She may be full of woe, but 'Wednesday' is a winner

“Pain always reminds me that I’m still alive.”

—Wednesday Addams (2025)

Take a heaping helping of Sylvia Plath, stir in a dollop of Patti Smith, add a jigger of Buffy Summers and just a dash of Edgar Allan Poe, spread onto a cookie sheet coated with Tabasco sauce, sour mash and a splash of bitters, heat at 350 F for just under an hour and you’ll have created a television masterpiece.

Either that or you’ll have a real mess on your hands.

Kind of depends on how you relate to comic, acerbic nihilism.

In a streaming wasteland littered with forgettable superheroes, disposable romcoms, inchoate true-crime docudramas and a regrettable dearth of anything remotely resembling intelligent, insightful writing, “Wednesday” stands out like a witch with a halo.

Its first season, which aired on Netflix in 2022, introduced viewers to the title character, who most Baby Boomers first experienced in the mid-'60s in “The Addams Family,” carried by ABC. She, her brother Pugsley, their parents Morticia and Gomez, along with Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Lurch and Thing, were based on characters created by cartoonist Charles Addams in the 1930s.

Its graveyard Friday evening time slot notwithstanding, “The Addams Family” drew respectable viewership numbers and, along with its less challenging and more cheerful brethren, “The Munsters,” helped add a sardonic layer to the prime-time pie.

But this is ancient history, comfy as a bed of nails and reassuring as two electric trains heading straight for each other at top speed.

What’s of more import today is how the Addams Family has survived and adapted over the years, yet still brings on the scary.

Some things, however, have changed. Wednesday, brought to life by Jenna Ortega, is now older than Pugsley, a script alteration that is never fully addressed, at least not yet, not that it really matters.

She is the show’s cold, shrewd, determined heartbeat, its gyroscopic center of gravity, one capable of spinning off into wild frenzies of self-destructive pride as she tries to save those in danger in Nevermore, an elite boarding school for social outcasts.

Wednesday has trouble relating to others, be they teachers, fellow students, family members or among the everyday slouches she has little use for and even less tolerance when it comes to conformity, which, in her worldview, is an even worse sin than cowardice.

She’s afraid of nothing in this world or the supernatural one, which is never far away from her inquisitive meanderings. There are unseen portals through which Wednesday passes, places that invoke yesterdays even as her todays careen into uncertain tomorrows. Hers is a life spent straddling time, space and danger.

And yet she always finds time to play a mad cello, turning the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black” into a 21st-century homage that somehow seems to strike the proper balance between parody and perfection. Wednesday, a social wallflower by choice and intuition, still manages to dance like a dervish, infusing “Goo Goo Muck” by the Cramps with charming insouciance and innocent sex appeal.

The biggest stumbling block “Wednesday” faces is the nearly three-year hiatus the show took between ending the first season and beginning the second. This is hardly a new discovery; in fact, many streaming services have had to deal with similar gaps in some of their most promising properties, putting the viewer into the uncomfortable position of hoping to recall all the plot twists from memory or simply sitting down to binge-watch it all again.

Not to be one of those “Back in My Day” old-guy bores, but there was a time, not too long ago, when a show would end in the late spring and return in the early fall, thus retaining all the momentum without siphoning fans’ time during the summer months, when they had better things to do than sit around watching reruns on TV.

There were some notable summer replacement shows — “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and "Hee-Haw” among them — that developed loyal followings and made it into the prime-time lineup, but they were the exceptions in the variety-show genre.

Early statistics indicate a rather precipitous decline in “Wednesday’s” market share, but these days, determining with any accuracy who’s watching what and when is a fool’s errand, rather akin to counting corpses after a devastating earthquake or tsunami.

Experts take educated guesses and move on to the next disaster.

I hope that fate doesn’t befall “Wednesday” because it’s one of the very few modern shows that captured my interest from its very first episode, something so exotic, so rare as to be virtually extinct.

I’ve tried to steer clear of spoilers, something even less common in today’s online orgy of me-first-ism that plagues cyberspace, believing, naively perhaps, that some readers will give it a shot.

All of the actors who worked on the original TV series have died, including John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Ted Cassidy, Jackie Coogan, Blossom Rock and Ken Weatherwax. Even little Lisa Loring, the macabre first Wednesday, passed away in 2023 at the age of 64.

But if there’s one thing I learned from watching and enjoying “The Addams Family” from 1964-66, it’s that you can’t take everything so seriously, because when your time is up, it’s over.

Just ask Wednesday Addams after she’s beheaded her Marie Antoinette doll, using her grisly Christmas present — a guillotine.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where '60s sitcoms are always in vogue.