|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
33
Mixed:
22
Negative:
2
|
Critic Reviews
Nov 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Ortega kills as the gifted, nihilistic teen who’d rather hang out in a crypt than a club. ... Gimmicky callbacks to the films and the 1964 TV series are rare and strategically deployed in this streaming iteration of the franchise. ... Burton’s sensibilities and style are all over this irresistibly quirky, sardonic whodunit. ... “Wednesday” is brilliant on every level.
Read full review
ColliderNov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Wednesday retains all the hallmarks that make the stories and the characters special. It succeeds very well at pushing the story outside its usual genre and into something a little more grown-up, and a little more supernatural, but never loses sight of the heart, humor, and kooky horror that have kept us all double-snapping for decades.
Read full review
Screen RantAug 29, 2025
Nov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Wednesday successfully captures the growing pains of being 16 without taking itself too seriously, serving to be an entertaining and binge worthy addition to this year’s renaissance of teen television. Ortega’s performance is by far the highlight, tackling Wednesday’s complexities with an ease that truly cements her status as the new horror It girl.
Read full review
Aug 8, 2025
Season 2 Review:
In addition to breaking from teen drama stereotypes, leaving out a bothersome love triangle also makes room for more interesting character dynamics to flourish and deepen. Season 2 of Wednesday zeroes in on two other complicated relationships that were merely skirted around earlier.
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Wednesday’s zingers aren’t as wickedly sharp as they once were. And because we know she’s going to be annoyed by her classmates, such as perky werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Myers), the dynamic is not as morbidly charming. The bond between Addams family members, however, is more deeply explored and their dysfunctional interactions add a new layer of contemptuous humor to the mix.
Read full review
SlashfilmAug 6, 2025
Nov 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It’s Ortega’s star power alone that helps drive this series from the very beginning into something that could have been mediocre into a totally watchable and exciting twist on a familiar franchise. ... While this adaptation makes some strange decisions, it ends up working in a weird way, which will interest both old and new viewers.
Read full review
The GuardianNov 23, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It loses something by not setting Wednesday against normality, as the films did, and by having a more fissured version of the Addams clan. The love and unity of the family against the world was always one of the great pleasures, in whatever incarnation you met them. But it has enough wit, charm and propulsive energy for that not to matter as much as it might have.
Read full review
Nov 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Although the main character’s name was inspired by the poetic line “Wednesday’s child is full of woe,” “Wednesday” is generally a delight, thanks almost entirely to Jenna Ortega. Having outgrown her Disney Channel days, Ortega makes the Addams Family’s now-high-school-age daughter the coolest humorless goth sociopath you’ll ever meet, in a Netflix series that’s more kooky than spooky or ooky.
Read full review
iNov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
With a script that doesn’t take itself too seriously, a knowing wink at the audience, some genuinely scary bits and a committed and very funny central performance from Ortega that more than holds its own (even if Ricci and Addams Family Values remain unbeaten), this is a treat.
Read full review
Aug 8, 2025
Season 2 Review:
There's an urgency and verve to the series that wasn't there in the almost lackadaisically paced first season, which seemed to going for a paint-by-numbers approach to plotting and stakes. Everything has been tightened and sharpened this time around, and the series is so much the better for it.
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
There are still strong “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” vibes — fine by me, because I liked that show a lot. But “Wednesday” works best when it leans most heavily into its history, a strange family happy in the misery they bring onto themselves and to others. To each their own.
Read full review
ColliderAug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Wednesday's two-part season break ultimately weakens the story, cutting things off at the knees just as the plot is ramping up into a good place. Although this means that Part 2 will almost certainly be a wild ride, it means that Part 1 resembles more of an appetizer rather than a full meal.
Read full review
Nov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Thanks to Ortega’s wildly entertaining blur of arch broadness and subtlety, plus creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s refusal to over-explain or over-evolve the eternally nihilistic goth favorite, Wednesday gets to come into her own here. Though the overall series is rarely quite at its leading lady’s level — adjust your expectations for more of an above-average CW dramedy — there are enough promising elements that I hope Wednesday gets the opportunity to make a second season with some refinements.
Read full review
Aug 5, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Wednesday herself seems less striking this season — she’s not any less unusual, but she is less distinct from her surroundings. Her classmates have embraced her, despite her objections, and her visits to the outside world are increasingly fleeting. Something is lost when there’s no culture clash in an Addams Family story. And yet in plenty of superficial ways, Wednesday has become a more entertaining show.
Read full review
Aug 7, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Wednesday continues to be passably entertaining mainly thanks to its visuals and its casting, particularly Jenna Ortega in the central role. But even with a couple of trouble spots from Season 1 improved upon, Season 2 still struggles with a wildly uneven tone and comedic moments that too often falter.
Read full review
The IndependentAug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Soap opera machinations drive the plot exactly where you think, when you think. What seems on the surface shiny and new is really a Frankenstein’s monster of countless teen hits: Emily in Paris meets X-Men meets Veronica Mars meets Riverdale, all stitched up in style.
Read full review
Nov 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It is often delightful, despite its deliberate darkness, but “Wednesday” is many things, including a murder mystery, a teen romance and a boarding-school soap opera with a quasi-macabre curriculum. Its heroine is all over the place and it does feel as if eight episodes weren’t enough to quite nail down what the tone of her character and story will eventually be.
Read full review
Nov 22, 2022
Season 1 Review:
More focused on morbid humor, for sure, and, like “Smallville,” reasonably well executed and entertaining. But still, teenage melodrama. ... This will not be what real fans of Charles Addams and his characters are looking for, and “Wednesday” is satisfying only on the level of formulaic teenage romance and mystery. On that basis it’s pretty tolerable, though.
Read full review
The PlaylistNov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The plotting sets up numerous arcs that feel promising. And then “Wednesday” succumbs to what plagues so many Netflix shows—narrative wheel-spinning, a lack of momentum, and that sense that this would all have been a better film than a TV series. It never completely loses 100% of the energy of its premiere, but the ingenuity of the first hour fades as the season progresses like all of the colors in the wardrobe of Wednesday Addams.
Read full review
Nov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Before Sabrina went off the rails, it had some fun preoccupying witches with comically mundane problems while ordinary high schoolers faced down terrors. Wednesday lacks that funhouse-mirror perspective on growing up, where the small problems feel bigger than the big ones. High school is just high school.
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Most of Season 2’s first half — even the Burton-directed first episode — is generically dark, with effects beyond The Thing resembling standard-issue CGI in a million other shows. Overall, it looks like a follow-up made with half the budget of Season 1. That is, until the fourth episode.
Read full review
Nov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
May as well call it “The Chilling Adventures of Enola Addams at the School for Good and Evil.” The original goth girl deserves better. ... Establishing her own sarcastic, moody adolescent iteration, Ortega is not just Wednesday but “Wednesday,” the only element that feels like what the show ought to be.
Read full review
Nov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Despite Ortega’s fantastic performance and Burton’s active involvement, “Wednesday” as a whole never really captures what made “The Addams Family” so viscerally strange (nor is it half as visually striking). It does, however, get what makes a teen Netflix show tick. ... “Wednesday” uses the specter of its IP to lure people in and stand out among the rest. The former should prove easy enough — the latter, not so much.
Read full review
Nov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Shockingly good casting (and a typically Gothic score from Danny Elfman) aside, there’s little to recommend about Wednesday. It feels like a reconstituted mush of Tim Burton’s late-career apathy, the vagaries of the Netflix streaming show model, and the unholy resurrection of the corpse of IP.
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It’s not just the supporting stars who are dulled in the new episodes, which are equally split by directors Tim Burton (who also serves as executive producer) and Paco Cabezas (The Appeared, Mr. Right). Ortega is an interesting performer whose goth-girl charms are reminiscent of Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but season two’s Wednesday Addams isn’t just deadpan: She’s damn near soulless, all clipped deliveries and unblinking stares.
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The hit Netflix series has turned the morbidly deadpan character created by cartoonist Charles Addams into the central figure in a generic supernatural teen drama, seeping away most of what makes her such an enduring presence. That process continues in the second season of “Wednesday.”
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Jenna Ortega returns for a new season as the acerbic Addams daughter, which is great, but the character’s misanthropic self is supported by an overload of the repulsive, the gruesome, the homicidal and the disgusting—or am I, like the series, being redundant? There’s also a negative side, which is the lack of much storytelling craft in a production that seems to be making stuff up as it goes along.
Read full review
Aug 6, 2025The IndependentNov 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
This is a world where everyone talks in zingy one-liners, where the creature design is too scary for children but too cartoonish for adults, where the performances are more two-dimensional than the New Yorker comic strip in which the characters first appeared. For a show about vampires and werewolves, it has very little bite.
Read full review
The PlaylistAug 8, 2025
Season 2 Review:
“Wednesday” Season 2 lacks spark or direction. Bogged down by a meandering plot, distracted writing, unnecessary additions, and a misunderstanding of what made the premiere season winsome despite its many flaws, not even Ortega is enough to lift this one out of its depressive state. For all of the mischief the protagonist seeks, there’s not a whiff of playfulness or sense of fun. And it suffers because of it.
Read full review
Nov 21, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The show’s dialogue is flavorless at best and laughable at worst. ... Though she has zero to work with, horror-movie fave Ortega does what she can with her character, nailing the deadpan delivery Christina Ricci perfected in the ’90s movies. ...Others caught up in this dreck include Gwendoline Christie, Riki Lindhome, and Fred Armisen. What’s more, horror legend Tim Burton directed half the season’s episodes; but the show’s visual language is so flat that you’d never know.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score