TV Review - Netflix's Wednesday, Season 2

The wait has been torture.

Wednesday is a 2022- supernatural fantasy horror mystery comedy series created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, produced by Millar Gough Ink, 1.21 Films, Glickmania Media, Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, The Jackal Group, Tim Burton Productions, Toluca Productions, and MGM Television, and distributed by Netflix Streaming Services. The show is based off of the 1964 TV series, The Addams Family. It stars Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers. A third season is confirmed.

"I'm where fun goes to die." - Wednesday Addams

Plot

After saving Nevermore Academy in the previous year, Wednesday Addams returns to her school a celebrity. As she copes with her newfound fame and continued complicated relationships, psychic visions of death and destruction begin to plague her everyday life, causing her to dive into another mystery...this time, a much more personal one.

The Sweet

It took three years, but Jenna Ortega has finally made her return as Wednesday Addams.

Season two of Wednesday immediately does a really good job of separating itself from season one by expanding the scope of the world and the size of the story. We have a lot more characters to juggle in this season, whether it's returning characters with bigger roles or new faces altogether. I enjoyed that aspect, because this Tim Burton / Addams Family / Hogwarts hybrid world is just such a fun place to explore. Sure, the main draw of the show will always be Wednesday herself, but this season does a really good job of making a more expansive, bigger-feeling second season.

And, of course, Jenna Ortega is just as good in this season as she was in season one, and Wednesday Addams is still the core of what makes this show so popular. Ortega is so good at playing the deadpan, sarcastic psychopath that clearly has emotions and cares about her friends and family. Wednesday is a hard character to play, because you have to give her all these layers and emotions while presenting the deadpan, gothic mannerisms, but Ortega's performance nails the subtleties with minor facial expressions and little smiles that let those emotions shine through.

This season also does a really good job of focusing on Wednesday's relationships with the people around her. Season two cements Wednesday and Enid as the core relationship of the show by challenging their friendship and putting them in conflict with each other. Episode six was possibly my favorite episode of the entire show, because it does something with their relationship that progresses both of their arcs perfectly while also giving both Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers free reign to do some of the most fun acting I've seen in recent memory.

The other major relationship that's a focus of this season is the daughter-mother relationship. I say that because the season is not just focused on Wednesday's relationship with Morticia, but also Morticia's relationship with Grandmama Frump, her own mother. It does a great job of showing these three women and how their individual dynamics affect their own arcs and relationships with others. It juxtaposes Morticia and Hester's relationship with Wednesday and Morticia's relationship so well and just adds depth to the entire Addams family in a way that I was not expecting.

This season also leans a bit more into the horror than I was expecting. A major plot line of the season involves a truly unsettling zombie that kills people in some pretty horrific ways. Beyond just the zombie, however, Burton definitely leans into some truly scary imagery that made it feel a bit more horror-esc than the first season, but I really appreciated that.

And, as any second season should, this season gives us a batch of really fun new characters. The standout for me was Agnes DeMille, this younger girl who worships Wednesday and wants to be here protege. I wasn't sure how I felt about Agnes after part one, but part two really dives into her character and her insecurities a bit more, and I found that to be some of the most profound and emotional stuff of the season. I really liked Evie Templeton's performance and I cannot wait to see her character in future seasons.

There are some other fun new additions: Isaac Night, the season's principal villain, was a step up from Marilyn Thornhill. He was super creepy and weird but in a way that felt a bit more endearing than you'd expect. He has this unsettling relationship with his sister that makes him feel a bit more sympathetic than you'd expect, but you also hate him while feeling bad for him. He was a solid villain. And I liked the way that he tied together the past history of the Addams family with the modern fight against Tyler.

Finally, I think this season has some of the most fun episodes of the show yet. The overarching story is solid, but this season has some really fun one-off adventures that allow for some different settings and cool twists that I didn't expect. As I already mentioned, episode six may be my favorite episode of the show, because it does something really fun with Wednesday and Enid, and there are a few more episodes throughout the season that are like that.

The Sour

While I do like that this season went bigger, it also made the plot feel a bit more stretched out. The additional scope allowed for more development with characters like Morticia and Grandmama and Enid, but it also drew some of the focus away from Wednesday. And I found that to be very frustrating.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Bianca's plot line. Bianca Barclay was Wednesday's principal rival in season one, but the two eventually set aside their differences and became friends. Bianca has a subplot this season involving Steve Buscemi's character that was completely disconnected from the main plot and felt forced. I really didn't like the direction they took with this story for multiple reasons, but mainly because it felt like it didn't contribute to the overarching story of the season. There's a connection back to the Addams family by the end of it, but it still doesn't feel necessary enough to justify it's inclusion.

Part of what I really didn't like about Bianca's storyline was Steve Buscemi. Buscemi plays Principal Barry Dort, Larissa Weems's successor as the headmaster of Nevermore. I like Steve Buscemi a lot, but his performance simply did not work for me. It felt like he was saying every single line with the same intuition, facial expressions, and hand gestures. His character is written to be extremely unlikable and slimy, but even beyond that, I just really hated his screen presence. I just found him to be annoying and, like the entire plot that he's involved in, forced.

I also found Pugsley to be one of the most frustrating aspects of the season. Isaac Ordonez, the actor for Pugsley, hit a major growth spurt between seasons one and two, so he's now a teenager attending Nevermore with Wednesday. It felt like anytime the writers needed to force conflict, they would have Pugsley do something stupid. They really play up how much of an idiot he is, and it is insanely frustrating. Like, I don't care how little of a brain someone has. He basically single-handedly allows everything bad that happens in this season to happen. And that was frustrating. I also don't think that Ordonez is a good actor. Look, he's sixteen years old, so he's got time to grow, but he just can't carry these scenes whatsoever, especially when he's pitted against Jenna Ortega.

This season also still feels like it has all of the problems of season one. It sometimes leans too much into the CW soap-opera feel with these teenage romances and weird little dramatic subplots. Enid has a complicated love life going on in this season, and all of it just feels out of place in this show. Neither of the guys she is having a romance with are remotely compelling. Ajax is somewhat likable, but Bruno is just a nothing burger of a character. And, yet, the season devotes a significant amount of time to showing us these Riverdale-esc love stories when we should be focusing on Wednesday and her investigation.

Finally, I think the decision to split the season into two parts was really strange. Netflix feels like it doesn't want to abandon the binge model so it doesn't want to release it's shows week-to-week, but it also wants them staying in the conversation for more than the week that they are released. So they've found this in-between compromise where they release the season in parts. I don't mind it with Stranger Things or Cobra Kai, and I wouldn't even mind it with Wednesday, but the second half of this season is so much better than the first half that it feels weird to have split it up like that. It's not that big of a deal, but the second half of the season felt so much better in basically every single way that it made me question why they didn't just drop the whole season at once.

Final Thoughts and Score

Wednesday Addams's sophomore season is on par with her initial outing. A bigger scope and more complex relationships outshine a somewhat overstuffed narrative and some questionable storytelling decisions.

I am going Savory here. Age range is 11+.

SWEET N' SOUR SCALE

Sweet (Great) Savory (Good) Sour (Bad) Moldy (Terrible)

"Wednesday"

Fun Factor: 8.5/10

Acting: 8/10

Story: 7.5/10

Characters: 8/10

Quality: 7.5/10

Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar

Rated TV-14 for moderate bloody violence, frightening themes and images, language, thematic elements

Premiered on August 6, 2025

Episode runtime: 50 minutes

Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams

Emma Myers as Enid Sinclair

Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia Addams

Evie Templeton as Agnes DeMille

Hunter Doohan as Tyler Galpin / The Hyde

Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay

Georgie Farmer as Ajax Petropolus

Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley Addams

Owen Painter as Isaac Night / Slurp

Billie Piper as Isadora Capri

Steve Buscemi as Barry Dort

Noah B. Taylor as Bruno Yunson

Luis Guzmán as Gomez Addams

Jamie McShane as Donovan Galpin

Christina Ricci as Marilyn Thornhill / Laurel Gates

Moosa Mostafa as Eugene Ottinger

Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo as Ritchie Santiago

Victor Dorobantu as Thing

Heather Matarazzo as Judi Stonehearst

Joanna Lumley as Hester Frump

Frances O'Connor as Francoise Galpin

Fred Armisen as Fester Addams

Christopher Lloyd as Professor Orloff

Thandiwe Newton as Rachel Fairburn

Anthony Michael Hall as Ron Kruger

Lady Gaga as Rosaline Rotwood

Casper Van Dien as Arnold Hunt / Gideon Sterling

Gracy Goldman as Gabrielle Barclay