Wednesday Season 2: Thank God It’s (Finally) Friday

Wednesday Season 2 (Part 1) is not the most satisfying watch, especially because the belated comeback feels like a cash-grabbing dash to reproduce more rather than course-correcting a greedy formula.

Rahul+Desai

Aug 08, 2025

Still from Wednesday Season 2.

WEDNESDAY SEASON 2 (Part 1: the first four episodes) arrives nearly three years after the goth-deadpan teenager and her morbid adventures became the most watched Netflix show of all time. Immortalised (not a term these characters are fond of) by actress Jenna Ortega, a death-coded Wednesday Addams saved her unmerry school of outcasts, the Nevermore Academy, by cracking a murder mystery and discovering that the boy she liked is a serial-killing monster puppeted by a psychopathic botany teacher. Season 2 takes an interesting route, more or less writing the new-age popularity of the series into its storyline. It opens with a Sixth-Sense-weds-Unbreakable tribute — extra marks for that — to show that Wednesday has learnt to control her psychic powers. She returns to Nevermore for the Fall semester. Except now she’s famous — and it annoys the hell out of her. Everyone knows her, and as an aspiring writer, it gets on her numbed nerves.

READ | Before you begin watching season 2, recall what all happened in Wednesday Season 1

My problem with the first season was the dissonance between the concept of the Addams Family and the genre identity chosen by the Tim Burton-tinged series. Given the family’s playful relationship with death, gore and pain, it felt strange to buy into the chaos of Wednesday playing a super-sleuth and, you know, saving people. What is at stake, exactly? Her twisted heritage kind of reduces the meaning of danger; it’s a toy for them, and suddenly, we are supposed to care about the threat of characters dying. One of the early set pieces here again shows Wednesday and her brother casually causing a deadly road accident from their car, with the parents cackling away at their little contest. But I’m getting over this suspension of disbelief issue in Season 2, slowly and steadily. Perhaps the point is that the Addams girl who trivialises darkness is not all that immune to the emotions of losing a loved one or two. Or perhaps her sociopathic heroism is shaped by how reluctant she is to go against her own essence.

More of Tim Burton's classics here

Whatever the case, this is no longer the main hindrance to my viewing experience. But something else is. I’m not a hater (fully), but the Netflixication of Tim Burton’s old-school imagination is now too jarring to ignore. The season starts off fine, with a nice meta idea, but then it inevitably believes that more plot means more eyeballs. Before we know it, Wednesday’s world gets crowded and packed with red herrings, parallel tracks, backstories, mysterious side characters, forced conflicts, cartoonish diversions, and an algorithmic avalanche of twists and punchlines. I’ve never understood why the streaming platform tries to go the there’s-something-for-everyone way when they have such a wicked core of themes and literary puns. Keeping it simple would do wonders for shows that flaunt their willingness to entertain and diversify.

There’s too much going on at any given moment. Wednesday gets a vision of her best friend and roommate Enid (Emma Myers) being killed, so she sets out on a stop-and-start mission to stop it from happening. Simultaneously, there’s a stalker who steals her book and does weird things to get her attention. Simultaneously, a spate of grisly murders — eyes gouged out, hollowed heads — rocks the town of Jericho; a sinister one-eyed crow is seen. Simultaneously, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley inadvertently revives a brain-eating corpse and it goes on a zombie rampage. Simultaneously, the tension between Wednesday and mom Morticia reaches a head. Simultaneously, shady things unfold at the Willow Hill asylum, where Wednesday’s loony enemies are held, and the employees aren’t as innocent as they seem. Simultaneously, a rival in school has a mother who squats at a local hotel. Simultaneously, a camp features an obstacle course competition between a normie school and Nevermore’s freaks. Simultaneously, Thing feels ignored after everyone forgets his birthday. Simultaneously, I’m losing my mind.

Somehow, these threads are supposed to be loosely connected. Even if they are, there is no excuse for the series to sprout into so many different directions to pad up a narrative that often forgets about its protagonist. 4 episodes in, one is tempted to give the season the benefit of the doubt; maybe it’ll all add up. But this is a more fundamental illness. The writing doesn’t trust the filmmaking to be kooky enough, and the filmmaking doesn’t trust the writing to be coherent enough. What we get is a hotchpotch of arcs jostling for attention, feeding off each other like bloodthirsty ghouls out to feast on every demographic possible. I get the hype behind Jenna Ortega’s meme-core turn, but now I’m confused about whether the acting is inert or the character is. She fuses the two, yes, but even the inertia feels performative. Sometimes she’s giving Vicki in Small Wonder (see what I did there? I used “giving” in perfect context), and sometimes she’s just action-hero blank.

The better parts of the mess feature instrumental needle drops that serve as montage framing devices. The unplugged versions of classics ranging from 'Losing My Religion' to 'Zombie' work well as a gravity-injecting tool for a story that struggles to manufacture any. But there are also instances where Wednesday’s episode-ending voiceovers give Desperate Housewives (see again?), which was at least the sort of quasi-reality television that was self-aware enough to satirise its own reality. All the season needed to do was have a blast with Wednesday’s status as a celebrity, the obsessions of her stalker, and how her deliriously dysfunctional family panics at the prospect of functionality. Instead, it plays out like a Frankenstein Monster composed of rotting genre fluidity and tonal shapelessness. In other words, Wednesday Season 2 (Part 1) is not the most satisfying watch, especially because the belated comeback feels like a cash-grabbing dash to reproduce more rather than course-correcting a greedy formula. I can’t even appreciate Burton’s hand-drawn era antiquity and goof-horror anymore. Not even Lady Gaga’s imminent arrival can change the course of this franchise. Maybe it’s no surprise that the protagonist is named after the most middling day of the week. It’s Thursday night as I write this, and all I think of is: only a few hours to TGIF.

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