Wednesday

The adults give it proper weight. Gwendoline Christie plays Principal Larissa Weems across season 1. Luis Guzmán and Catherine Zeta-Jones are Gomez and Morticia, and they are perfectly cast. Christina Ricci, the 1990s film Wednesday, turns up as botany teacher Marilyn Thornhill, a piece of casting that is self-aware without being cute about it. Jamie McShane plays Sheriff Galpin. Riki Lindhome is the therapist Dr Kinbott. Victor Dorobantu is the actor inside the gloves playing Thing.

Season 2 widens the frame. Steve Buscemi arrives as new principal Barry Dort. Thandiwe Newton plays a new psychiatrist. Owen Painter, Noah Taylor, and Joonas Suotamo join the staff, and Lady Gaga shows up as the mysterious teacher Rosaline Rotwood.

🧠 What It's Really About

Surface read, it is a YA mystery with a gothic coat of paint. Dig a layer down and Wednesday is doing something older and more specific. This is a show about a girl who has been told her whole life she is too weird and too cold and too morbid, dropped into a school where everyone is weird and cold and morbid, and finding that she still does not fit. The outcast among outcasts.

That is a genuinely useful idea for a teen drama. Teenage identity does not actually resolve by finding your tribe. Sometimes you find your tribe and discover the tribe has its own pecking order you do not want to climb. Wednesday refuses to climb. She keeps her weapon-grade disdain, her cello, and her diary, and slowly a handful of people who can tolerate her push their way in.

What saves Wednesday from being a Hot Topic playlist in TV form is that Ortega plays the character as genuinely alien. Not cool-alien. Actually alien. Like someone who has read about human feelings in a book.

The mystery plotting is sturdy enough to hang the arcs on, without ever becoming the reason you watch. You are here for Wednesday's face when someone says "I love you" to her, and for the micro-horror when Enid hugs her against her will. The moment a boy asks her to a dance and her head tilts two degrees is a full second of television in a way only Ortega's face makes possible.

🎨 Visual Identity

Burton's look carries through even in the episodes he does not direct. The Nevermore campus is ivy and stone and heavy wooden doors, shot like a German fairy tale that would not mind if you wandered off the path and got eaten. Jericho is small-town pilgrim America with just enough neon to feel uncanny. Wednesday's bedroom at the school is split down the middle in the pilot, one side black crepe, the other Enid's unicorn-sticker riot, and the visual joke of that room gets more milage than it has any right to.

The show's signature moment is the dance scene in episode four. Ortega choreographed it herself and set it to The Cramps' 1981 track "Goo Goo Muck". What followed online was not a TV promotional campaign so much as a cultural event. Teenagers on TikTok copied the moves in their kitchens. The song charted four decades after release. Lady Gaga's "Bloody Mary" became a second-wave soundtrack to the same choreography. You can argue Wednesday's cultural footprint outran the actual show, but the scene itself is the sort of thing any series would give a season finale to engineer.

📈 Reception & Legacy

The split on Wednesday was striking. Audiences went feral for it. Critics were a lot more measured. Older prestige-TV writers tended to find it shallow, a teen mystery dressed in Burton's visual mannerisms without much beneath them. Younger reviewers and the general public disagreed, loudly, with streaming numbers to back them up. Ortega's central performance was the one thing every camp agreed on.

Both readings have merit. If you arrive expecting Severance-level thematic depth you will be short-changed. If you arrive wanting a sharply cast boarding-school mystery with a lead actress operating at a level nobody her age has any right to, you will get exactly that. I landed closer to the audience side. It is not trying to be the next great American novel. It is trying to be the thing a fourteen-year-old puts on and then rewinds for the dance scene. On those terms it is a success.

Season 2 inherits the weight of expectation, and the directors rotate more (Angela Robinson, James Marshall, and Paco Cabezas share duties with Burton). Early returns suggest a looser, slightly less Burton-shaped show that is still absolutely Wednesday's.

🏆 Why It Works

Casting first. Netflix got lucky very fast when they found Ortega, because the show is unimaginable without her. Past that, the Addams Family brand is nearly a century old and still reliably weird in a way nothing else in the culture quite is, which gives the writers material no original IP could match. And Burton brought genuine visual authorship to a genre (teen streaming show) that does not usually get any.

The deepest reason is tonal. Wednesday figured out a teen-drama register that most teen dramas miss. The show takes its main character seriously, lets her be difficult and slightly cruel and sometimes wrong without softening her, and trusts the audience to enjoy spending time with her anyway. That is rarer than it sounds. It is why my wife and I both finished season 1 in a single weekend and were annoyed there was nothing left.

Catherine Zeta-Jones

Morticia Addams