Apparently, even Wednesday Addams can grow up. If only a little.
It's been three years since we last saw Jenna Ortega's macabre take on the classic Addams Family character in Netflix's "Wednesday," and that seems to be the amount of time the wildly popular show needed for a glow-up. Yes, the first season was Netflix's most-watched English language series ever and spawned countless TikToks of its viral dance number, a thousand Halloween costumes and a lot of puns using the word "woe," but it also at times felt incomplete and shallow. It was the first draft of something, with greatness peeking in around the edges.
Season 2 (Part 1 now streaming), however, finds its footing. There are marked improvements over the first season, from the expanded roles for characters like Morticia Addams (the always-wonderful Catherine Zeta-Jones) and a de-emphasis on teen romance ("Twilight" this is not), but also a general confidence and watchability that was lacking in Season 1. It's as if producers Al Gough and Miles Millar and director Tim Burton woke up and found the soul of the series locked in a cupboard, preferably an antique black one with bars and rust.
Season 2 brings viewers back to Nevermore Academy, the gothic high school for supernatural scamps that Wednesday enrolled in last time around, and subsequently helped save from Season 1 villains Tyler (Hunter Doohan) and Marilyn Thornhill (Christina Ricci, a one-time Wednesday herself). Now she's back, more popular than ever for her resting ghoul face and faced with a new, elusive enemy threatening the campus, and her bubbly roommate Enid (Emma Myers). But Wednesday is also at her weakest, as her psychic powers become unreliable and she wilts under the steely gaze of her mother Morticia, an indefinite guest at the boarding school.
