The 2022 debut of Wednesday became a cultural phenomenon, setting viewership records for Netflix and driving viral social media trends. This level of success makes a follow-up season an immense challenge, and, for better or worse, the series returns to live squarely in the shadow of that achievement. Season 2 of Wednesday wants to tell a bigger and bolder story, with a clear intent to lean more heavily on horror than the teen drama that shaped its first year. However, this goal is consistently dragged down by an attempt to play it safe, as a proliferation of subplots designed to preserve every element of Season 1 ultimately leaves the new season feeling bloated and unfocused.
After a delightfully macabre cold open establishes Wednesday’s (Jenna Ortega) summer activities, she is thrust back into Nevermore Academy, where her past heroism has transformed her into an unwilling celebrity. Her closest friends — Enid (Emma Myers), Eugene (Moosa Mostafa), and even Bianca (Joy Sunday) — bask in the newfound attention, but Wednesday, naturally, despises it.
Meanwhile, the school itself is under new management, with the suspiciously cheerful and corporate-minded Principal Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi) eager to boost donations and school spirit after the demise of Principal Weems (Gwendoline Christie) in Season 1. At the same time, the enigmatic pop star Capri (Billie Piper) has abandoned her celebrity career to become the new music teacher, raising immediate suspicions. These new authority figures present their own mysteries, all while a new murder investigation connected to former sheriff Galpin (Jamie McShane) pulls Wednesday into a conspiracy threatening the entire Outcast community.
This narrative overload is only compounded by a dizzying array of personal and familial conflicts. A stalker begins sending threatening messages the moment Wednesday returns to school, her psychic visions start to fail her at critical moments, and the Addams family becomes a constant presence at Nevermore. Her parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), are more involved than ever, while her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls for his first year, leading to a subplot about his calamitous attempts to make friends. On top of all this, the season juggles the mystery of a long-lost aunt, Ophelia, and the dangling plot threads from Season 1, including the fate of the Hyde (Hunter Doohan) and Bianca’s connection to the Morning Song cult. Even with four hour-long episodes, the sheer volume of storylines the series tries to service is simply too much to handle.
This refusal to edit itself is the season’s greatest weakness, as in its attempt to address every fan’s desire, Season 2 of Wednesday sabotages its own ambition. For instance, it amps up the horror, as promised, but refuses to sideline the high school drama, creating a constant tonal tug-of-war. Plus, the series commendably steers Wednesday away from the first season’s romantic entanglements, a move Ortega herself championed, only to saddle Enid with a love triangle that feels like a vestigial limb from the previous year. By clinging to every ingredient from its successful recipe, the show becomes thematically scattered. So, at the end of Part 1, it’s unclear what the season is truly about, as its central message is buried under an avalanche of subplots that are introduced and resolved at a breakneck pace.
A foundational issue from its predecessor also persists; the essential charm of the Addams Family has always been their blissful ignorance of their own strangeness within a “normal” world. Placing them in a school for “Outcasts” forces the series to render its supernatural student body remarkably conventional in order to preserve the Addams’s signature strangeness. This puts the Addams in the awkward position of being outcasts among outcasts, which undermines the very concept of what it means to be an Outcast inside the show’s proposed lore.
Despite these significant structural flaws, Wednesday remains a compulsively watchable piece of gateway horror. The core cast is so charismatic that they manage to disguise many of the script’s shortcomings, and the decision to promote the larger Addams family to series regulars proves to be the season’s greatest strength. Guzmán is a scene-stealing delight as Gomez, and Zeta-Jones brings a concerned maternal depth to Morticia’s relationship with her daughter, even if the script doesn’t give the theme the space it deserves. Above all, Fred Armisen is having the time of his life as Uncle Fester, whose dedicated episode features some of the most creative and gleefully fun sequences the series has ever produced.
On a technical level, the series continues to impress. The direction is sharp, and its commitment to stylized, gothic cinematography is a welcome departure from the murky visuals that plague many streaming productions. While the frantic pacing forces some choppy editing choices, it works as well as it can with the overstuffed material. As the unwavering anchor of the show, Ortega continues to deliver a solid performance, embodying the titular character’s confidence and intellect with a precision that elevates every scene she’s in. Finally, the show’s philosophy, that being different is something to be celebrated, remains fully intact, providing a satisfying throughline for fans.
Wednesday Season 2, Part 1 is a creature of compromise — it is an entertaining, if unwieldy, return that succeeds on the charm of its cast and its slick, horror-lite aesthetic. It is held back, however, by a palpable fear of alienating its massive audience, resulting in a fun but frustratingly directionless story. While it will likely satisfy fans, it may also leave them wondering if, in this case, less would have been much, much more.
Rating: 3.0 out of 5
Wednesday Season 2, Part 1 premiered on Netflix on August 6th, with Part 2 slated to debut on September 3rd.
