When you think of Netflix’s biggest English-language dramas, you probably imagine matchmaking, monsters or malignant young men. Seasons of “Bridgerton”, “Stranger Things” and “Adolescence” all rank in the platform’s top ten releases, having racked up hundreds of millions of views. But the streamer’s breakout hero is a gloomy girl who has long plaits, psychic visions and a knack for sarcasm.
“Wednesday”, about the eldest child of the Addams family, is a supernatural smash. Viewers spent 1.7bn hours—roughly 200,000 years—watching the show in the three months after its debut in November 2022. According to Parrot Analytics, a data firm, “Wednesday” made $360m in advertising and subscription revenue for Netflix between its release and March of this year: that is $40m more than the first season of “Squid Game”, Netflix’s biggest title in any language, did in an equivalent period. “Wednesday” returns to screens for a second season on August 6th. What explains its otherworldly power?
Part of its appeal is its mix of the ordinary and the eerie. Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) is, in some ways, a typically sullen teenage girl. She bickers with her family, made up of a brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), an eccentric uncle, Fester (Fred Armisen), and her parents, Morticia and Gomez (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, whose hairpiece looks like a flattened chinchilla covered in asphalt).
Wednesday finds most people annoyingly, boringly conformist, and prefers the company of Thing, an ambulatory severed hand. She loathes school—in this case, the Nevermore Academy, which specialises in educating outcasts. Like many of her real-life peers, she enjoys true crime—but, unlike them, she is able to help solve local murders thanks to her premonitions.
The show shares traits with “Stranger Things” in that both follow a group of winsome teenagers investigating strange happenings in a small town. (And both are the scrubbed-up children of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” without the originality or genuine existential dread.) And like “Harry Potter” the school is replete with coloured uniforms and houses filled with unusual characters, from gorgons to werewolves.
But “Wednesday” looks different from those shows thanks to the involvement of Tim Burton, a film-maker famous for wry gothic fantasies such as “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands”. He has helped to produce “Wednesday” and directed half of its episodes. (His longtime musical collaborator, Danny Elfman, has also written some of its unsettling score.) The script is snappy: combined with the quick, tortuous plotting, it provides laughs, jump scares and creepy moments. “Want to take a stab at being social?” Wednesday’s perky room-mate asks her in the first season. “I do like stabbing,” Wednesday retorts.
It has no doubt helped “Wednesday” that its characters have been mainstays of Halloween costumes for decades. The family, nameless to begin with, first appeared in a single-panel cartoon in the New Yorker in 1938. In 1964 a tv executive brought them to the small screen. Charles Addams, their creator, lamented that the family was only “half as evil” as in his comics, yet the show made the Addamses twice as popular—and Addams himself a much wealthier man. Subsequent black-comedy films in the 1990s boosted their fame again.
Addams would be pleased that, over the years, the oddball family has become increasingly macabre, as well as zany and camp. In the first series Gomez staged train crashes with model trains. In the current one, Wednesday punishes the boys who bully Pugsley by releasing hungry piranhas into a swimming pool during water-polo practice.
Yet the Addamses are not popular because they are wicked or weird. (In the current series, they are kinder, better people than the “normies” who hate them.) They have endured across generations because, beneath the idiosyncracies, they are a functional family. If you ignore the severed hand, the household is made up of two parents, two children, an uncle and a grunting servant. Wednesday’s family is both what every teenager fears—cringeworthy—and what they wish for: loving and accepting. Gomez and Morticia are besotted with each other and they dote on their children, who love and torture each other in equal measure, as siblings often do. “Wednesday” is heartening as well as spooky viewing, on any day of the week.
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