We should all be thankful that Tim Burton's Wednesday series didn't come out back when all of us were on Tumblr. Can you imagine the barrage of gifs posted by the most annoying person you know, pretending that this version of Wednesday Addams is "totally me", even though the "me" in this scenario gets panic attacks trying to order at McDonald's by themselves?
Released in two chunks (because Netflix is beginning to realize that dropping a season of TV all at once isn't generally that good for a show's longevity/buzz -- if only there was a way they could give us one new episode per week), the new season is largely an improvement upon the first.
Right off the bat, it's nice to finally be seeing more of the other Addamses aside from Wednesday herself (a better-than-ever Jenna Ortega) -- Isaac Ordonez's Pugsley has ascended to main character, for one, and as it turns out, the actor's pretty good. Luis Guzman and Catharine Zeta-Jones continue to work well as Gomez and Morticia, although they don't seem quite as violently in love as Gomez and Morticia ought. The previous season featured Christina Ricci in a nod to the 1990s Addams Family film series; Season 2 contains a similar special appearance. Speaking of charming call-backs, Burton himself returns to the realm of stop-motion horror in one of the season's best sequences (easily).
I liked the newer characters more this season, as well; Steve Buscemi is a hoot as always, Emma Myers as the bubbly Enid is still delightful, and especially entertaining is Evie Templeton as a creepy yet adorable admirer of Wednesday's.
At worst, this show feels like a fan fic -- specifically a crossover between The Addams Family and some CW superhero crap or Miss Peregrine spin-off that never got made. At best, it looks and sounds excellent, but seeing as we had to wait three years for eight episodes (and the characters, many of whom are supposed to be children, inevitably look visibly older), Wednesday is one of many recent shows that put into question whether TV shows need to be as grandiose and expensive as they are these days, especially when so much other content takes up time and resources in the interim. (You will have seen many a baffled tweet about the difference between the production/release schedule of stuff like Stranger Things and Euphoria vs that of, say, the original run of The X-Files.) With shows like Severance and Andor, I understand (considering the WGA strike delays or not). With this, eh.
