I don’t know what the world’s coming to. You denude one bullying high-school jock of just one testicle (at a swim meet, with piranhas) and suddenly you’re packed off to a boarding school full of weirdos and outcasts.
My heart goes out to young Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega), whose fate this is in the opening scenes of the latest Addams Family reinvention – a Netflix series simply called Wednesday. Ortega has the toughest of acts to follow. Christina Ricci defined the part in The Addams Family then stepped equally definitively up to the plate as the superbly unengaged ur-goth girl in Addams Family Values in 1993. But Ortega holds her own, despite two issues Ricci didn’t have to face. First, Wednesday is now a teen which means none of the deadpan, sarky responses hold quite the same charge as they did coming from a prepubescent. Second, she has to leaven it with some humanity so she can grow over an eight-hour series that is part horror story and part murder mystery but mostly a coming-of-age tale with classic tropes of high-school drama. Ricci played affectless to perfection, but she was in an ensemble cast and only had to hold our attention for a few scenes at a time. Ortega has to keep us with her all the way – and she does.
