Recently, I reviewed the second season of Netflix’s Wednesday, and I found myself disappointed: despite its undeniable style and polish, the overly ambitious season had far too many undeveloped characters and half-baked plot developments, many of which were too disconnected from Wednesday herself. A very bright spot of the season, though, was the return of Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester, whose charm is positively magnetic (or should that be electric?). Recently, Netflix announced that we’d be getting an Uncle Fester spinoff series, and such a show has the potential to be much, much better than Wednesday.
So far, there are absolutely no details confirmed for the Uncle Fester series except that it is in production. That means we don’t know exactly what the plot will be and if it will have anything to do with Wednesday and Fester driving off to help Enid at the end of Wednesday Season 2. It’s entirely possible that Wednesday will be a cameo character in Fester’s show, just like he was on hers. Even without stunt cameos, I’m confident that an Uncle Fester show will be better than Wednesday for several reasons.
Freed From Hot Topic Hogwarts
The first reason is that Wednesday was a show that never knew exactly what it wanted to be. The pitch was almost certainly “Hot Topic Hogwarts,” which is why Nevermore Academy is filled with young characters who have both fantastic powers and outsized personalities. But the writers were understandably more concerned with the title character, which is why by Season 2, Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday and her macabre investigations rarely intersect with the plots of the other characters (even the main plot of saving Enid comes at the expense of giving Wednesday and Enid much screentime).
A Smaller Ensemble
An Uncle Fester show would almost certainly have a smaller ensemble cast, and the show would presumably focus more on the title character’s life as a career criminal. Maybe he’ll sweep into a new town every episode, or maybe he’ll settle down somewhere to pull off a long con. Either way, the show is unlikely to have an entire goth academy worth of characters, which will give the writers more time to focus on Fester and his family.
The Trouble With The Addams Family
Speaking of which, the Addams Family became, ironically enough, one of Wednesday’s biggest problems in Season 2. The actors did a fantastic job (especially Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia), but their larger-than-life characters always took attention away from the Nevermore Academy crew; like, how are we supposed to care about werewolf teen drama when the most famous family in horror is onscreen? The Wednesday writers seemingly agreed, which is why the Addams loomed so large in Season 2 at the expense of even major supporting characters like Enid.
That seemed particularly distracting because the Addams were in Wednesday Season 1 so little, and their presence was greatly increased for Season 2. With an Uncle Fester show, the writers should know well ahead of time exactly how much screentime they want to devote to the Addams Family, and they can more properly build the show around them. This goes back to the smaller cast thing: fewer new characters in the Uncle Fester show means we’ll get more of a chance to know them, and it will be easier to balance their stories with those of the Addams without the seasonal storytelling feeling lopsided.
The Secret Life Of Uncle Fester
That brings me to the final reason why an Uncle Fester show will be successful: namely, that there are so many unanswered questions about the Fester of this universe that a new series could answer. For example, we don’t know much about how he teamed up with Thing to become criminals, and we don’t even know much about Fester’s motivation for robbing banks. Most importantly, we don’t know much about his relationship with Gomez Addams, even though that was such an important part of the Addams Family movies in the ‘90s.
As a lifelong fan of The Addams Family, I’m very hyped for an Uncle Fester spinoff. He’s a naturally compelling character (heck, he had his own Nintendo game!), and Fred Armisen plays him perfectly. So long as the new writers learn from the old writers’ mistakes, fans of things altogether ooky can look forward to a show much better than Wednesday.
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