This situates the show among the post-“Harry Potter” proliferation of supernatural high school dramas, with the requisite town-versus-gown conflict, here characterized as the normies versus the outcasts. And when Wednesday discovers that people are being killed by a monster in the nearby woods, she goes into girl-detective mode, complete with voice-over narration that recalls “Veronica Mars.”
Amid these various familiar TV structures, the morbidity and sarcasm that have always characterized Wednesday become more of a motif, a running gag, than a defining trait. More fundamentally, her alienation from her schoolmates, teachers and parents becomes something she has to overcome. The through line of “Wednesday” is toward learning the value of teamwork, tolerance and human connection. Perhaps for the first time, an Addams Family story pushes Wednesday toward being more like everyone else.
This will not be what real fans of Charles Addams and his characters are looking for, and “Wednesday” is satisfying only on the level of formulaic teenage romance and mystery. On that basis it’s pretty tolerable, though. Burton’s episodes — the first four — have style and some wit, from an opening shot of Wednesday’s brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), falling out of his locker to the candy-colored beauty of a nighttime carnival scene, which includes a wonderful long shot of Wednesday chasing a schoolmate through the midway beneath a scrim of exploding fireworks. (Burton closes out his episodes with a baroque bit of mayhem, clearly inspired by “Carrie,” that is more excessive than inspired.)
The teenage-redemption themes of “Wednesday” are also a good fit for the 20-year-old Ortega, who broke in as a child actor on the Disney Channel and in CW’s “Jane the Virgin” and has since branched out into slasher films like this year’s “Scream.” She doesn’t do much with Wednesday’s mean-girl punch lines, which is at least partly the fault of the writing — they drop into the script like stones. (“I don’t bury hatchets, I sharpen them.” “Sartre said hell was other people. He was my first crush.”)
She’s good, though, with the side of the character that’s been invented for the show — she puts across this Wednesday’s submerged desire to connect with her effervescent werewolf roommate, Enid (Emma Myers, giving the show’s liveliest, funniest performance), and she gets at the small core of poignancy that’s there among the soap opera machinations and routine scary-creature battles. (Most of the latter come after Burton’s episodes, unfortunately.)
Mike Hale
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