Why Wednesday Fails
Watching Season 2 of Wednesday on Netflix, and I finally see why this series doesn’t connect the way the movies did, despite an excellent cast, sets, characters, directing, budget, dialog, dancing, costumes, and everything else. At a deep level they are telling the wrong story.
The movies succeeded because they were a conflict between the putative “monsters” (the Addams’s) and the “good people” (the camp counselors, Debbie, the lawyer, girl scouts, etc.). Of course we all see that the Addams’s, although deeply weird, are genuinely good people and the normies are the horrible ones. We get very satisfying resolutions in which the weirdos win and the normies get what they deserve. It’s a Revenge of the Nerds wish fulfillment fantasy for anyone who was bullied in high school and felt out of place, especially compared to the jocks, cheerleaders, and mean girls. And at the end of they day, isn’t that all of us? One thing no one recognizes in high school is that you’re not weird. Everyone feels out of place at that time in their lives, and very often long after it. Even the jocks, cheerleaders, and mean girls are deeply insecure. It’s the nature of being a teenager. This is why we love those two movies so much.
However, this is not the story the Netflix TV series tells. The plot might as well be a Scooby Doo episode. This is not a story about being an out of place weirdo forced into a normal world. It’s a show about nothing but weirdos. The few normies are basically set dressing, and mostly comfortable with and friendly to the weirdos (even more so in season 2). It is not a story about weirdos coming into conflict (and triumphing over) a deeply broken normie world. It’s a story that takes place in a safe space for weirdos, and that’s not very interesting.
A much stronger story would have put Wednesday not into a special school for special children, but into a completely normal school. The antagonists and danger would arise not from supernatural monsters but from cliques, bullying, hazing, incels, mean girls, social media, eating disorders, classism, and a generally over the top satire of real world problems. That’s what the movies got right and the Netflix series didn’t.
The fundamental message of the Addams Family is that weird is good and normal is damaged, and that message is almost completely absent in the new TV series. That’s why it doesn’t resonate like the movies did.
