Netflix made the decision to release Wednesday’s Season 2 in two parts, with the first dropping back in August. I was a bit underwhelmed by that first half, but I held out hope that the show would be able to stick the landing when it finished up in September. Sadly, these last four episodes magnify the show’s key problem: there are too many characters and too many stories and not enough time to do them all justice.
There are a few improvements. Wednesday’s various investigations flowed better around the other characters’ stories. Earlier in the season, it felt like Wednesday was in a different show, conducting her own mystical forensics investigations and avoiding friends and family alike. She’s avoiding family less in the second half, but that’s part of the problem: you see, the Addams are such an outsized crew that the more the show focuses on them, the less it focuses on anyone else.
In the show’s first half, the added presence of the Addams family is largely arbitrary. Sure, it added some juicy character conflict between Wednesday and Morticia, but those early episodes reduced Gomez to a bumbling sidekick and Pugsley to someone infinitely more boring than his pet zombie. In the later episodes of Wednesday’s second season, almost all of the core family members are integrated into the plot in surprising ways, and we even get some interesting Addams lore (including the origin of Thing, the walking hand) along the way.
For fans of this altogether ooky family, extra Addams screentime may be a good thing. But there’s only so much runtime in these last four episodes, and the extra focus on family means less time is spent on the many plot threads woven earlier in the season. That means we get hardly any time devoted to Enid’s boy woes, which have been replaced by a new plot about her being an Alpha werewolf; this body drama is not to be confused, though, with yet another plot about her swapping bodies with Wednesday.
As you can tell, there’s a lot going on in the back half of Wednesday, Season 2. In addition to all of the above, we also get the weird lore behind Steve Buscemi’s creepy headmaster, a resolution to his Siren-powered mind games, and more insight into Billie Piper’s mysterious new teacher. Not to mention extensive appearances by Wednesday’s creepy ex, a wild plot twist about Pugsley’s zombie, a weird cameo by Lady Gaga, and so much more.
No matter how well-written (and the show does have moments of great writing) or acted (this is by far Jenna Ortega’s best performance), Wednesday doesn’t have enough runway to give this small army of plots and characters justice. Though it was set up in the first four episodes, I was staggered that the show gave us a major B plot that had such little relation to the ongoing A plot. This was jarring largely because the A plot was wrapped up in the penultimate episode, making the final episode feel like a rushed attempt to set up another season.
Ironically, a third season of Wednesday would likely be a major improvement over Season 2. That’s because the show sets up a kind of Quixotic road trip for Wednesday as she sets out to save a dear friend. This implies a season without much of the Nevermore crew, and since this show is incapable of focusing on both its extended cast and the Addams Family, it might be for the best for the show to do smaller episodes featuring fewer characters.
Wednesday Season 2 is hardly an awful season of television: it’s well-acted, impeccably stylish, and (perhaps above all) morbidly funny. But this sophomore season never reaches the heights of Season 1, and its impressive efforts at world-building are constantly being undone by scripts that ignore half the cast. It’s an ensemble show that rarely utilizes its full ensemble, making Wednesday a bit like Thing: an occasionally engaging part of what was once a far more entertaining whole.
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