(courtesy IMP Awards)
How do you, to wildly and wilfully paraphrase a song from The Sound of Music, solve a problem like keeping a franchise fresh and vital years after the height of its emergent and zeitgeist dominating popularity?
It’s a great and enduring conundrum, one given even more present urgency by the incessantly voracious content-chewing maw of the streaming platform industry which relies heavily on giving venerable old pop culture properties a new and verdant lease on life.
The biggest quandary is how do you keep characters, borne of a particular time, place and sensibility, relevant to modern-day audiences, some of whom will have a nostalgic link to them while others will have no link at all.
A great example of how to tackle this very real and present issue is Wednesday, now into its second season – uncharacteristically Netflix has released the season in two parts, with the second tranches of four episodes following up the initial four reviewed here, on Wednesday (naturally) 3 September – which gives us a very modern take on the Addams Family, who first burst forth, ookily and spookily, in 1938 as cartoons penned by Charles Addams in The New Yorker.
While season one very much concentrated on the sole daughter in the family, Wednesday (played with macabre vivacity by Jenny Ortega) and her first crime-solving first year at Nevermore Academy (think Edgar Allen Poe and you’ll get the inspiration for the name), season two widens its scope to given more time to the rest of the clan who, Thing (Victor Dorobantu) aside, only made cameos in the series’ first outing.
With Wednesday back at Nevermore for her second year – a miracle in and of itself as Wednesday’s mother, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) rather archly, and maybe a little passively-aggressively observes – we get to see far more of Thing, who goes from overseer to companion and conspiracy solving right hand man (or is that left? Must pay better attention to that), and other members of the family such as Wednesday’s fire-zapping brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), father Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and gloriously loopy Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen).
While Wednesday season two, part one, seems a little unsure about what to do with some of Wednesday’s “friends” like rommie and new “wolfed-out” werewolf Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) and her newly-minted ex, gorgon Ajax (Georgie Farmer), who proved integral to season one’s takedown of big bad Hyde Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan) and his and his master, Marilyn Thornhill/Laurel Gates (played by previous Wednesday actress Christina Ricci), it does a very good job of folding the Addams family in without taking away from Wednesday’s central role in the series.
We get to see Gomez and Morticia dancing to the tango, trading romantically charged French bon mots and stoking the fires of their ardent and very unusual passion, we see Pugsley indulging his love of all things kaboomy and explosive, and as it turns out, zombies, and Uncle Fester being ridiculously and lovably loony.
It all works a treat and adds some deliciously fun Addams Family depth to the second season’s first four episodes which sees a new mystery emerging, one where a one-eyed crow (a sort of riff on Mr. Poe once again) and a murder of crows are taking down a number of people and leaving their corpses, rather creepily, without eyes.
All Wednesday has to go on, with the help of Emma and new stalker “friend” Agnes DeMille (Evie Templeton), is a mysterious caped figure, some scattered if telling clues and her on-and-off-again psychic ability which reveals that, unless she acts fast, Emma will be ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- dead by season’s end and a foreboding sense that some new great conspiracy is to hand.
The first four episodes do a really good job of building the suspense and intrigue, of asking questions and implying all kinds of dark mystery and confoundingly unsettling riddles – only for us “normies”; if you’re a Nevermore outcast, it’s pretty much par for the course really – and then somewhat solving it all, unleashing all kinds of mayhem by the end of the half-season that suggests something far greater and more terrible is in the offing.
Of course, when much of your storyline is linked to a psychiatric asylum named Willow Hill in which Tyler and a number of others are incarcerated with a view to possible long-term rehabilitation, things are bound to be creepy and Wednesday season two part one makes merry use of them.
Of course, our titular heroine, who is not handling at all well the in-school celebrity sent her way at the end of season one when her actions saved Nevermore Academy, a haven for outcasts like werewolves, gorgons and sirens to name just three, is unfazed by the sorts of things that would give many of us “normies” the absolutely chills, the reality is that something darkly horrific is afoot.
Is there more to the actions of new principal Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi) who projects himself as all things cheerleader buoyant but who is capable of being quite intimidatory for a not-quite-clear agenda? And what is the importance of the introduction of Morticia’s mother, played by Joanna Lumley as Grandmama Hester Frump, “fabulously wealthy mortuary mogul” and mentions of Morticia’s MIA psychically gifted sister Ophelia?
Wednesday has a lot of fun and intrigue going in its second season’s first tranche of episodes, and by and large it does an exemplary job of balancing narrative fullness and character growth, even if it does struggle with keeping the wider ensemble cast fully engaged in proceedings.
While the series doesn’t make a great deal of tackling bigotry and prejudice, the exploration of which is intrinsic to the Addams Family as a whole, it does celebrate how normal being different is and that, for all the obvious differences, all normies and outcasts want is to be loved and accepted … and yes, practice some deftly executed, Wednesday intriguing revenge.
Quite where it will lead must wait another week when the final four episodes drop, but so far Wednesday is being deliciously, brilliantly gothic, warm and funny, scary and sad and dark and folding in the old mythos of the Addams Family while rather fabulously also giving us something entirely and fascinatingly new.
Wednesday streams on Netflix.