3 Reasons Wednesday Season 2 Was Worse Than Season 1

The 2022 debut of Wednesday was a full-blown cultural event, smashing viewership records for Netflix and launching its star, Jenna Ortega, into the global spotlight. The series succeeded by blending the gothic charm of its source material with a compelling murder mystery and a healthy dose of teen drama. Of course, this runaway success created enormous expectations for Wednesday‘s sophomore season, which promised a bigger, bolder, and more horror-focused story. As such, fans were eager to return to Nevermore Academy for another year of macabre adventures, hoping the show could build on the strong foundation of its first outing.

Unfortunately, the ambition to escalate the series resulted in a season of Wednesday that many found to be a significant step down in quality. Instead of refining the elements that made the first season a hit, the show buckled under the weight of its own success, delivering a story that felt scattered and less engaging than its predecessor. In addition, a series of questionable creative choices ultimately led to a disjointed and frustrating viewing experience that failed to recapture the magic of Wednesday Season 1.

3) A Further Betrayal of the Addams Family’s Core Appeal

A foundational aspect of the Addams Family’s charm has always been the humor derived from their macabre sensibilities clashing with the ordinary world. Unsurprisingly, their blissful embrace of the strange is most effective when contrasted with a mundane backdrop. By placing Wednesday in Nevermore Academy, a school filled with other supernatural beings, the series inherently dilutes this core concept. That’s because, in a world of werewolves, sirens, and gorgons, the Addams’ signature weirdness loses much of its unique power.

This conceptual problem became more pronounced in the second season of Wednesday with the increased involvement of the entire Addams clan. While seeing more of Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán) was a highlight for many, their expanded presence further exposed the flaw in the show’s setting. The series positions the Addams family as the leaders of the strange, rather than a strange family living in a normal world. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the characters so enduring, and it weakened the season by moving them further away from their classic appeal.

2) A Reliance on Lazy Narrative Shortcuts

To manage its overly complicated story, the second season of Wednesday frequently resorted to contrived solutions to escape the narrative corners it had painted itself into. Rather than allowing characters to solve problems organically, the story would simply invent new information about its own mythology on the spot. This often manifested as a monster having a previously unmentioned Achilles’ heel, or a convenient clarification of how magic works in the show’s universe. This practice of creating on-the-fly fixes for plot holes seriously damaged the story’s dramatic tension.

The stakes of Season 2 of Wednesday felt meaningless when it was clear that any challenge could be overcome by a freshly invented rule, making the world of the show feel inconsistent and arbitrary. This approach also led to characters acting in ways that contradicted their established personalities simply to be in the right place at the right time. Finally, the story was frequently propelled by coincidence, making major revelations feel hollow and unearned.

1) An Overstuffed and Unfocused Plot

The second season of Wednesday was critically hampered by its own lack of narrative discipline. The writers attempted to juggle a dizzying number of subplots, introducing new conflicts at a frantic pace while trying to service every dangling thread from the first season. For starters, Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) had to contend with a new stalker, a suspiciously cheerful new principal played by Steve Buscemi, a mysterious pop-star-turned-teacher, and the enrollment of her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez). This was all happening while the show tried to resolve the fate of the Hyde, further explore Bianca’s (Joy Sunday) connection to the Morning Song cult, unravel mysteries of the Addams Family’s past, and expand the lore of multiple Outcasts.

Wednesday Season 2’s refusal to streamline the story left it feeling thematically scattered and poorly paced. With so many competing plotlines, no single conflict was given the necessary screen time to develop in a meaningful way, creating a constant tonal tug-of-war. In addition, the show’s desire to be a horror story, a high school drama, and a family comedy all at once meant that it failed to excel in any of those areas. This bloated structure ultimately sabotaged the season’s momentum, burying its central mystery under an avalanche of half-baked ideas that were introduced and resolved with little impact.

Wednesday Season 2 is currently available on Netflix.

What other parts of Wednesday’s second season did you think missed the mark? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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