Wednesday

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Wednesday” succeeds thanks to its familiar protagonist and her macabre-loving family.

With Ortega electrifyingly glum throughout, Wednesday is worth watching any day of the week.

The series rarely feels derivative, and the predictable plot doesn't mean it's not entertaining. "Wednesday" may aspire to the greatness of "Buffy," but comes across on the agreeably kitschy side of "Teen Wolf."

This is a Tim Burton production, so it looks great. But looks wouldn't matter if Jenna Ortega's deadpan wasn’t just as elastic as it needed to be — she consistently pushes outside the caricature enough to keep things lively.

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.

If CW dramas are your jam, you might like “Wednesday.” I was mostly bored and found the plot machinations predictable. “Wednesday” is at its best when it leans into the mordant humor Wednesday evinces.

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.

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.

The high-school adventures of Wednesday Addams are less ‘Mean Girls with monsters’ and more ‘gothed-up Harry Potter’. You might have hoped for better for The Addams Family’s best character, but at least she’s perfectly pitched by Jenna Ortega.

Netflix’s Wednesday has a ghoulish tone and a superb lead performance, but the story is strictly cookie-cutter YA mystery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wednesday (and, more so, “Wednesday”) is all talk and little action — a well-rounded character hammered into the rectangular icon on your Netflix homescreen, by an algorithm built to conform.

Ortega certainly looks the morose part and exudes requisite stern-eyed, unsmiling coldness. Unfortunately, her Wednesday has been shoehorned into a dull YA template that doesn’t suit her.

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.