a stoner by the name of Ajax comes over and asks her if she met that psychotic murderer roommate of hers that she mentioned in her blog yet. Enid goes into bubbly smiley dorky mode again, but Wednesday quickly chases him off. And then decides she's had her fill of Enid for now too. I can't really blame Wednesday that much, honestly.

Next scene, the family is departing. Pugsley hugs Wednesday goodbye. Wednesday flinches, and then tells him he's weak and soft and won't survive two months without her. He rolls his eyes and resentfully tells her he loves her too and gets in the car. Pugsley, why are you normal? You're not supposed to be normal. Gomez wishes her goodbye, and assures her that she'll learn to love this place and that he's already overjoyed to see her in a school uniform just like his old one. Oof. At least he doesn't try to hug. Lastly, Morticia tells the others she wants a private word with Wednesday. As soon as the others are out of earshot, Morticia...changes. Her already pale skin seems to go whiter, and her eyes sharper, as she looms to her full height and gives her daughter a really intimidating expression. Whatever escape plans Wednesday might have, Morticia growls, they're going nowhere. All close and distant family members have been alerted. She has nowhere to go. She will find refuge nowhere. So, she'd better stay right here.

Ohoho, well then, Wednesday might just get what I suspect she really wanted all along. If she's still capable of adapting to it.

Also, I just realized that Morticia is Catherine Zeta-Jones. I must have missed her name in the intro. Heh, well, she definitely looks the part.

Trying to close this up on a positive note, Morticia pulls out a little silver-and-obsidian amulet thingy she had made for her. It's got a reversible "M/W" symbol, and the obsidian is from a real Aztec sacrificial dagger.

That last detail is the kind of thing Wednesday would normally be all over, but it's not enough to make up for the rest (even if she has to visibly hold herself back from looking appreciative at its mention). Wednesday still replies with barbs and refusals, and Morticia still doesn't listen when Wednsday tells her that she's not going to become her. She's not going to be a witch. She's not going to be a wife. She's not going to be a mother. Morticia just tells her that she's sure this place will fix her, and leaves her a crystal ball they can call her on.

...

Okay, it's time to delve into the genre issue I mentioned earlier. I was going to do this during the campus pentaquad scene, but the stoner joke distracted me.

Historically, the Addams Family are sort of magical. Sometimes. Morticia being a literal witch who can do real magic is a thing in some episodes, but completely absent from others where it should be relevant. They all have physics and biology defying feats, some more consistently than others. Supernatural creatures randomly turn up from time to time. Their family pet is a severed hand. But, at the same time, it was never quite urban fantasy either. These things pretty much happened when they were funny and didn't exist the rest of the time.

As far as worldbuilding goes, it wasn't not totally undefined, but still pretty inchoate. Their world is pretty much exactly like our own, except for these scattered lineages of ambiguously supernatural weirdoes (most of the ones we see are ones the Addamses have intermarried with). These ambiguously supernatural weirdos all seemed to recognize themselves as one type of being and normal humans as another. And, that was pretty much it. The world didn't seem to have been changed by the existence of these creatures. None of the normal people who the Addamses or similar families meet ever seem to have seen or heard of their kind before (even though they never make even the slightest attempts at secrecy). There certainly wasn't a codified urban fantasy supernatural underworld with distinct cultures of werewolves, vampires, witches, potheads, etc. It pretty much all worked on dream logic and rule of funny.

The point I'm trying to get to is that this show feels like a crossover. Addams Family + some Twilight-adjacent YA fantasy thing. "What if Wednesday went to the fairy school from that unwatchable Winx Saga live action show?" Something like that. It's actually a major enough change to the assumptions and conventions that the old Addams' Family stuff works on that I'm surprised this aspect didn't get talked about more. I almost want to say that the title of the show is misleading, and it should be something like "Wednesday's World of Darkness" or "Wednesday In Magic School" or "Wednesday Vs. Predator" or the like.

I guess you could interpret this as the writers doing the same thing to the setting as they're doing with the characters. Pinning the nonsense down and fleshing it out into something consistent. Once again, I'm not sure if this was something that needed to be done, but I also am not hating it outright like I'd have expected myself too if I'd heard about it going in.

...

Wednesday tells Morticia she doesn't have a heart, and Morticia smiles and acts like this is finally some proper family affection. The show seems to be trying to have it both ways with the weirdos' manners working on "opposite day" logic, and it's hard to keep up with. Anyway, the hearse finally drives away, with Morticia's expression and posture as she sits beside Gomez looking much more like her daughter's than usual. Switching it on and off just like someone else we recently met, almost like Enid is a heavyhanded analogue to Morticia's teenaged self as Wednesday imagines it. Almost. As they drive, Gomez pulls a lever and opens a trap door in the floor of the vehicle, releasing their extra secret bit of assurance that they can keep track of Wednesday and letting it scuttle back toward the school behind them.

Heh, well, he's a fan favorite. They pretty much had to keep him in the show even with the rest of the family offscreen.

Jump back out to the Stephen King forest, late afternoon. That Lonely Island extra's body has been found by the local sheriff's department, torn apart with pieces thrown all around the clearing. Sheriff Shawshank tells Deputy Greenmile that that makes the third victim in the last ten days. Deputy Greenmile nods grimly. He knows that it's that damned monster school. Just like he knew it the last time something like this happened. He just could never prove it.

For now, he tells her to tell the media that "that bear" came back. There's this bear that sometimes wanders through the area and leaves a trail of bodies. They'll manage to catch it one of these days.

So, Sheriff Shawshank. Recurring antivillain? Recurring antivillain. This story is getting busier and busier.

That evening, Enid returns to the room she shares with Wednesday to find her removing the stained panels from her half of the rose window, being careful not to get any bright colour on herself. Enid freaks out at her, despite knowing about said allergy, and it almost comes to blows before she backs down.

This only lasts about a minute, though. Wednesday gets out her typewriter to work on the novel she's apparently writing, and - after the two of them exchange some more insults and threats - Enid puts on loud music and starts dancing to it by herself over on her side of the room while Wednesday tries to write. This time, Wednesday is the one who threatens violence. And, this time, Enid demonstrates that she's not incapable when it comes to such matters.

She's some kind of cat-person, it seems. Wednesday mostly keeps her icy composure, but her face registers just a split second of surprise and second thoughts when the claws first extend. Maybe this place is - if not quite a match for her in the long run - at least a worthy opponent.

Things may or may not have ended in bloodshed here, as the fight is interrupted by the door opening. It's the dorm mother, a somewhat older woman named Miss Thornhill, and the girls manage to hide the signs of an imminent altercation before she can see it.

And man, this exchange:


Miss Thornhill: "I'm sure Enid has been giving you the full Nevermore welcome?"

Wednesday: "She's been smothering me with hospitality. I plan to return the gesture. In her sleep."


I'm almost in awe. How can you sic a school of hungry piranhas on your classmates and still be such a poser? That's totally what this is. If Wednesday was actually going to kill Enid in her sleep, she sure as hell wouldn't be letting her know about it, much less the school authorities.

The question it leaves one with, of course, is that if Wednesday is willing to sic a school of hungry piranhas on her classmates, why is she not also willing to smother Enid in her sleep instead of just emptily threatening to?

...

This is pretty much the same problem the 90's series had when it tried to model its Wednesday after the movie version. You're stuck in a situation where she should have killed everyone around her by now, but the story can't allow that, so she's reduced to empty bluster much of the time. It's much easier to make this work in a movie where you totally CAN just have her go on a murder spree without having to sweep it under the rug each time.

...

Miss Thornhill takes the murder threat in stride (something you have to learn to do when keeping a school full of werewolves and vampires under control, I suppose) and coolly warns Wednesday that killing other students is strictly against the rules. Just like letting boys into the women's dorm, loud music at night, and going into the nearby town without express permission. Enid already knows all this, of course.

There's also a little discussion of how the school's PR is bad enough as it is, so if they ARE granted town-visiting privileges it is very important for them to not do anything criminal. Or even disruptive. Anything that can be used to push harmful stereotypes about werewolves, stoners, etc WILL be, so giving the normies extra ammunition is strongly frowned upon.

Well, I guess that's going to be Wednesday's first attempt at getting herself kicked out. Wonder how it'll go wrong for her?

...probably by her stirring up trouble in town at the exact wrong place and time and implicating herself in the bear murders. Yeah, that seems to be what this is all pointing to. I'm not sure if those stakes would really be enough, though. It's not like being known as a murderer would especially bother her.

The next morning, we look at the fencing club doing their drills, presumably in the same gymnasium that Morticia once ruled. Wednsday quietly stalks in, looking more displeased than usual. Behind some benches, Thing surreptitiously creeps after her.

Wednesday happens to see the current team captain, a comically over-the-top bully named Bianca, being mean to one of her younger teammates. After taking a moment to mentally superimpose her own mother onto the girl who currently holds her old extracurricular club position, Wednesday steps forward, tells her that she's just proven herself unworthy of the Rose Bride, and challenges her for marriage rights. Bianca makes some comically over-the-top bully taunts and insults, and then accepts.

Wednesday has her own special pitch black fencing gear, because of course she does.

The battle is fierce and the music dramatic from the start, and they only grow moreso over the following minute. It's a pretty intense, well-choreographed fight. Wednesday gets the first hit in, which Bianca snidely attributes to beginner's luck. Bianca gets the second. For the third and final point, Wednesday issues a further challenge; no helmets. No tips. They fight to the first blood.

Bianca accepts.

The fight gets even more visually impressive, although now that the helmets are off you can totally see the girls' proportions change when the stunt doubles are in play. Heh, oh well. I'm predicting that Wednesday loses this battle, let's see. Yup! She gives Bianca a good fight, but in the end Bianca is the one making comments about how now Wednesday finally has some colour on her.

Wednesday's expressions here are perfect. Her composure finally, actually broke. Stunned disbelief crosses her face, followed by dismay and slowly mounting dread. She lost. She got into a fight using sharp objects, and...lost.

That doesn't happen. That never happens. That isn't supposed to happen.

...

Heh, well, you know Wednesday, maybe if you're so determined to not be like your mother you shouldn't have gotten invested in showing off a skill you must have learned from her, in the same place where she learned it. The fact that she even got into this duel at all shows how much of her mother is in her, regardless of how she feels about it.

...

Cut to the nurse's office. Wednesday is still in shock, though it's a muted, controlled kind of shock now. There's a boy also in there who tries, very very awkwardly, to befriend and/or flirt with her, which she promptly shuts down. When asked how she got that cut, she murmurs that no good deed goes unpunished. Lol, am I supposed to believe that she actually did that for the rose bride boy instead of displaced spite for her mother? I hope not, because I don't. As she leaves, the awkward guy mumbles about being "outcasts in a school for outcasts."

I don't think "outcast" is really the right word, given that these creatures all come from extended families and communities of others like them. And it's not like any of them seem to care what normies think of them, unless they're all just hiding it in a weird way like Wednesday is implied to be.

Wednesday leaves as soon as she can get away with it, running out into the rain outside to fume by herself. Thing is still sneaking after her. Outside, she stands under one of the dismal grey walls and...a gargoyle randomly falls on her. She's saved at the last moment by Anthy Himemiya body-slamming her out of the way, and even then she gets knocked out when her head hits the pavement.

When she wakes up, she's back in the nurse's office. This time with Anthy standing over her and pressing a cold pack to the swelling.

Is it supposed to be implied that Thing pushed the gargoyle over on her, somehow calculating that this would be the outcome? The framing of the preceding Thing shots sort of implies it, but that feels completely wrong. On multiple levels. Hopefully it's not that.

Anyway, apparently Anthy and Wednesday already knew each other. They're distant relatives, through a shared grandmother or something like that, though they haven't seen each other since they were children. She didn't even recognize him until he tells her.

She accused him of trying to be chivalrous by saving her, and reminds him that chivalry is a tool of the patriarchy used to control women. I can't decide if that sounds really right or really wrong coming out of Wednesday Addams' mouth. I'm leaning toward wrong, but I'm not sure. He coolly informs her that, no, if she needs a good reason for him to have helped her it's because when they were at that grandmother's funeral as children she stopped him from being dumped in the incinerator in a hide-and-seek mishap. She apparently thought the sounds coming from inside the coffin were the grandmother returning as some type of undead when she stopped the conveyor belt and wanted to get a better look, but still, she did save him, so now they're even. Her swordfighting Bianca is mostly irrelevant either way.

Heh. Maybe good deeds do get rewarded every once in a while.

Anyway, that's pretty much the half hour mark, and it feels like a partial capstone on some of the themes touched on thus far, so I'll call it quits on "Wednesday" here.


It's definitely an experiment. Some aspects of it feel very insipid (the YA fantasy monster school doesn't need to be parodied or challenged, it needs to be taken out back and shot), but the combination of elements does have a degree of novelty. So, I won't fault the creators for trying something different, even if it has some real warts.

I think the thing that felt most dissonant to me was that the other Nevermore students are all pretty much normal. Or at least, YA fantasy character normal. They aren't the same KIND of weird as the Addamses and the other families like them that have been seen over the years. The roommate is just the standard petty high school gossip archetype, just a catgirl. The staff are pretty much normal posh private school staff archetypes, just extra numb to monsters and weirdness. They don't feel like part of the same underground nega-society as the Addams family, even when we're told that Morticia and Brienne are ex-roommates. This contributes to it feeling like some kind of fanfic crossover.

But hey, it definitely has somewhere it's trying to go. And there are plenty of encouraging signs about where that somewhere might be.


Adult Wednesday Addams (S1E1-3)

Anyway, it's time to have a look at the indie alternative now. Adult Wednesday Addams, written by and starring one Melissa Hunter. There's no background or introduction for this. The premise is self explanatory; Wednesday is in her late teens or early twenties now, and she's left home to get book learning and join the workforce. These skits are only 2-3 minutes apiece, so I'll just embed them here for you to watch before reading my reviews instead of my usual liveblog format.

The musical jingle after the stinger is great, first of all. Obviously not as impressive as the prolonged, professionally produced musical sequence from "Wednesday's" OP, but for a mere nine notes and handful of background beats it really gets a lot done.

The "my parents were horrible monsters, and of course I appreciate that" is classic Addams Family dialogue, of course. The grandmother necromancy was fine, if a bit predictable. The real standouts as far as writing goes were the two recurring gags with Wednesday's bag-pet (that she ruthlessly beats to death without blinking as soon as it proves inconvenient ), and the impossibly oblivious roommate playing off of the "paranoid" purple-hatter.

Where this skit comes together the most and the least is in the acting. Miss Oblivious' performance was understated, but adequate. Purplehat...feels like she's reacting just realistically enough to the fucked up things going on for it to seem weird that she's not freaking out more. Like, her fearful expressions calm down again much too quickly until Wednesday does the next thing. She keeps chewing her snacks even while supposedly in wide-eyed terror of the undead grandmother. Etc. It's in a weird uncanny valley spot where she's either underacting a normal person's fully aware reactions, or overacting a glazy-eyed stoner whose barely processing things. But, oh man. The real draw. The absolute main draw. Hunter's Wednesday Addams isn't just more convincing than the one in the Netflix show; it's arguably more convincing than the one from the movies, even though that's clearly the version of her that this is supposed to be. The dead-eyed expression. The almost electrical monotone that still shows intensity, rage, and other almost exclusively negative emotions. She's amazing at this.

Compared to the experimental Netflix series, this first skit is just plain old true-to-form TAF giggles. Here's the unearthly maybe-human-maybe-inhuman weirdo. Here's the bedevilled normies trying to wrap their minds around her, or in this case being too oblivious to even attempt.

As a final note, I feel like this Wednesday wouldn't bother putting piranhas in the pool, instead escalating straight to sharks.

Next skit.

I think the "fire" joke in the teaser really highlights what makes this Wednesday fundamentally different from the Netflix one. And, really, the core difference in what each series is doing in general.

Netflix's Wednesday is, while still Wednesday, also a snarky, surly teenager who isn't nearly as smart or self-aware as she thinks she is. If she answered the interviewer's pair of questions like that, even if she was telling the truth (which wouldn't be guaranteed), she'd be doing so for the satisfaction of seeing the woman freak out. The Youtube Wednesday absolutely 100% means every single fucked up thing she says. There's no performance. No deliberate attempts at being edgy. She's the complete polar opposite of "snarky." Perhaps most importantly, she doesn't seem to understand why telling the truth about the arson might be bad for her employment prospects. She's from another reality with incomprehensible rules, and the absurdity of that is the entire point.

The rest of the skit...mmm...I think it's weaker than the first one, mostly due to it being a dialogue. The interviewer's actress does a decent enough job with what she's been given, but the length and "out there-ness" of the script causes the same problem we saw with Purplehat. She's visibly getting more uncomfortable throughout most of the interview, and starts seeming like she's hurrying through the interview procedure so she can just get rid of Wednesday, but it's not nearly enough discomfort and desperation. Without anyone else for her to bounce off of though, the script doesn't allow her to do what it seems like she *would* do and just end the interview immediately and/or flee the room. So, it falls into that same uncanney valley of either too much or too little of a reaction.

To be fair, this is an issue that plagued the official Addams Family shows and movies as well, to varying degrees.

The skit does redeem itself with the roleplay phone call that makes up its second half. This is also where the interviewer's actress really comes into her own, as she communicates - purely through facial expressions - that this roleplay is in fact a recreation of a real call she's had to deal with, and that Wednesday's handling of it is something she only wishes she could have pulled off at the time. For such a long, slow-build gag, it was paced and executed almost perfectly, and the credit goes to both actresses in pretty much equal proportion.

One more to close this out.

The teaser joke was weak this time. "Haha, she always wears the same outfit." Too many shows have done this too many times, I can't laugh at it any more unless there's some kind of twist.

And, really, that's the tone that this one follows. A lot of very predictable jokes, most of them not that clever to begin with. Wednesday's date being too busy with his phone to pay attention to what she's saying and doing is an amusing solution to the underreaction problem, but it's just not enough. Some of the gags were good. "Weakness." "I don't take my own life on the first date." Hunter's expressions really sold that second one, when she leaned in and put her hands together and so forth.

Did she actually think he wanted to autoerotically slit his wrists in the bathroom, after failing to find a partner to do it with? Or was she basically telling him "go kill yourself, you suck" in simultaneously more and less explicit language? This is an example of something where Netflix Wednesday would definitely have meant the latter, but with this version of her it's much more ambiguous. Anyway, the blood diamond thing was good.


So. Who does it better? Well, that depends on what "it" is, exactly.

"Adult Wednesday Addams" is exactly what it says on the tin. Classic Addams Family style comedy sketches, featuring 'movie Wednesday, but older.' The "Wednesday" series has different goals, different inspirations, and mostly a different type of draw. The former has the titular character as a plot device or a prop. The latter has her as an actual protagonist.

The thing is, by being so much more ambitious and experimental, "Wednesday" has much further to fall. I don't think it did fall in the thirty minutes I watched, but it's standing pretty precariously, with a lot of things not counterbalancing each other the way they need to. Still, I do have to respect that it defies expectations and tries something new with the franchise. If it fails, it'll be the earnest, admirable kind of failure.

I think AWA is better for what it is and what it's trying to be, but it sets its sights so low and plays things so close to the old material - even if it executes it all really, really well - that it feels wrong to call it the winner. I was fully expecting to end this review with a blistering takedown of a cynical committee-written Netflix show in the face of more earnest, amateur enthusiasm from the Youtube skits, but no. They're both worth watching, and also - in stark contrast to my predictions - too different from each other to really directly compare.


They really did Pugsley dirty, though. What even was up with that?