Wednesday

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.