15-year-old Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega from Scream 5) After another trick at another school, she is transferred to Nevermore Academy, where her parents Martisha once studied. (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzman). This is an elite educational institution for the “outcasts” who are supernatural creatures such as werewolves, vampires, sirens and gorgons. Wednesday is unhappy with the new set and plans to run away as usual. However, this attempt has to be postponed due to a series of horrific murders committed by a mysterious monster in the vicinity of Nevermore, as they are somehow connected to the history of the Addams Family and Wednesday.
Netflix streaming (and after that we’re in the title of this article) painstakingly promotes “Wednesday” as another Tim Burton project—generally understandable and even legitimate positioning, but that, however, cannot exactly build enough expectations. Burton directed four of the eight episodes here and served as executive producer on the project, but there are actually other people at the helm here—Smallville writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. So the catchy sticker “From the imagination of Tim Burton” doesn’t quite honestly describe the contents of this box, but the association with The CW series is fully felt here.
Wednesday, of course, is decidedly Burtonian material: from the very beginning, Gough and Millar dreamed that it was the director of Beetlejuice who would once undertake to direct this gothic young adult detective who was going to make a puppet cartoon about the Addams family. For Universal (and in a recent interview, he admitted to sharing his worldview on Wednesday; who could doubt that). So the show was somehow a chance for him to realize a long-standing idea. But still, first of all, “Wednesday” is the late “Creepy Adventures of Sabrina” (a spin-off of “Sidab’s” “Riverdale”) and (in this case it’s a compliment) and “Harry Potter” and “Monster High”. And already the second – in Burton’s first television work, let all the necessary pieces of the puzzle be here, including composer Danny Elfman.
Because of this, some fans of the cinematographer – and perhaps “The Addams Family” – may be quite disappointed with the new series. But the school should please everyone who is not indifferent to the fantasy of youth. And also to comfort those who have yet to recover from Sabrina’s closure, and to lure those for whom the eerie degree seems inadequate.
After all, Burton isn’t the main character here (to be honest, it’s impossible to tell which episodes he directed without looking at the credits). I’d like to address Jenna Ortega with quite a bit of enthusiasm, whose Wednesday looks like it could become the Same Wednesday for the latecomers in Barry Sonnenfeld’s films starring little Christina Ricci. Ortega’s prodigious talent (not counting the spectacular dance of The Cramps in the fourth episode) confirms that Ricci himself, who plays one of the teachers here, regularly appears in the same frame as a young colleague, but the show does not intend to break up. such a test of strength.
However, it cannot be said that they are so well glued together – after all, the spirit of “sidabovsky” wandering the charmingly gloomy corridors of the local academy in itself suggests some dimming of the sleeves. In many ways, it’s a stereotypical representative of the genre, with romantic lines on the job, a story of growing up on the job, and not as hot as a detective (for some, he’ll come out in the first series to divide up the local hudanites). But resisting her temptation isn’t all that hard, but on principle she doesn’t want to resist: we weren’t expecting letters from Hogwarts, at least now you can move on to Nevermore.