Stream It Or Skip It?

Wednesday made Jenna Ortega, already a pretty busy young actor, into a superstar, which is probably one of the big reasons why it’s been almost 3 years between the show’s first and second seasons (the writers’ and actors’ strikes didn’t help). But just because she’s now three years older doesn’t mean that her portrayal of the pigtailed, super-dark teen Wednesday Addams has lost any of its funny intensity.

WEDNESDAY SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) tied up in a chair with a gag in her mouth, blood streaming from her eyes. “It was a productive summer,” she says in voice over. “I’m tied up in a serial killer’s basement. Who said nightmares don’t come true?”

The Gist: Wednesday’s summer project was to channel her psychic abilities to catch the Kansas City Scalper, who she’s had an obsession with since she was six. She even did a presentation about him to her first grade class. She flies to Missouri — after leaving most of her weaponry at TSA security — and tracks the killer down. The psychic visions she gets makes her eyes bleed temporarily, a condition that puzzles her. But she gets her man, after making him think he captured her first. Of course, she has the help of her ever-present companion, Thing (Victor Dorobantu).

On the way to Nevermore for the new school year, Wednesday is being joined by her younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez). Their parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), couldn’t be prouder that both their kids are attending their alma mater. But they’re especially proud of Wednesday, who saved the school from a demon attack.

The problem is, the whole school knows about it, and the attention Wednesday gets when she steps on campus is not what she wanted. The new principal, Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi), is reinstating a Founder’s Pyre ceremony that was an Outsider tradition his predecessor dropped, and wants Wednesday to be the student of honor. “I’d rather be burned at the stake,” she tells him.

She also finds out that she has a stalker, who may or may not be related to a murder of killer crows that just pecked a private investigator to death in the woods near the school. The stalker manages to get into her dorm room and take her novel manuscript, that she’s been working on for two years, and hide it in the pyre, which will go up in flames during the ceremony. Of course, she has to deal with all that while fielding relationship drama between Enid (Emma Myers) and Ajax (Georgie Farmer).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Wednesday is a spinoff of The Addams Family series and movies, of course, but the involvement of Tim Burton — he’s an EP and directed the season premiere — also invokes some of his darker work, like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice.

Our Take: Just like in the first season, Wednesday rides on Ortega’s consistency as the morbid and psychic title character. The way she delivers Wednesday’s most menacing lines, ones where she reveals the darkest parts of her coal-like personality, almost always give us the creeps, but often makes us laugh at the same time.

There definitely seems to be a new dynamic at Nevermore, but we’re not sure what Principal Dort’s ulterior motives are. Buscemi is the master of making a peppy personality look creepy as hell, and all of his abilities in that department are on display as Dort. He’s recruiting Morticia to be on the board of the upcoming gala and stay in a house near the school, and he knows that the painting he commissioned of Wednesday and the group that saved the school would earn him her most wrathful reactions, yet he did it anyway, as if to provoke her. He even threatens the scholarship of a new student, a siren named Bianca (Joy Sunday), if she doesn’t help him as a student liaison.

Could he be the stalker? Who knows? It certainly feels like the stalker story could take up most of Season 2’s story real estate, but like Wednesday herself, we’re annoyed at all the side stuff we have to deal with. There’s the Enid/Ajax drama, and then there’s Pugsley not fitting in with anyone there, including his roommate Eugene (Moosa Mostafa); he goes to a skull-like tree that Ajax mentioned to a group of students as part of a ghost story and digs up something fascinating to him. Then there’s the new music director, Miss Capri (Billie Piper), who wants Wednesday to feel the music she plays on the cello and… that’s all we know about her right now.

Are these stories going to be a distraction? We do worry that showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar are throwing too much out there; every time we go away from watching Wednesday darken every door she crosses, we just want to see her back again. But directorial flourishes by Burton, like the stop-action puppetry used to tell the ghost story, are also welcome touches that help keep Wednesday from drifting into the territory of, say, Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, and keeps things appropriately nightmarish. So if we can see more of that kind of thing, even in the b-stories during Season 2, that will make the show more than just about watching Ortega doing her thing.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode, except for the usual heavy PDA between Morticia and Gomez.

Parting Shot: Wednesday gets a massive psychic shock when Enid touches her after the pyre ceremony. Enid and Morticia kneel over the convulsing Wednesday, who is bleeding out of her eyes more than ever.

Sleeper Star: Joonas Suotamo plays Lurch in Season 2, and we’ll single out anyone who plays Lurch, because the whole role is grunting and being a put-upon butler/monster.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Wednesday continues to be a funny, scary delight because of Ortega’s performance and because Burton has gone all in with the nightmarish imagery written by Gough, Millar and the show’s writers.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.