Wednesday (TV Series)

Wednesday is, of course, an adaptation of The Charles Addams cartoons and their other adaptations, particularly the two films with Christina Ricci et al (you can find little and not so little easter eggs scattered throughout the episodes). This is also identifiably a Tim Burton series (you can find easter eggs for his previous work too) but this is more an adaptation like Sweeney Todd than Alice in Wonderland - I think the source is macabre enough he sprinkles his touches throughout rather than twisting it too far. However, it would be fair to say that this show owes as much to the success of Harry Potter, and it’s far less TERF-associated spin-offs, as it does to the original material. In the vast majority of the earlier material we have the family together, by and large. This series sends Wednesday away to boarding school, which is distinctly not Hogwarts in many ways but, equally, could have come from the mind of Tim Burton but probably wouldn’t have been funded like this in a world without Hogwarts.

Is that a bad thing? We don’t spend a lot of time with characters other than Wednesday and Thing. They are there but only occasionally. If your favourite character is Lurch, or you love either the Wednesday-Pugsley or the Morticia-Gomez relationships then you’re out of luck. That, for me, is balanced by the fact that the way we get Wednesday presented is very well done and feels like a fusion of the character from the comics (albeit as a tween rather than a child) and the Christina Ricci interpretation, with a twist of 2022 in there too. That’s down to good writing, directing and acting. I’ve not knowingly seen Jenna Ortega in anything else (although I have actually seen her, in You for example) but she’s brilliant in this role. She keeps an even voice, a calm expression and just delivers the most pitch perfect lines for the character. It’s not a one-hander, and it’s not an out of this world performance like we saw from Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black but she carries the show in a similar way, albeit in a single role, and with equal aplomb. For me to put her in the same sentence as Tatiana Maslany is a mark of just how impressed I was.

There are moments where Wednesday being at school plays near the classic tropes. There’s a school dance for example, and Wednesday goes, complete with rival potential love interests. We have other characters who are there with someone else to make their genuine love interest jealous and more. However, we have enough of the tropes being subverted, Wednesday being Wednesday, that it nearly works. You may be happy with it but I felt they tried to walk a tightrope between the school dance and the subverted Wednesday tropes and, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors (rather like the whole school dance) they couldn’t keep all the balls in the air. It wasn’t terrible but I can’t help feeling it could have been a lot better. I think it’s the only time I felt that about a scene or episode. There are obviously little tweaks to other scenes I could make, but almost nothing that could have been a lot better.

The reason I qualified that to be about scenes is, I think, some combination of the direction, makeup and writing specifically as it relates to Gomez. He’s meant to be overweight but charming; he and Morticia are madly, passionately in love but at some level it’s about love transcending the physical, the connection to the inner person. All very laudable. However, for me, this version of Gomez is pushed too far. He’s become a caricature. He’s obese to the point of monstrous and, for me, he’s lost any semblance of charm. I know the actor from a couple of other things and while I’ve never seen him as a romantic lead, he’s always been warm and charming in various ways. That charm is just absent here, somehow, and that throws the whole relationship out of kilter. In fact, it makes the whole point of the love between Gomez and Morticia fail, although they play their parts in that respect.

In addition, the CGI monster that is the big bad is the final thing that didn’t land for me. Which is odd, because we see a CGI werewolf, complete with transformation, and they are so often a disappointment yet this whole werewolf thing worked pretty well. Why didn’t the other monster not work? They’re clearly capable of doing it but didn’t manage for that one.

While I’ve written extensively about these things in the overall scheme of the show they’re relatively small issues. Even the big bad not quite working. Yes, it’s an important part of the story but there are enough strands to the story that the season doesn’t rely on the appearance of the monster.

While the story doesn’t exclude queer relationships, we have a character with lesbian mums for example, it looks heteronormative at first glance. That said, there are definitely moments between Enid and Wednesday that read like they’re a couple, and there are enough of them that you can easily create a pretty solid ship for the pair. It’s not even subtext really, there are friendzone explanations and there isn’t writing to specifically encourage the shipping to the point it feels like queer baiting but you definitely can read them as a pair. I guess the fact that they’re not canon might make it feel queer bating if you’ve been led to believe it was going to lean into the gay, although see below.

Overall I’m with the masses. Wednesday has been out for a couple of weeks now and is already Netflix's fifth most watched show behind Squid Games, Stranger Things (4 seasons of that) and two shows I don’t remember. It’s the most watched show by a huge margin at the moment, so it could easily climb up the charts over the next couple of weeks. I really enjoyed it. There is some internet fuss that “Wednesday makes the black people the villains.” At the risk of spoilers, there are black people who are less than totally above board and honest, but there are hardly any people who are on the straight and narrow. The huge majority of those crooked people are white, so trying to create a racist dialogue really feels like a stretch. In fact, Wednesday saves the day courtesy of a black character’s help and while there are less than heroic black characters all the big villains are white. It doesn’t stand up to actually watching the show.

Overall, go for it! It’s not deep and meaningful but it’s dark and twisted fun.

Bechdel Test: Pass. While we have a fair number of male characters, the majority of characters are women and while it’s not a single-hander, Jenna Ortega is the undoubted star as well as the title character. She’s not in every scene but the whole story revolves around her. So, roughly 90% of the scenes have Wednesday in them, and any scene where she’s talking to another named woman character you’re getting a chunk of the way through passing the test. Some of these conversations are about men: Marilyn and Wednesday have a conversation about Eugene in his hospital room for example. But lots are about other things, like the headmistress' poor ethics, the problems Enid and Wednesday have sharing a room and so on. Well over half pass the Bechdel Test.

Ko Test: Pass. Ortega is Hispanic in her own words. There are a number of other WOC in prominent roles too, so we have at least two passing in every episode.

Russo Test: I’m saying pass. Overtly this is not clear. Apart from the lesbian mums who are minor bit parts in one or two episodes we don’t see clearly LGBTQIA+ characters. But I’d urge you to look at Wednesday more closely. She is shown as the romantic interest of two male characters but she shows no real interest in them, no understanding of them and their desire and no real reciprocated interest in them. In the first episode she announced she had no interest in romance, marriage and motherhood - some people are saying the love triangle betrayed this but her lack of interest and the way she tries to drive people away seems to maintain it rather than betray it. She’s shown as going on a date with Tyler but from her side it’s shown as really transactional rather than romantic. Tyler is shown as having put a surprising amount of thought into it, and when Wednesday thanks him it seems genuine but platonic. Similarly, later on, Wednesday kisses Tyler. While it’s absolutely her first kiss and they’re always awesome (while real life first kisses are rarely awesome, on TV they usually come with romantic fireworks, Wednesday's kiss is certainly memorable but not for the right reasons) this kiss has all the romance of siblings kissing. While there are other ways to read the character (she’s similarly clueless about her interactions with Enid for example, so it could be autism or very poor social skills) I read her as aro/ace. Subsequent series, and it’s impossible that there won’t be at least one more series, might change (that last hug for example) that and it’s how she presents rather than how we’re given a label for her. So, I’m giving it a pass.