‘Wednesday’ Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: “Here We Woe Again”

Coming late to Wednesday is a bit like coming late to the most buzzworthy song of the summer, only to discover the buzzing comes from a lengthy kazoo solo. Created by genre journeymen Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (Smallville, Shanghai Noon), this Addams Family spinoff brought superstar director Tim Burton to the small screen for half its initial run of episodes, while the theme was provided by his longtime collaborator Danny Elfman. Too often, though, there was little distinguishing the resulting work any of the hundreds of Burton/Elfman knockoffs who have followed in their Hot Topic goth sensibility.

Wednesday is bogged down further by its writing. The plot mechanics tend to be direct to a fault — lots of characters announcing what they’re going to do, then doing it, then recapping it, that sort of thing. More importantly, the show seems centered on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Addams Family concept. Barry Sonnenfeld’s influential and still-beloved early-‘90s movies The Addams Family and Addams Family Values were playing with Burton’s aesthetic toys for sure, but they had a nastier, more aggressively nonconformist edge to them, in which this one big happy family gleefully does their own thing to the horror and terror of squares everywhere. 

Inexplicably, Millar and Gough abandon this idea almost entirely and put Wednesday in a sort of Spirit Halloween Hogwarts called Nevermore Academy. Apparently, Wednesday takes place in a world where everyone knows there are millions of vampires and werewolves and psychics and sirens and other freaks out there, instead of just one big weird family full of them. There’s even a posh New England boarding school for these so-called Outcasts, an institution basically identical to any normie school of its kind except some guys have snakes for hair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wednesday Addams does not work as a fish out of water in a school where she’s surrounded by people even weirder than she is. I’m not sure a single one of Wednesday’s sardonic gallows-humor jokes in the entire first season landed as a result. But that doesn’t stop Wednesday from trying, and trying, and trying! 

So why did the series hit so big? The cast, plain and simple. Headlined by overnight sensation Jenna Ortega in the title role, supported by a breakout turn as Wednesday’s chipper werewolf sidekick Enid by Emma Myers, and augmented by a cast that included — let’s face it — certified dimepieces Catherine Zeta-Jones, Christina Ricci, Gwendoline Christie, Joy Sunday, Riki Lindhome, Hunter Doohan, and Percy Hynes White, the show felt more vivacious and charming than it actually was at any given time, just by virtue of how pleasant it was to watch these people act out their haunted-house hijinks. The flatness of any scene involving the badly miscast Luis Guzmán as family patriarch Gomez Addams shows how important the casting was to the overall project; it’s the exception that proves the rule.

Now a lot of these people are back, but fewer than you might think. Filmed several years after the first season (and the cast of “high schoolers” sure looks it), the second season of Wednesday says goodbye to a decent chunk of its winning cast. Ricci, Christie, and Lindhome didn’t make it out of the first season, while White gets written off the show with a couple of lines here in the premiere. (You can google why yourself.) Zeta-Jones seems primed to be a more regular presence this season to compensate, however, and Steve Buscemi joins the faculty as the school’s zany, sinister new principal, so it’s not like the show is unaware it culled itself pretty hard by the end of its first outing.

After a spooky but superfluous cold open in which Wednesday and her disembodied-hand sidekick, Thing, get the better of a doll-fixated serial killer played by Haley Joel Osment, the action resumes for real. It’s the start of a new year at Nevermore, where Wednesday is now treated like a celebrity after saving the school from destruction during Season 1. Meanwhile, her adoring roommate Enid has now fully “wolfed out,” i.e. gone through werewolf puberty. She’s now spending most of her time freshly glammed-up and in the company of wolves, i.e. the various meatheads and airheads who comprise her constantly rough-housing pack.

Wednesday has still more changes to get used to. With the previous principal, Gwendoline Christie’s Hitchcock blonde Larissa Weems, slain during the battle for the school last year, Steve Buscemi’s upbeat Barry Dort steps in. Though his perky demeanor is far from Edgar Allan Poe’s legendary melancholia, Dort’s hair and mustache appear modeled after Nevermore’s literary-legend founder. (I guess Edgar started a New England prep school sometime before drinking himself to death in Baltimore at age 40.)

Dort is more of an Outcast Pride type than his assimilationist predecessor, or at least that’s how it seems for now. He busies himself with restoring many of the school’s old traditions, such as the Founder’s Pyre bonfire night, while banning others, like the Nightshades secret society. And oh, he also blackmails glamorous scholarship student Bianca (Joy Sunday) into using her psychoactive siren song to help raise funds for the school, so he’s clearly not as friendly as he fronts. 

Also new to the faculty is Ms. Capri (Billie Piper), a sultry-voiced music teacher who encourages the cello-playing Wednesday to really let go and feel Prokofiev. Is this teacher going to be the monster of the season, too?

Dort and Capri aren’t the only newcomers to the Nevermore grounds, and Wednesday is no longer the only Addams on campus. Her kid brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), who compared to his stern sister is kind of a non-entity, is entering the school. He’s rooming with Eugene (Moosa Mostafa), the adorably nerdy beekeeper who helped Wednesday save the school; having shot up and thinned out during the ten or twelve years since Season 1 was shot, he’s now too cool to waste much time on Wednesday’s weird kid brother.

Wednesday and Pugsley’s mother Morticia, meanwhile, has been invited by Principal Dort to participate in a fundraising gala or gala fundraiser or whatever. She now lives in the same gardener’s cottage where Christina Ricci’s secret serial-killer character, Marilyn Thornhill, dwelt last season. The pinkness of the place doesn’t agree with her.

There are changes among the townies, too. Deputy Santiago (Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo) has been promoted to sheriff following the events of Season 1. Her predecessor, Sheriff Galpin (Jamie McShane), seems to have lost or left his job after learning his son Tyler (Hunter Doohan) had his dormant Outcast power to transform into a cannibalistic monster called a Hyde awoken and used for evil by Thornhill.

Galpin’s still in town, though, sniffing around a series of Hitchcockian bird attacks that claimed the life of a friend. The ringleader of the murderous flock is a badly scarred bird that seem to be connected to Morticia’s estranged sister Ophelia. Though he’s no longer on the show, Wednesday’s artist love interest Xavier sends her a drawing of the red-faced crow that came to him in a dream as a combination parting gift and warning.

The episode culminates in two Addams Family crises. Puglsey impulsively seizes on a spooky story told to him by his resident advisor, Enid’s one-time gorgon love interest Ajax (Georgie Farmer). He travels out to a haunted stump known as the Skull Tree to test his courage. Instead, his newfound Uncle Fester–style electricity powers revive the dead teen-prodigy inventor buried beneath the tree, whose story is told in a lovely animated sequence done in the Tim Burton/Henry Selick style.

Pugsley’s sister has been hiding a secret. Wednesday’s psychic flashes, in which she catches glimpses of people’s future through contact with them or objects associated with them, are now accompanied by creepy rivulets of black tears. After torching a pep rally held in large part in her own honor, she and Enid touch, and she gets a doozy of a vision: an undead Enid attacking Wednesday in front of her own grave for getting her killed in the first place. Wednesday gushes black tears and has a full-blown seizure, as Enid and Morticia desperately try to revive her.

So here’s the deal. We can go back and forth about the show’s good points and bad points, its surprising strengths and depressing disappointments. We can talk about the way the show’s monster designs actually do recapture the madcap macabre energy of Burton’s incredible run from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Mars Attacks!, or we can talk about how you can practically hear the huffing and puffing to get its creaky goth jokes over the hump. Fine, fine.

But the reason you’re watching Wednesday, whether you adore it or simply need something on in the background while you fold laundry, is the cast. Wednesday and Enid feel as though they were developed for Ortega and Myers specifically; this remains the case for Myers even as Enid has entered a new and more adult, or adult-esque, phase of her life, which is encouraging to see.

The established stars largely come through, too. Catherine Zeta-Jones goes full Vampira in her now red silk–lined black gown, though with Guzmán’s Gomez holding her down it only ever feels like half a performance. As for the newcomer, it feels truly shocking that Steve Buscemi has only worked with Tim Burton once before, on 2003’s Big Fish; Burton loves big-eyed actors who can simultaneously project both their movie-star persona and the character they’ve been hired to play, and few do that better than Buscemi. 

In the end, what am I gonna do, complain about watching the Jenna Ortega/Steve Buscemi/Catherine Zeta-Jones television show? This has been quite a year for streaming series squandering crackerjack casts, but on this streaming series people are occasionally disembodied by giant Gollums or berserk undead pilgrims, so it’s got a certain joie de vivre those other ones lack. Let’s see if the whole is more than the sum of its parts this time.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.