Wednesday Addams is back, and she isn’t even mildly thrilled about it. As Nevermore Academy lurches forward into a new semester, its most notoriously unflappable student begrudgingly copes with a touch of infamy. She saved a school, slaughtered a genocidal pilgrim, and sent several murderers to the graves they had intended for her—so she has to be a minor celebrity. The students fly to her like moths to a funeral flame. But of course, she would prefer that they didn’t do so.
The second season of Tim Burton’s twisted teen Gothic murder mystery picks up at a gallop, missing not one corpse-beat. We actually meet Wednesday in the midst of chasing a new villain—a serial killer who has a taste for doll collecting and grooming dogs—distantly played by a suspiciously cheery Haley Joel Osment. This subplot twists and wraps up with such stylized pageantry and then disappears into the absurd void with great Wednesday flair. Nevertheless, it’s an appetizing amuse-bouche before the meal ahead.
What’s to come will be some sequenced return to form: complicated, elaborate, chaotic, and mordantly funny. Now she has a stalker. There are inchoate notes that appear with dark warnings to “do something,” or else. Enid’s life might be in danger, a private investigator meets a plucky demise, and the skies above Nevermore are starting to darken with supernatural calamity.
New cast members offer different wry mischief. Steve Buscemi comes on as Barry Dort, the school’s relentlessly wholesome new principal who wears a knit and loves Springsteen and is a total wild card. Billie Piper shows up as a quite disconcertingly ethereal music teacher, with just the right amount of charm and freaky mystery. Catherine Zeta-Jones returns as Morticia: part velvet, part poison. There too is Luis Guzmán’s Gomez, still kind of weirdly done, somewhere between undercooked and over-the-top energizer bunny.
The production continues its unapologetically over-the-top direction. Hallucinations, graveyard visions, mirrors that whisper, at least one scene involving caterpillars marking out creepy warnings, and a cornucopia of jumbled ideas. The abundance of scripted jokes and nods to pop culture, songs, and ballet—it’s all a bit too much, and every time I think it went too far, it surprises me and makes me laugh. All attempts at sincerity are buried under a heap of bones—sometimes, literally.
But the still so-called “gravity” (if we can even call it that), just as before, is Jenna Ortega. She is unfailingly magnetic as Wednesday—dry, deadpan, and dangerous, but somehow, likeable all the same. Whether she’s passing icy judgement at seemingly doomed galas and parties or glaring at her sycophantic classmates, she is still the spring of this show’s own peculiar charm. Ortega is never over the top. She is Wednesday—blunt, brilliant, and as cantankerous as she is unable to be sentimental.
If season one was located in the world, then season two is playing in it and having an absolute blast. So much is happening, perhaps too much, but again, none of it seems wasted. It’s gothic melodrama as seen through a funhouse mirror, with a lead acting performance that deserves every superlative it has received.
The series is definitely not asking to be seriously taken, nor does it need to be. Like her heroine, the show is very much alive with the morbidly chaotic, decadent cynicism of (slight) emotional repression; as Wednesday herself says, “Do not put me on a pedestal. The only place I’ll lead you is off a cliff.”
