There’s only one show on everyone’s mind:
‘Wednesday’
Senior Jayci Pyle watches Wednesday in true Wednesday fashion, in black and white. Photo by Jayden Jones.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
‘Wednesday,’ a recent show that premiered on Netflix as
of Nov. 23, has now passed ‘Stranger Things’ as being the most hours viewed in a single week, with a whopping total of 341 million hours viewed.
The show is surrounding a series of murders at Wednesday’s new school, Nevermore. She decides to investigate these murders and makes shocking friends along the way. We see a new take on the Addams’ family and have secrets revealed from their past.
Wednesday is portrayed by Jenna Ortega, formerly known as Harley Diaz from the Disney show ‘Stuck in the Middle.’ The woman who previously played Wednesday in the original ‘The Addams Family,’ Christina Ricci, is featured as professor Marilyn Thornhill.
There is a lot of pressure and scrutiny that comes with playing a role that is so well-known
and loved, especially with the previous actress on the same set. Ortega has been sure to properly prepare for her role on this striking series, her heart set on not disappointing those who are die-hard fans of the character.
Ortega has been reporting her consistent training and practicing to prepare for her role. This extrenuous training includes archery, cello and she even learned a bit of German.
She has, according to an interview with Netflix, been compared to Wednesday Addams most of her life due to her dry humor and her sarcasm. When she found that Tim Burton requested for her to audition for the role of Wednesday, she had just wrapped shooting on the set of another project, the horror movie ‘X,’ leaving her to audition in the bloody prosthetics from her previous shoot.
There comes a lot of scrutiny and criticism when it comes to playing a decades’ loved character like Wednesday Addams. While Ortega has tried her very best to remain true to the character and give her a sense of modernism, some people didn’t like her portrayal of Wednesday.
Ortega has said that a part of centering in on a single person for a show insists on some sort of personal development for said character. Ortega has also mentioned in an interview that trying to develop Wednesday into this functional person who shows little emotion could be difficult to do. She has had to navigate through when appropriate to show the little emotion Wednesday Addams may show.
Critics have claimed that anyone in the Addams’ family, Wednesday included, only thrive in classic suburban neighborhoods. What must be taken into consideration is that in this spinoff, Wednesday is notably not living in your classic suburbia, but in a boarding school full of others like her, which also differs from previous renditions of the kooky family.
Not being in a typical suburbia and giving Wednesday a taste of normalcy with others like her is the entire point of the show. The well-known family is iconic due to their odd nature, and definitely make viewers, who feel as though they are outcasts, not feel as alone. By bringing Wednesday to this school, you are indeed putting her with even more outcasts, yet she still has her kooky, spookiness in tact. Aside from her visions that she recently began having, Wednesday has seemingly no other powers. She’s simply an outcast among others who have special abilities, that don’t involve attempted murder or psychopathy, leaving her to be singled out. She remains true to her Addams’ legacy and remains a mystery from the first day on campus to many students. The viewers are made aware that Wednesday still has a sense of uniqueness to her due to her interests that people have loved from the start.
There have also been claims that the Addams family would happily welcome any monster
to join their clan. Murderous monsters who kill anyone they please, or who they’re instructed to kill, are reasonably something that this pig-tailed girl would want to stop, especially factoring in the legacy that was envisioned 30 years prior. The show isn’t isolating this monster, just because. They do so in order
to give us the plot, to give the audience a show to watch. We see later in the series that the monster ties together with the prophecy, that had there been no homicidal monster with a plan to kill or prophecy, there wouldn’t be much of a show.
When taking everything into consideration, it’s safe to say that the Wednesday series wasn’t a means to give a better version of the Addams family or their values. The show is called a spinoff for a reason.
They simply put Wednesday Addams in a respectable high school for misfits, outcasts, and monsters; and displayed their own perspective of how it would play out, of course, with a few unexpected or surprising twists and turns as well.
After all, what would the Addams family be without being mysterious and spooky?
