Wednesday (Netflix)

This had an excellent trailer, and yes, the trailer at the end of the episode looked great too. But I was disappointed. This is pretty standard supernatural teen soap stuff. Veronica Mars is a very similar premise for me (without all of the spooky stuff). I was expecting a bit more based on the hype. And yeah, the trailer might have gotten my hopes up too.

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luiz Guzman were excellent casting choices for Morticia and Gomez. While Zeta-Jones seems like a natural fit for Morticia, I think Guzman is a pretty inspired choice because I never would have thought of him, and once I do, I understand he's perfect too. And he is. Weird.

Reserving judgment for the rest of the series though. 3 stars.

It's only the second episode but I have to say this series is turning out to be SUCH a disappointment.

It's just standard teenage supernatural soap stuff. All of Wednesday's best lines from the trailer, when not punctuated with comedic dramatic pauses and trailer music, just aren't funny. The show is SO freaking standard. To be fair, Tim Burton is an overrated director, and Al Gough and Miles Millar practically murdered Smallville every week they were the showrunners. But the show shouldn't be this weak. I don't care about Burton, Gough, and Millar's earlier career missteps. The show should be better.

I mean it's episode 2 and they had Thing give the middle finger AGAIN! First time, it's subversive. Doing it even once more during the series' lifetime would have been pushing it. But the second episode? The show is really hurting for actual humor.

I was really looking forward to this show, and it sucking is an even bigger bummer than Wednesday herself is. 2 stars.

The show is bad. It's not bad in the same way Riverdale is. Riverdale is just plain reprehensible. But it's bad in the same way Smallville is. It's simply underwhelming.

I was however interested in the idea that psychic visions are tied to emotions. Naturally that gives Wednesday a handicap against interpreting them correctly. That's actually a REALLY good idea.

But the show continues to disappoint me. 2 stars.

Sadly, this episode is a turning point for me. I suspect the producers had Wednesday do the crazy dancing to shock and delight the audience. I'm appalled instead. The series right there utterly failed the character of Wednesday Addams. I was disappointed in the first three episodes, but I was half-rooting for the show to turn things around by the finale. I'm not on the series' side anymore. I believe it violated Wednesday's character by doing that, and that's not forgivable for me. It also makes me think less of Christina Ricci for being involved in the project.

People talk crap about how Michael Bay ruins beloved franchises, but the truth is most incarnations of Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are already kinda crappy. As far as taking existing interesting characters, and utterly destroying them goes, Tim Burton's hands are MUCH dirtier. And it pisses me off that Burton is somehow beloved while Bay gets nothing but crap. Yes, Bay is terrible. But when Burton is using characters not his own, he is invariably far worse.

I am beyond disgusted at this episode. half star.

Interestingly, the first half, with the Addams Family touring the campus, was all right. There were some great macabre gags like Wednesday and Pugsley fishing with grenades. Eat your heart out Ron Howard in Springfield. But once the focus turns to the murder investigation things become badly written.

So no producers of teen soaps understand how the law works? It's apparently not just a Greg Berlanti-specific problem. But from we saw, no matter if it was Morticia or Gomez on the end of the sword, that wasn't murder, that was pure self-defense. That is not something that would need to be covered up. It's legally defensible to kill another person if they are trying to kill you or someone else.

Worse is the idea that Gomez is off the hook because the vic was already poisoned through Nightshade. Again, not how the law works. A guy jumps off a building he is going to die. If a guy on the tenth floor shoots and kills him halfway down, the law says he is still charged with murder. The guy being poisoned changes nothing in the eyes of the law. And for a show dealing with murders and sheriffs, it bothers me this sucks at it so much. It bothers me Arrow, Riverdale, The Flash, and Supergirl suck at it so much. This should not be the ordeal teen soaps make it.

Do you know what kills me? Law & Order's relaunch has started to have super shady legal plots too. Bad cops and lawyers stuff is starting to infect even the veterans of the genre. It's really disheartening.

Did the show really just unironically have Morticia tell a black man a person like him has no idea what it's like not to be believed? Beyond tone-deaf. Nobody on staff objected to that? Seriously? You'd figure there'd be an intern on every TV show that looks out for obvious garbage like that and says "Uh uh". Can't believe that made it by quality control.

And again the specific level of bad writing for the legal stuff is not necessary. It's so unnecessary it shouldn't be happening. The fact that it is, and the fact that it's actually common is extremely troubling. Are we really living in the golden age of television when audiences tolerate stuff like Riverdale and The Blacklist and other crappily written shows? I mean The Brady Bunch and Full House are crappy too. But nobody in the 1970's or 1980's ever believed they were good television. The fact that so much badly written current stuff has these huge fanbases that don't just look past it, but don't even seem intelligent enough to understand the writing sucks and the producers are failing them is disturbing. I don't think we are living in the Golden Age of Television if stuff like this episode is tolerated rather than bashed. And I predict very few people will complain about this episode. I guess I'm the designated turd in the punchbowl. I always seemed to be forced into that role, and I truthfully don't like it much. 2 stars.

Credit where it is due: That was not terrible.

I actually loved the moment where Thornhill says she believes she's like Wednesday, and Wednesday says she isn't. Thornhill is hurt, and neither character gets the in-joke, but what I like about it is I think that's an actual slam on Jenny Ortega. Not everyone will interpret it that way, but I like ambiguous jokes that let ME decide who the butt of them is for that reason.

For the record, the Sheriff being pissed Wednesday nearly got his son killed is the right reaction.

Enid's entire problem is she believes she and Wednesday are friends. She might not be so gut-wrenched if she had cottoned on to the truth earlier.

The episode was good. The part where Enid is alone and telling herself to "wolf out" was cringe-nducing, but even if the story doesn't interest me, I detected a noticeable lack of "Wrong Things". I'll give the episode a gentleman's three and a half stars for that reason. 3 1/2 stars.

Wednesday showed more emotion than she ever did before. Not just by crying by Thing's Near-Death. But she also immediately smiled when she saw Uncle Fester. That told me everything I needed to know about him.

I actually really liked the episode. The show is still on the thinnest of ice with me, and I'm not sure how neatly Tyler fits into the murder mystery (that will be for the next episode to suss out) but I like Wednesday realizing from her first kiss that she has a type.

According to the end credits there is someone on the show called an "intimacy consultant". I think that's not just a good idea for a character like Wednesday, but also when working with actors this young. Child acting in Hollywood is brutal. This specific thing added to a teen soap is welcome.

I really DID like Fester and the episode. 4 stars.

The ending was emotionally effecting, but the truth is I felt the entire episode was too much. It was confusing. It piled on misleads, constant reversals, false endings, and untrue mystery resolutions until the actual answer felt random instead of logical. And it shouldn't have been. Miz Thornhill SHOULD have always been the Big Bad and I was hoping she was. Come on, the new Wednesday versus the Classic? Sign me up for that (and let me root for Christina Ricci!) But after Wednesday pointing the finger at practically everyone, it doesn't land as it should.

I liked the idea that the other students bailed upon Wednesday's suggestion of torture. Torture has always been played for laughs on The Addams Family, and it was sort of amusing and right-on to see a group of sane people react to it the way real people would. The show treats the Addams Family gimmicks as silly. Really, they aren't in a drama.

The Munsters had a modern soap drama Pilot a few years back called Mockingbird Lane. But it missed the point of the Munsters. That they were lovable and harmless and perfectly normal. And that Pilot turned them into a family of monstrous killers. NBC unsurprisingly passed on it. I don't like this show too much. But in comparison it tries to very much also send the message "The monsters are just like us". I'm actually disappointed Wednesday hugged Enid at the end. But really, isn't that what normalizing the odd and grotesque the way Charles Addams did sort of the entire point? I'll forgive it.

The finale tried to do too much, but considering the MANY missteps earlier in the season, it could have been FAR worse. 3 1/2 stars.