Sometimes a piece of culture becomes so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness, that we forget how weird the core concept is. An animate sponge, for example, who wears nothing but a tiny, square shirt and trouser combo, or a felt frog who’s shacking up with a felt pig. The Addams Family is rather like that. A camp, gothic romp, populated with a series of characters who have become icons of eccentricity. Morticia, Gomez, Uncle Fester, Thing, Lurch: all instantly recognisable weirdos. But perhaps nobody from that famous family has broken out quite like troubled child Wednesday, who lends her name to the title of Netflix’s new, Gen Z-baiting, prequel.
Wednesday sees the Addams’s daughter, played here by Jenna Ortega (the latest star off the Disney conveyor belt), heading to Nevermore Academy, her parents’ alma mater and a special school for “outcasts” (she’s just been expelled from Nancy Reagan High School for releasing piranhas on the swim team). There she has to deal with besties and bullies, classes and cliques, and many other hormonal disasters. All with the trademark pigtails and sulk. “Wednesday always looks half-dead,” comes the verdict of papa Gomez (Luiz Guzmán); “She’s allergic to colour,” confirms her mother, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). And so Wednesday heads off to a school filled with werewolves, vampires, sirens and assorted other dark creatures. A goth Hogwarts, you might think, and that’s a comparison the show is desperate to encourage. The premise is a lowest common denominator fusion of a prestige piece of IP and a winning format. Or, as the teens would say, Wednesday is giving Hermione Granger.
