What is the best phrase that sums up Tim Burton's Netflix Wednesday series cast? What is your unedited opinion about it?

I’m not persuaded. That, to me, is the ageing hipsters at AV Club mourning for their teens in the 90s, when Christina Ricci was their dream girl.

The 1993 sequel was more of the same: unlike the Bush dynasty, who did nasty shit but spoke in bland, tedious platitudes, the Addams family wore its dark, ugly side like a badge of pride.

In short: I greatly enjoyed this show as undemanding fun. Looking forward to bingeing season 2.

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This Wednesday’s main motivation, filtered through her Addamsian relish for the painful and unpleasant, is that she is offended by the idea that anything is going on which she can’t figure out.

It was the 90s films, rather than the cartoons or TV show, that codified Wednesday’s character by means of Ricci’s performance as an unnerving comedic sadist.

She wants to be on top of every situation. Hence Ortega’s permanent unsmiling glare, her inability to unbend and enjoy herself, which becomes funny when, no matter what shit comes her way, she gets impatient with people who think that she can’t handle it.

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I really warmed up to Ortega’s performance when I realised that she was basically playing Wednesday as if the character were a crusty middle-aged man. It’s not easy to communicate shades of meaning when your basic expression is a death glare, but she does it.

But also, the Jenna Ortega Wednesday is a different character.

That was the year of the Gulf War, a war fought basically in order to cheer America up and make it feel like it meant something. It was fucking idiotic, but there you go.

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It opened in 2022, the Biden presidency, when America was tearing itself into mutually exclusive parts.

I have read some criticism of the show, notably by the AV Club website, which complained that they want Wednesday Addams to be a sort of agent of chaos, spreading fear and mayhem wherever she goes—not this stiff, awkward, scowling do-gooder that is the Jenna Ortega version.

It’s certainly more interesting than making her a one-joke callous psycho, which Christina Ricci pulled off very well in the movies, but which was partly funny because she was so young at the time, and Wednesday was a pre-teen supporting character. Wednesday in the show is 15–16, and Ortega herself is 22, so that wouldn’t fly.

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When she is drafted into serving fudge in the awful ‘Pilgrim World’ theme park in the local town, Wednesday informs a group of tourists in her fluent German that the cacao bean industry is based on exploitation and that fudge wouldn’t be invented until hundreds of years after the 17th century anyway, and who wants some? I like ‘Wednesday as deadpan killjoy for vacuous tourist attractions’.

The Addams family in the cartoons appeared to be a bunch of weird freaks, but were actually rather sweet. I still recall an early 50s cartoon of the family in their mansion, sitting in the window, watching a horrendous storm outside, and the father exclaiming It’s days like this that make you feel good to be alive!

Quite a large part of the population seemed to be motivated by nothing more noble than pissing off the rest of the population, and the oddness was that both parts thought that it was the other part that existed to do that.

Why should the US public listen to Lauren Boebert, the queen of hypocrisy tell us, "We need morals back in our nation" when her real-time video is the heartbeat of immoral? Why does her audio not match her video?

But this, also, shows how this show has been welcomed by its audience: they want a Wednesday who is not a cute psychopath, but who is gruff, weird, potentially violent (at one point in the show, Wednesday blithely prepares to torture a suspect for information) but who is, deep down, a good person.

Ricci is in Wednesday as one of the teachers in Wednesday’s school, which should be a massive red flag to anyone wondering why she would take a relatively supporting role. It’s not as memorable as her other great current TV role, Misty Quigley in Yellowjackets, but Yellowjackets is a grownup show and this is very much a show for teenagers.

Of course we can tell that Enid’s good spirits and cheerful nature will eventually wear Wednesday down, as indeed they do—that’s part of the charming predictability of a show like this.

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Back then, Wednesday seemed like a truth worth saying out loud.

It’s a bit disingenuous to complain that Wednesday is boringly more cuddly than the 90s movies. The Addams family has always been a loving, model American family. Wednesday sets up a certain conflict early on, with Wednesday being resentful that her parents are packing her off to boarding school, but it doesn’t last.

In 1991, Barry Sonnenfeld’s movie The Addams Family resurrected the TV show’s version of them as a deliberately psychopathic swipe at the vacuous surface blandness and subterranean violence of Bush-era America.

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I have a pop culture memory that extends far back beyond my own birthdate.

Nevermore Academy, where Wednesday goes, is indeed a bit of a knock-off Hogwarts, but the show gets plenty of mileage out of the relationship between Wednesday and her blonde and perky roommate, Enid, played by Emma Myers.

For a start, she is not primarily motivated to do terrible things to people. She does have the usual Addams family relish in topsy-turvydom. At the beginning of one episode, she is kidnapped, and comments in voice-over:

Have you been arrested or investigated?

Let's assess, shall we? Bag over my head for optimal disorientation, wrists tied tight enough to cut off circulation, and no idea if I'm going to live or die. It's definitely my kind of party.

In the meantime, I think the basic joke of making Wednesday a permanently cynical, disenchanted, pain-relishing snarker who is like that because the world continues to fail to live up to her standards, is rather a good one. When some local boys pull a Carrie on the school dance and flood the sprinkler system with red liquid, drenching the students, everyone freaks out except Wednesday, who looks rather pleased—until she tastes it, realises it’s paint, and grumbles Couldn’t even spring for real pig’s blood.

Is your spectral vision impaired? Ortega snaps, sweating and weak from loss of blood. I’m dying.

Hi everybody! I have been looking at posts on narcs and narc abuse on here and if has really helped me out a lot. I am currently struggling with my situation and need some advice/support. I met a narc last year, everything seemed to good to be true. Love bombing, always texting calling and taking me on dates. Everything changed when someone warned me about him out in public in front of him and who he is. This caused a conflict with us and the love bombing seized. he would tell me that everything is okay and i can come and talk. He would set a time limit on me and kick me out after that. he would then text me like everything was fine and we hung out again and after that he completely ghosted me for one week. He came back and texted me a week later laughing about the ghosting and acting like nothing had happened. he continued to text me ( not like in the beginning) make plans with me, then on the day of the plans he would just ghost me. One day he would act interested the next silence. i contacted him a month later and he acted like nothing happened. He was on a vacation and sent me a picture of another woman ( someone he allegedly met on the trip) to strike a reaction but i never gave him one. After the trip he came to my place and was extremely rude, accusing me of going on dates with a bunch of men. The next day he accused me of being an alcoholic and that he wanted nothing to do with me but said well maybe we can be "friends" then ghosted me i assumed at this point it was over and i would never hear from him again. He contacted me on the holiday a month later acting like everything was great. We ended up hanging out a month or so later and when we hung out it went well, i thought things were going in the right direction. after we hung out.. silence. I would try to text him and if he replied it would be very short then he just stopped replying. He ghosted me for almost three months. I thought he was done this time and of course he popped up again like nothing happened. At this point i was getting sick of if so i questioned him as to why he dissapeared and always does this. Of course he had some sob story about a injury and family member dying of cancer. I felt pity for him and he gave me an apology.. so i took him back stupidly. things seemed to be going smooth for a couple months, of course until his family member died and his injury got better he never contacted me and was distant. Menawhile, i was there for him during the difficult time for him. He lied to me about the funeral and never wanted to chat. I was chasing him and he would always claim nothing was wrong but when i said i thought he used me when he was down he could not handle it and would always tell me he didnt care and to go away. I would get so upset i would try texting him to work it out he would barelt respond and if he did he would not be nice about it. we did hang out a couple times after that, he would ignore me after. One day i was like hey i think you are seeing someone else, and i was like well ixam seeing someone so no problem if you are he said " buy bye good luck with your new guy stop contacting me" i was devastated and tried to get into contact with him for weeks then i just gave up and accepted it was over. He ended up contacting me a month later acting like everything was fine. He wanted to go out and have drinks i told him i would. He and i both seemed to have a great time. He ends up ignoring me again. I kept texting him trying to figure out what was wrong. He kept saying everything was fine and i said ok can we hang out again? He said maybe i was like why? He just kept saying maybe … our last conversation we had… i said what is wrong ? He said nothing is wrong everything is fine. I asked him why he keeps saying maybe. He said " maybe but i dont want to see you right now" i said why? He saix " im just not feeling it, if i wanted to date i would" i said why did you contact me less then a week ago wanting to go out? He said i didnt.. even though he did. So i said should i just move on or what? He said whatever you want to do. So i said that he was really confusing me and asked him if he had anything more to say before i move on? My messages were turning green so i panicked he blocked me and reacted irrationally. I said " omg did you block me? My messages are not going through. Even texted him on my work phone asking what was up. And called him twice ( please dont judge me i know it is pathetic i never was this type of girl before him) so he replied and said " Ok I'll block you now" then immedietly blocked me. He has never blocked me before since I have met him he will just ghost. Is this ths final discard aka " grand finale? Did i just push him too far? this has upset me so much its hard to even function.

The fact is, when popular culture phenomena get reinvented at different times, it’s because they are a response to those times. And this is true of every such phenomenon: you can’t go [original decade] again.

And that’s one of the things that I like about it.

Wednesday the series, however, came along in a very different time.

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I was poring over volumes of 50s New Yorker cartoons when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. My parents had a copy of Charles Addams’ Dear Dead Days. I knew that Addams’ cartoons had represented, even then, an inverted mirror image of the model American household.

There was enough surface havoc going on in real life, from people who didn’t think that what they did was even havoc, or who caused havoc and then blithely pretended that they hadn’t. At least the Ricci-era Wednesday never pretended to have not done all the bad shit she did.

Throughout the show, Wednesday gets repeated visions of a 17th century ancestor, Goody Adams, who gives her cryptic advice. Late in the season 1 finale, Wednesday gets stabbed in the gut, and Goody appears to her and tells her what she has to do next.

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In a phrase? Social Justice Wednesday.

This has led to a humongous degree of shipping among the show’s fans, who are dying for Wednesday and Enid to get together in season 2. I have no dog in that particular race, if that’s even the metaphor I’m looking for: I like the Wednesday/Enid friendship fine without needing to make it complicatedly romantic.

Jenna Ortega as Wednesday and Emma Myers as Enid.

Enid comes from a family of werewolves, but for most of season 1 she has not yet ‘wolfed out’ and actually transformed into one, which makes her a disappointment to her mother.

Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams.

In this context, a Wednesday Addams who lived, as the Christina Ricci version of Wednesday lived, only to wreak havoc, would not have been an interesting character to place at the centre of a TV series.