Review: Jenna Ortega grounds sillier, star-studded second season of ‘Wednesday’

This review contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Wednesday.”

It’s fitting that the second season of “Wednesday,” Netflix’s Addams family spin-off, launches Wednesday. It’s not exactly a joke, and it’s not really that clever, but it feels right. That’s not the worst analogy for how its first season found wild, record-breaking success, becoming the streamer’s most-watched show. Sure, there was wacky, thematically incoherent plotting, but the series could coast on its rich combination of sensibilities (Tim Burton style plus CW-era showrunners) alongside monsters, witches, child detectives, high school drama and pure nostalgia — not to mention Christina Ricci’s thrilling appearance, which felt like an implied benediction from the actor who made Wednesday a goth icon in “The Addams Family” and “Addams Family Values.”

The first season followed Wednesday (played by the inimitable Jenna Ortega) as she struggled to navigate the social jungle of Nevermore, a more sinister Hogwarts that happened to be where her parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), met — and caught their first murder charge. For fans of the films or the original series (or, indeed, the comic), the boarding school was a surprising choice: It isolated Wednesday from her iconic parents and reduced the interactions with ordinary folks that have historically made the Addams family so enjoyable to watch.

But the new production worked hard to drive home that even monster academics have in-groups and popularity contests and “normie-coded” people such as Enid (Emma Myers), Wednesday’s cheerful, Elle Woods-type roommate, even if she also happens to be a werewolf. How well that worked is a matter of opinion. Sure, it’s mildly amusing for the school cliques to break down by species into the Furs (werewolves), Fangs (vampires), Stoners (gorgons) and Scales (sirens). But with the exception of the sirens, headed by popular girl (and Wednesday’s nemesis) Bianca (Joy Sunday), the show hasn’t done much, conceptually, with any of those familiar high school tropes.

Perhaps the spin-off’s strangest twist on the original was endowing some of the titular family with powers: Morticia and Wednesday both have psychic visions in the show. The witch parallels are explicit and literal, not playful references, and the supernatural element — along with some stuff about bloodlines and ancestors — detracts from the campy pleasures Morticia offered as an ordinary human who voluntarily draped herself in sexy, witchy vibes. In any event, Wednesday spends much of the first season trying to understand what those visions are telling her, how to control them, and whether she can somehow deploy them against the hideous, bug-eyed monster who has been savagely attacking students and townspeople. (Spoiler: She saves everyone at the school.)

The second season opens with Wednesday dutifully recounting her summer activities (mastering her visions and catching serial killers) and the family delivering her back to Nevermore for a new term, this time with her brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), in tow. Now the school’s most popular misfit, she spends much of her time dodging new fans, including an avid young disciple named Agnes DeMille (Evie Templeton), and new faculty — in particular, Isadora Capri (Billie Piper), a vaguely sinister music teacher, and Principal Dort (Steve Buscemi), the school’s unctuous replacement for the late Principal Weems. Buscemi is a natural fit for this universe, and there is, thankfully, a new mystery to investigate: People are turning up dead, pecked to death by a murder (get it?) of crows. There is also a more personal threat — an unwelcome vision of Enid’s death has Wednesday spending much of the season’s first half trying to figure out how to intervene.

That said, many of the relationships that came to feel structural in the first season seem diffuse or anemic in this one. The Enid-Wednesday bond is strong enough to survive their many scenes apart, but most of the other characters feel siloed from each other, and from her. Wednesday’s nerdy pal Eugene (Moosa Mostafa) is still around, but he spends most of his time paired up with Pugsley, whose eagerness to make friends leads the pair on a grim misadventure.

A second-order joy of the season (which sometimes threatens to overwhelm the monster plot) is the casting. “Wednesday” has been hyper-referential since its inception in a very particular way: It threads specific actors’ and directors’ oeuvres and vibes into the story with a sense of winky fun that neutralizes some of the gore. Lloyd — who played Fester in the films — pops up in the second season. (So, for that matter, does Fester, played once again by Fred Armisen.) More thrilling still is a new character, played by Heather Matarazzo, whom fans of the 1996 cult classic “Welcome to the Dollhouse” will instantly recognize as Dawn Wiener. Other exciting additions include Haley Joel Osment, Thandiwe Newton and (this one has me rooting for yet another spin-off) Joanna Lumley.

All that said, “Wednesday” is tonally darker than its predecessors, and that sometimes feels like a drag on the show, especially when it veers away from the silly high school antics (such as the notorious dance sequence in Season 1). The spin-off suffers from some of the same conceptual instability that plagued the original films, but the latter, being comedies, managed their contradictions with hand-wavy humor. (Why, for example, is Wednesday, who frequently tries to kill Pugsley and revels in death, so intent on stopping murderers?) This isn’t a moral universe capable of sustaining much philosophical scrutiny; that makes its monsters less interesting.

Fortunately, the series has Ortega to single-handedly ground it. The diminutive actress’s remarkable stage presence imbues the prickly teenager with enough humanity — and intelligence and chilly, real concern — to anchor and sometimes justify the show’s horror and clichés and patchy, not-quite-persuasive lore.