Woe Betide

Let’s talk about writing. I think we all expected that I wasn’t going to enjoy the second half of the second season of Wednesday. That should have been a foregone conclusion because I also didn’t like the first season, nor the first half of the second season. At this point the show is set enough in its ways that we already know how it all works. It’s a high school type show with magical creatures, acting like a cross between Harry PotterFirst released as a series of books (starting in the UK before moving worldwide), the Harry Potter series gained great acclaim before even becoming a series of successful movies. Now encompassing books, films, a prequel series, and a successful two-part play, the series even now shows no end in sight. and Riverdale, only with a higher production budget than the latter show could ever hope for. And, well, the series continues to play like that.

Anyone hoping that the show would throw off its chains and become something different, something better, should look elsewhere. The strengths of the show remain because it’s still largely carried on the back of Jenna Ortega, but I did find that some of the supporting cast is getting better in their roles. Catherine Zeta-Jones is better as Morticia Addams this time. Not great, but better, and Joanna Lumley comes in for the back half to play Grandma Hester Frump, and while the character doesn’t really break any molds, Lumley is a great actor who could do this kind of role in her sleep. There are bright points to be had here.

The tragedy, as we should all know by now, is that these great performances are wasted in a series that doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing. The first half of the season set a lot of plates in motion – an evil doctor bent on stripping “outcasts” of their powers, a mad scientist brought back from the dead, a crazy headmaster looking to use his pet siren to control wealthy parents, the return of an old flame who is also a hulking monster, and a psychic vision that foretells the death of a friend – all of which had to be delivered on in the second half. The issue with the season is that none of these plates really worked together, at least when the show actually tackled them.

When you’re writing a season of a show, especially one with a serialized storyline like Wednesday has, the goal is to create a cohesive, interconnected story that pays off in a satisfying way in the end. If you raise different plotlines, those should feed and work around each other, building thematically onto the whole of the season. Wednesday doesn’t do that. It sets all those plates in motion at the start and then, one by one, ties up each of them in their own episode, never having the storylines actually connect in any meaningful way. It’s not thematically built, just running down a checkbox.

A good story could, for example, use the theme of “the sins of the past come back to haunt the Addams family.” Morticia (Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán) knew the mad scientist, Isaac Night (Owen Painter), before he died, and then covered up his death for mysterious reasons. That’s the kind of thing that should reverberate outwards. It shouldn’t just be something raised half way into a season and then dismissed in one plotline without it coming up elsewhere later. Even if it was self defense (which I won’t spoil one way or the other) that still feels like a crime that should have tragic consequences for the family. And yet… it’s just a plot point that barely holds after the villains are dealt with.

The evil doctor, Judi Spannagel (Heather Matarazzo), looking to strip outcasts of their powers? She’s disposed of before the first episode of this second half season is over. She could have had real consequences for the family, especially since it’s shown just a little later that the tech she was using was taken from Isaac Night. There could have been a power play between the two as they each vie for the technology while the Addams family, some of whom are outcasts, are caught in the middle… but no. That doesn’t come to pass because the show doesn’t know how to do that kind of intricate plotting.

And what does any of that have to do with the greedy headmaster, Principal Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi)? How does he tie into all those storylines? He doesn’t. Not at all. He has a completely separate story that ends up feeling like so much wasted time and potential simply because the series needed eight episodes and it didn’t have a better idea how to fill them. So his story, about helping to create and lead a cult and eventually shift into grifting wealthy families, doesn’t connect to anything else and has no thematic connections with the rest of the story. It does nothing, goes nowhere, and ends up getting resolved in a single scene. In a different series he would have been a season long big bad that had real weight to his story… but not here.

In fact, how does someone like Gort even get appointed as principal or headmaster or whatever of a school like Nevermore Academy. There has to be a board of directors, an oversight group that looked through all the applicants and, somehow, they decided that this guy was the best choice? It’s the kind of plot convenience you don’t have to think about in the moment, but once all the cards are on the table and you know who he really is, it doesn’t make any sense. He’s there to drive a story, not because there’s logic behind the decision, and it shows.

And look, Wednesday isn’t alone in having these kinds of problems. There are plenty of shows, many of which ran on the CW, that struggled to fill a full season with the superpowered heroes working against a big bad, so they ended up with many, many cases of the week… and even then they felt padded, slow, and like they didn’t know what they were doing. A big difference here, though, is that those shows had twenty-plus episodes to get bogged down in slow storytelling and meandering plots that don’t matter. Wednesday somehow managed it in eight episodes.

An ideal version of this story would have focused on Judi and Isaac. Having set those characters up in the first half of the season, we could watch their chess game play out for the last four episodes. Judi tries to use her machine, Isaac stops her. Isaac steals a piece, Judi tries to get it back. Working our heroine in, she could get stuck in the crossfire, blackmailed by one or the other into doing their bidding, or maybe duped by it because she needs one of them to help her fix the prophecy that her friend will die. She hates them both and wants them dead, but they’re useful tools for her.

Hell, we could even have had a flashback story set entirely in the time when Morticia and Gomez were at school. Wednesday could have a psychic vision and she could be warped into the memories of her mother, acting out Morticia’s part during the whole fiasco that led to Isaac dying. All of that ties the storyline together in such a way that when the climactic final episode happens we feel like we went on a journey with all the characters. Instead we get one-offs that tie each of these up without any satisfying build up.

And yes, Principal Gort doesn’t have a consequential storyline there at all. Have him in the background, failing to get his plotline off the ground, and then he recalibrates and realizes he needs more planning, leaving his villain reveal until right at the very end of the season so that he can be the big bad for season three. We also need to give him more to do than just be weird and generic. Maybe he could become a kind of mentor for Pugsley, making his heel turn down the road all the more impactful.

My whole point is that there are reasons to set up characters and give them storylines, and that’s because they’re all supposed to build to something. Wednesday builds to nothing. It continues to be a generic Hogwarts-style show that is, for some reason, set in The Addams Family universe but fails to use its license in any effective way. There are enough pieces of the show that could work if given the right direction, writing, and point of view. Wednesday has none of that. It’s a massive waste of time and effort for all involved and all that this season half of the second season proves is that even with time, energy, and planning, the creative team on this show still can’t make anything work.

A third season has been ordered by NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). so I have no doubt we’ll be having this conversation again in a couple of years. If we’re lucky, though, that season will also prove to be its last.