Wednesday (Two Seasons, 16 Episodes – Netflix – 2022 to Present)
The Addams Family are becoming an increasingly popular touchstone in popular culture and the latest incarnation, Netflix's Wednesday, continues to expand on America's favorite spooky family. Sorry Munsters, but you'll always be number two in our hearts.
Starting as a series of cartoons in the 1930s New Yorker the macabre family rose to fame with a black and white sitcom in the 1960s, rose to dizzying heights with a pair of cult-classic movies in the 1990s and were kept alive in the interim via a beloved pinball game and a variety of cartoons and TV revivals that I never watched.
The current version focuses on Wednesday, the Addams daughter whose portrayal by Christina Ricci in the 1990s probably kept the Goth subculture going another decade. Filling in for Ricci is Jenna Ortega, a veteran of both the Scream franchise and The Disney Channel. You can choose what's more impressive, the fact that she hasn't fallen prey to the Disney Channel curse, that she can convincingly portray a teenager at the age of 20 or that she's a worthy successor to Ricci.
Dour, snarky, and above-it-all, this version of Wednesday is sent off to Nevermore, a boarding school for "Outcasts" or Cryptid-Americans like werewolves, gorgons, sirens and presumably the Addams Family. Fortunately the early efforts of sorting everyone into neat categories seems to have been dropped in favor of a supernatural grab-bag of Outcasts. As opposed to Normies aka ordinary people, muggles, mundanes, baselines, saps, flatscans, rubes or whatever reverse-fantasy racism term you prefer.
When you have a boarding school? Mysteries and love-triangles must follow and while there were plenty of hidden doorways, secret societies, riddles and puzzles in the first season they all kind of got lost in an effort to copy the "mystery box" format created by Lost. There was always a new mystery with supporting characters emerging each episode. Unlike Lost the old mysteries were neatly explained, but the leftover characters and red herrings did tend to pile up.
This continued into season two where they decided they needed to prune things back. Deceased characters were brought back as ghosts, presumably to welcome the red herrings and supporting characters who were ruthlessly killed at the hands of a bevy of killers including a super-intelligent zombie, a murderous psychopathic Hyde and the Alan Parsons Project which I believe was some type of hovercraft.
Suffice to say it's watchable, but with Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville and the underrated Into The Badlands) at the helm it could be more. Even with the subplot pruning there feels like a lot of dead weight and aimless B-plots.
Less so in season two with frequent appearances by Gomez (Luiz Guzman) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta Jones) Addams as boosters of Nevermore Academy to speed things along. They join Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi) with appearances by Billie Piper, Lady Gaga and Christina Ricci herself amongst the surprising star power of the cast. Also Fred Armisen is a delight as Uncle Fester in a more animated performance than I think I've ever seen from him before. If Netflix doesn't give him a Fester's Eleven spinoff focusing on his criminal antics? Straight to jail.
One thing the show isn't nailing is soap opera antics, despite the Smallville credentials of the creators. Wednesday's emotional restraint and disdain for displays of pathetic sentimentality unfortunately reins the rest of the characters in as well. Even when her werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Sinclair, ) is dealing with delayed puberty metaphors, boyfriends, peer group acceptance and cracking Wednesday's shell it's treated as a tedious intrusion on mystery solving.
Which is odd, because they mysteries don't have much depth. There were a few puzzles in the first season that were fun to unravel but those are gone. While Wednesday hunt serial killers during her summer vacation she doesn't show any any of the investigative chops of Veronica Mars, Dale Cooper, or even Dale Gribble. Instead she glowers and bosses others around like a pint-sized police captain from a 1980s buddy cop movie. That's when she's not longing for the return of psychic powers that others warn her are unreliable at best.
Given that Ortega convincingly portrays Wednesday as driven and obsessive you would think she'd be delighted to supplement her absent psychometry with observation, deduction and forensics. The opportunity for gruesome experimentation gags writes itself. Alternatively she could lean into the Dark Academia bookish side of things and drop references to Blackwood, Hopley and Campbell. At the very least she should have a psychic logbook noting her hits and misses. That would be a much more interesting MacGuffin than her unsold and frequently unsecured novel.
There's a lot of potential here, but like Tim Burton who directed a number of episodes it's all surface and no depth. It's frustrating because there are so many missed opportunities. It's watchable, but far from riveting.
So, what RPG system to run this in?
- You'd think that a PbtA version would fit best, MASKs or Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but those systems lean into soap-opera complications and Wednesday fails to hit the mark on those. Her own romances fall flat and those of her classmates rarely impact or interest her.
- Any combat oriented game isn't going to capture it. There are clear tiers of power and stronger always beats weaker. While you would think Wednesday would learn her opponents weaknesses and exploit them? You'd be wrong. She does look stoic and fearless when she's being knocked through a window, but she doesn't equalize a fight by prepping the battlefield with strobe lights, loud speakers, electrified tripwires, or mystical herbs. This isn't any of the Hunter lines from World of Darkness.
- Gumshoe, or it's teen-oriented version Bubblegumshoe would seem to be a natural fit with the emphasis on finding clues, but most of the mysteries of Nevermore seem to have been exhausted in the first season. There's a lot of characters being introduced (and subsequently killed) but finding out their connection to a mystery is usually done offscreen without even the thrill of a Library Use montage featuring microfilm newspaper archives.
So, probably best to ignore the show as written, lean into one of the choices above, or grab anything close enough, plus one of the brainteaser books always on sale at Barnes & Noble, set up a rival Griswold Academy and have fun. Something that Wednesday the show has had trouble doing despite being an overall entertaining watch.
