Wednesday - A review

I’m a grown man in his thirties, who never liked the horror genre in movies and who doesn’t care much for Tim Burton’s work either. Nor was I a fan of the original Addams Family movies or TV shows or cartoons or comics. Not particularly fond of teen dramas or goths, either.

So why did I binge Netflix’s new show, Wednesday, in just two days, when it’s everything I just said I don’t really like?

The short answer is: because it’s pretty damn good.

If a show or movie reaches the peak of popularity where it starts to pour out of the tap, my reflex reaction usually is to avoid it like the plague. Even if it’s part of a franchise I like or the new season of a show I’ve been watching before, hype this heavy just makes me annoyed. I’m fairly sure that part of the reason I still haven’t watched the newest season of Stranger Things is that for a while I couldn’t open any social media platform without stumbling upon three articles and five videos about it.

It should have been the same with Wednesday. What do I care about a goth chick and her silly dance? So every time that particular scene came up on my feed, you know which one, I was waiting to be annoyed. And I waited and waited, and it didn’t happen. Her slightly creepy, deadpan stare and zombie-like moves spoke to me, and not just because she seemed to be an even worse dancer than I am.

So I started to actually pay attention to all the reviews and critics and they all said that this new Tim Burton flick is one of the best things that happened to television this year.

So I watched it.

It won’t change your life. It might not become your favourite show ever. Frankly, the core mystery, the person behind the killings, was a little obvious. But it is fresh, funny, stylish, beautifully shot and masterfully written, with a bunch of decent actors and with Jenna Ortega, whose career I will be following from now on (insert Palpatine meme here if you will). She is the perfect Wednesday, equally creepy and competent, but not a Mary Sue, secretly vulnerable and deeply damaged, yet not too obnoxious so you won’t grow to hate her with time. Just a strong female lead who can be badass without making everyone else around look like incompetent idiots. Not to mention that her version of Paint it black lives in my head rent-free now, alongside all the other scenes when she plays the cello.

Wednesday resonates with people, as an outcast amongst outcasts, so much so that the show is currently one of the most watched in Netflix’s history, taking the crown from Stranger Things. In fact, the streaming company did the unimaginable, and actually ordered a second season of it, something that only happens on every blue (or red) moon. Maybe they will even give the show an actual CGI budget, so the monsters won’t look like cutscenes from a PlayStation 2-era game. One can only hope.

One last thing I want to address: the alleged racism. A minor backlash started to circulate on the internet this week, accusing Burton and the show of racism. Apparently, Wednesday didn’t have enough characters of colour, and those it had wasn’t one-dimensionally positive characters, which is apparently racist now. I won’t get into numbers here, I don’t believe that we should determine how many people of colour or any other kind of minority have to be in a TV show. I mean, the main character is a woman with a very obvious Latino father, I’d say it’s a good start. And characters like Bianca or the Mayor might not have been positive at first glance, but they both had deeper dimensions that made them much more than just your usual side characters.

All in all, I would highly recommend Wednesday, as one of the best newcomer series this year.