Wednesday

Our Review

Tim Burton’s best work in 20 years is, fittingly, about a teenager who refuses to be liked. Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams — deadpan, merciless, secretly desperate for connection she’d deny under torture — investigates a monster stalking Nevermore Academy, the boarding school for outcasts her parents once attended. Ortega is the whole show: she rebuilt the character from scratch (the viral dance scene was her choreography, drawing on Siouxsie Sioux and archival goth-club footage) and plays every scene like a knife looking for a sheath.

The mystery plot is serviceable; the Addams Family cameos (Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Morticia, Fred Armisen’s Uncle Fester) are generous; Thing the hand is a full character with a hand-puppet’s physicality. Burton directs four episodes and his gothic eye has rarely been better employed (the Pilgrim World episode is a grotesque hoot). Season 2 goes bigger and confirms Ortega’s Wednesday as this generation’s definitive screen Addams.

Verdict: Watch it. The Addams Family’s greatest generation, and it winks exactly zero times.