Summary: Wednesday is sent to Nevermore a school of outcasts and struggles to fit in but makes friends. There is a monster doing murders and Wednesday seems to be getting framed so she starts investigating. She uncovers a plan laid by the town's founder Joseph Crackstone, who aims to murder all outcasts, tracing back to Wednesday's ancestor. Eventually Wednesday finds out the culprit is Tyler, who she was becoming romantically involved with. Wednesday joins forces with her friends and authorities to capture Tyler, and the mastermind behind the plan, Marilyn, one of the dorm mothers, Having solved the case, Wednesday goes back home for the semester.
The Good: Jenna Ortega as Wednesday steals the show, and she is one of the few things I enjoyed. Wednesday is a good comedic character, her lines are creative and the deadpan delivery makes them amusing. It's fun to see Wednesday interacting with people because we know that she will be snarky with them. Tim Burton's directing style gave this season some visual flair in the episodes he directed, and it helped bring Jericho and Nevermore to life. The production is quite good in this series with memorable sets, costumes, make-up, and choreography. Visually, I have no complaints about this show. The music choices were also excellent, with some lovely tracks being played at various points in the series. The Bad: So many problems. Going into this show, I was expecting a comedy horror series, perhaps combining "The Addams Family" with some genuine scares to create an interesting comedic thriller-style show which would be interesting. Instead what I got was a cross between the worst of "Harry Potter" and "Riverdale" with an "Addams Family" reboot slapped on top to get people to watch. This show was packed to the brim with teenage melodrama, indulging into practically every trope imaginable. Things like love triangles, popular characters being villains who are "humanized" later, characters fighting and forgiving each other seemingly on a whim, the authorities being incompetent, and many other tropes are present in this show, and it severely detracts from the story that the show is trying to tell. The main mystery storyline is absolutely terrible. There is no reason to emotionally invest in this story, and it is completely uninteresting the whole time with obvious red herrings, boring twists, and a wholly uninspired conclusion. The main plot goes nowhere interesting with zero thematic value. All it leads to is the return of a villainous character who is blander than an uncooked potato left out to rot in the sun. This mystery storyline is the most bare-bones I have ever seen, and the severe lack of originality in the main plot of this show is indicative of how this show is nothing more than a cheap money grab that has zero interest in trying to be a genuine TV show. The pacing is also terrible. The only thing that makes a wholly uninspired plot worse is when a TV show wastes my time and drags out the development of the plot with constant uninteresting MacGuffins, with reveals coming at a low density, testing my patience significantly. The result of this slow pace is a complete loss of suspense, a large influx of filler, and the sense upon completing the show that I have wasted my time watching it. The first half of the show is filled with storylines that go nowhere, padding out the runtime of the show significantly. Storylines like Bianca's rivalry with Wednesday, Lucas' arc, Weems and Walker's alliance, and Gomez and Morticia's involvement with Wednesday have zero pay-off by the end of the series, revealing these stories to be useless fluff in a series that plods on for way too long. The side characters are not very good. Each and every new character is no more than a two-dimensional stereotype, the kind of lazy and shallow characters that you always find in mediocre teen dramas. Pretending that this show is more than just a generic teen drama is simply lying to yourself. Looking at these characters reveals that in truth. Bianca is one of the more "complex" characters, yet she is a character type in every one of these shows: a popular girl who ends up at odds with the main character, but is revealed to secretly hate her own popularity. Nothing about Bianca suggests that the writers treat her as anything more than this archetype. Enid also is uninspired, a typical high-energy sidekick with nothing unique about her. Xavier is another archetype, the snobby rich kid that ends up being worth more than it initially seems. And Tyler is even worse, the kind and thoughtful boy who ends up being a snide and evil villain. The repetition of these pre-established tropes highlights how this show fails to have a single original bone and is perfectly content with being mediocre. Wednesday is a fun character to watch, but her story is terrible. The story should be that she has to learn to be more open with her emotions and to learn to empathize with other people, and without doing this, she will never succeed in social settings. This seemed to be the arc for several episodes with Thing and Kinbott helping Wednesday open up, Weems being an effective foil for her, and conflicts coming up with Xavier, Enid, Tyler, and Bianca. Instead, these storylines resolve without Wednesday having to grow or even put in any effort to show that she cares. We're just told that the side characters should always accept the worst from Wednesday and accept her for who she is, which is such a cheap and unrealistic cop-out because Wednesday behaved poorly and is now being rewarded for her behaviours and being told not to change. It is insulting that the character isn't allowed to have an arc because the show bafflingly tries to justify everything she does as correct, even though it is horribly, horribly wrong. Wednesday is a Mary Sue whose flaws are ultimately glossed over with the show pretending that she's so perfect, and that makes for an irritating character arc that completely drives me away from the show. The performances are also very bad. The few good actors here aren't given enough material to really shine, and the majority of the actors are putting in such stuff, uninteresting portrayals, making bad writing seem even worse with how poorly thought out the characters are. The Addams Family, barring Wednesday, are all guilty of this, feeling more like drab caricatures than actual characters. Weems could have been interesting, but Gwendoline Christie can only do so much with such a poorly written storyline. Almost all of the main student characters have no real charisma or eye-catching ability with the exception of Jenna Ortega. The world-building isn't good either. A Monster high school could be a fun idea, but it needs the appropriate amount of world building to work. This show fails at this on every level. We aren't ever told how this world operates with the presence of outcasts and monsters, and what it means to be a monster in this world. We're told that they are an oppressed minority, but we never get to see how they are oppressed in public. Even on a smaller scale, the rules within the school are poorly defined. We aren't told of any curfew, and I feel confused by how easy it is for Wednesday to escape every night, especially since she is a potentially dangerous outcast. We also rarely get to see any actual schoolwork done, as every episode highlights some new event, and I often forgot that the setting of the show was within a school because of how little of a role the school played in the show. I also rolled my eyes at things like the Poe Cup, which feel like shoehorned events rather than something to actually care about. This show may have been more forgivable if it had good writing, but it did not. In no place is this more apparent than the outrageously bad season finale, which is filled to the brim with horrible writing decisions. More specific examples are in the review of that episode, but the final act of the show is a nightmare to watch. The resurrection of Joseph Crackstone is such an anticlimax because Crackstone is not a real character, he's just some cliched "bad guy" for the hero to fight that was slapped on in this show. The fight against him has zero emotional stakes, and it invokes every single cliche that you would expect from a final battle with absolutely nothing interesting going on. Everything after Crackstone's defeat is utter garbage. We get an extended section of TV show where Wednesday is treated as the second coming of Christ, tying in to my comments earlier where the show tries to justify every part of Wednesday's actions. And as if that's not bad enough, the show then concludes with a haphazard attempt to create mystery to get people to tune in for a second season. In one of the laziest and most insulting scenes ever, the final sequence raises brand new mysteries that were never built up before through some lazy narration in an effort to get people to tune in for season two. This was so badly executed and lazily slapped on to the ending of the show that it left me stunned. In a way, it summed up the show perfectly for me. At every turn I did not expect that the show would get worse, and somehow it managed to disappoint me each and every time. The Unknown: I don't care enough to ask questions about a second season. Best Episodes: E01 Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe: The pilot had some hopeful aspects to it and provided a better experience than much of what came after. E06 Quid Pro Woe: This episode had some good scenes, making it one of the better ones. Worst Episodes: E04 Woe What a Night: An episode that was more melodramatic teen drama garbage than anything else. E08 A Murder of Woes: The season finale was the worst episode of the show with horribly uninspired storytelling and one of the worst climaxes in recent memory. Character of the Season: Wednesday. Conclusion: Expecting anything more than a lame-duck teen drama from this show was a mistake. This had definite potential, but it squandered it by being one of the most unoriginal pieces of television I have ever seen, bastardizing an established property and never rising above and beyond any of the tropes and cliches that are so commonly present in the teen drama genre. "Wednesday" made every mistake in the book, and it went from being simply a mediocre TV show to being a bad one by the end, continually getting worse and worse with its writing, flatter and flatter with its performances, and less and less original with each episode. Watching this show hurt me (though not as much as "Riverdale"), and if you have any expectation of quality from the TV that you watch, stay far away from this embarrassment. Don't let the ratings and the popularity fool you; this is not a good show.
1 Comment
Joe Y
12/19/2022 11:03:51 pm
At least "Riverdale" is great for a laugh, lol. This just sounds like a very dull interpretation of the Addams Family. Which is a shame, because I agree with you that an Addams Family show done properly could be a very fun watch.
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
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