Wednesday

Wednesday goes big in a second season that bites off a little more brains than it can chew. Still, it’s a fun ride — worth it just to watch Steve Buscemi groove to ‘Dancing In The Dark’.

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.

“Wednesday’s” dry, morbid humor is, at best, noticeable, but too often forgettable and sometimes actively lazy.

Oozing with plot and attitude but dreadfully short on inspiration, it continues to feel like a training-wheels Burton rehash that’s only fit for viewers under the age of 13.

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.

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.

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.”

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.