Wednesday gets a deeper mystery and a bigger cast

After an almost three-year hiatus, Wednesday is back with the further adventures of Wednesday Addams at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters Nevermore Academy. The first season has plenty of style and Jenna Ortega’s outstanding performance as Wednesday, but, well, it never really beats the allegations of creative disharmony behind the scenes. The first season is uneven, with a half-baked mystery and too much boy drama, though Ortega’s committed, deadpan performance holds the whole thing together. The second still has its foibles, but overall, it is a massive improvement, with a better mystery, tighter writing, and, once again, a spectacular performance from Jenna Ortega.

Season two picks up after summer break, which Wednesday spent hunting down a serial killer. She’s been practicing with her psychic powers, which she uses to unmask “the Kansas City Scalper”, played with demented glee by Haley Joel Osment. It’s a brief sojourn that hints what Wednesday could be freed from the school campus, but then, this is the YA version of the Addams Family, Wednesday being a student and balancing her desire to seek out dark forces and join their hellish crusade against classes against typical coming of age drama is the whole point. Wednesday season two is an improvement, but it is still, at heart, for teenagers. 

Returned to Nevermore for another term, Wednesday is now joined by her younger brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), as well as her mother, the patrician Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Pugsley is now a fellow student with his own abilities, he can shoot lightning from his fingertips and repel absolutely everyone he meets. Morticia, meanwhile, is brought on board by Nevermore’s new headmaster, Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi), to raise money for the school. Gomez (Luis Guzmán) is also hanging around, as is the family butler, Lurch (Joonas Suotamo). The whole Addams family is along for the ride, to mixed results.

Wednesday excels when exploring the relationship between prickly Wednesday and Morticia—don’t call it poor, it’s fraught. Wednesday is determined to be nothing like her (interesting, glamorous) mother, but as they share psychic gifts, Morticia is the person best placed to help Wednesday understand her own abilities, which she needs because she’s fried her psychic conduit, and her powers go on the fritz. There are also hints of a missing aunt, Ophelia, Morticia’s sister who was once burdened by prophecy like Wednesday. There is also Morticia’s own mother, Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley), to contend with, as Morticia and Hester have their own fraught relationship.

All of this mother-daughter stuff works really well, especially when dancing around the growing pains of a headstrong daughter pulling away from a doting mother, who in turn still carries her own baggage from her mother-wound. There is also a subplot involving the siren Bianca (Joy Sunday) which doesn’t really mesh with all the Addams family drama. Only the first four of eight episodes are available right now, so perhaps Bianca’s mommy troubles with better blend with Wednesday’s, but through four episodes, it’s rather disjointed.

Which is the main issue with the second season of Wednesday—there is just SO much going on. The entire Addams family is hanging around, Bianca is dealing with her mother, Enid (Emma Myers) has boy drama, Pugsley has a pet zombie, and Principal Dort is weirdly insistent on getting Morticia’s mother to come to Nevermore’s aid. Also, there is the central mystery plot, which involves the local asylum, Willow Hill, a normie doctor who studies outcasts (played by Thandiwe Newton), and someone is killing locals and plucking their eyes out. AND Wednesday has a fan-cum-stalker, Agnes, played with appropriately off-putting intensity by Evie Templeton.

It's just too much. Wednesday herself gets lost in the shuffle, and all of these subplots are not equally interesting. Despite being divided into eight episodes, the series is not particularly episodic, which means storylines and developments run one into the other, so while all of this stuff might come together in the end, we only have four episodes to watch, and the result is overstuffed and disjointed. Wednesday is keeping Enid at arm’s length, afraid she will cause Enid’s death, but the writers do not find any way for Enid to be meaningfully involved around Wednesday’s constructed distance. She just has a lot of fluff and filler to do in the margins. Similarly, Pugsley’s zombie plot has, so far, no real relation to anything else.

The only subplot in the first half of the season that has connective tissue to Wednesday’s new mystery is the fate of her love interest, Tyler the monstrous Hyde. He’s been locked up in the basement of Willow Hill and CLEARLY has some sh-t to work out with Wednesday, never mind that someone still seems to be pulling his strings from the outside. This subplot actually has immediate relevance to Wednesday’s mystery, and as such, it flows seamlessly with both the plot points of Wednesday’s investigation and the story arc of her emotional development. Also, freed from playing a drippy love interest, Hunter Doohan is obviously having the time of his life portraying a bad guy. Tyler really went from zero to hero* during the summer break.

Again, this probably all comes together in the end, but this is the danger of splitting up episodes that fundamentally were not written to be separated. Season one was tonally uneven, and while season two fixes that issue and is much more tonally consistent through the first four episodes, it is still narratively uneven as too many plot threads are introduced that seem like nothing more than a reason for that character to be on screen (main culprit: Pugsley). There is more to like about Wednesday this time around, though, beginning and ending with Jenna Ortega. She’s just so much fun as Wednesday, it never gets old watching her scowl her way through an investigation and family drama. I just wish there was a little more of Wednesday in her own show.

*Murderous monster

Wednesday season two, part one, is now streaming exclusively on Netflix. Part two premieres on September 3, 2025.