Wednesday

The Algorithmic Oddity of Being Wednesday

I went into *Wednesday* expecting to bounce right off it. A Netflix offshoot of *The Addams Family*, centered on the deadpan daughter and parked inside a supernatural boarding school, sounded less like inspiration than market research. You could practically picture the charts in the room. And yes, a lot of the series does carry that engineered sheen. Even so, every time I was ready to write it off as another polished teen mystery, Jenna Ortega would walk into frame and make the whole thing feel sharper, stranger, and more worth watching.



Nevermore Academy is meant to be a haven for "outcasts"—werewolves, sirens, psychics—which immediately puts the show in a tug-of-war with itself. Tim Burton, directing the early episodes, clearly delights in the gargoyles, damp stone, and funerary wallpaper. The story engine, though, runs on much more familiar YA fuel: love triangles, queen bees, annoyed "normies," and a CGI monster in the woods. That machinery keeps threatening to sand down a heroine whose entire value lies in still having edges. Ben Travers at IndieWire got at the problem when he described the series as "a well-rounded character hammered into the rectangular icon on your Netflix homescreen, by an algorithm built to conform." That pressure never really goes away.

What saves the show is Ortega's refusal to smooth Wednesday out. She plants herself in the frame like she's daring it to move her. Chin low, eyes tilted up, blink rate almost nonexistent—it's a performance built out of control and denial. In a series that loves over-explaining its supernatural rulebook, Ortega does the opposite. She subtracts. Even a blink reads like an unwanted concession to weakness. Considering how much of her earlier work sat closer to Disney Channel and standard sitcom rhythms, the precision of this turn is genuinely striking. Even when the script nudges Wednesday toward tedious teen romance, Ortega's stiff, unhappy posture keeps reminding you that this girl would rather be performing an autopsy.



The clearest proof arrives during the Rave'N dance in episode four. Once The Cramps' "Goo Goo Muck" kicks in, Wednesday does not give us the usual streaming-service version of eccentricity. She jerks, flings, snaps, and shuffles like several different corpses are competing for the same skeleton. Part Fosse, part haunted attic. It is weird in a way the rest of the show only occasionally dares to be. For two glorious minutes, the Netflix gloss cracks and something messier, funnier, and more alive pushes through. That scene tells you Wednesday is not branding herself as strange. She simply is.



By the second season, with Steve Buscemi added to the mix and the horror nudged more plainly to the front, the school-mystery scaffolding starts to show its wear. The show is strongest whenever it stops chasing plot and settles into the smaller panic of intimacy. Wednesday's relationship with Enid (Emma Myers), her aggressively sunny werewolf roommate, still does most of the emotional heavy lifting. Myers gives Enid this bright, needy, golden-retriever energy that keeps hurling itself against Wednesday's brick wall exterior.

I still don't think the series has solved what it wants to be. Is it a sly continuation of Charles Addams' suburban satire, or is it basically a goth *Riverdale* with better tailoring? Probably more the latter. But even when the mystery feels like an elaborate excuse to move pieces around, the scenes themselves can be oddly charming. It is uneven. At times it barely hangs together. Ortega's stare, though, has enough conviction to drag the whole machine behind it, and somehow that has been enough for me.