Wednesday, Jenny Ortega Earn Emmy Nominations

Netflix’s Wednesday, the ratings sensation that reinvented The Addams Family as a Riverdale-style sexy teen murder mystery, has landed a pair of Emmy Award nominations. While the series itself, created by Smallville producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, has been nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series, star Jenna Ortega has been nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. The awards will be presented in September, with the ceremony currently scheduled to air on Fox — although a looming Screen Actors Guild strike might change that  if it were to go on as long as the currently-ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, which began in May.

Ortega and The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal nominations for acting in comedy and drama series today, becoming the first actors of Latin descent to do so in their categories since 2008 and 1999, respectively. Like Wednesday, The Last of Us had success of its own, landing on the Outstanding Drama list and scoring nominations for guest actors Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.

Wednesday came in hot when it debuted on Netflix in December 2022, scoring the second-biggest streaming debut of all time, trailing only the fourth season of Stranger Things. A second season is planned, although with the Writers Guild on strike, it’s difficult to know when the show will be ready to go into production. Ortega has earned praise for her performance on Wednesday, but famously alienated some of the show’s crew by criticizing the writing and claiming credit for numerous on-set rewrites whild doing press appearances in support of the sixth Scream movie.

According to its official synopsis, Wednesday is a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy. Wednesday’s attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.

Wednesday stars Jenna Ortega (Wednesday Addams), Gwendoline Christie (Principal Larissa Weems), Jamie McShane (Sheriff Galpin), Percy Hynes White (Xavier Thorpe), Hunter Doohan (Tyler Galpin), Emma Myers (Enid Sinclair), Joy Sunday (Bianca Barclay), Naomi J Ogawa (Yoko Tanaka), Moosa Mostafa (Eugene Ottinger), Georgie Farmer (Ajax Petropolus), Riki Lindhome (Dr. Valerie Kinbott), with Christina Ricci (Marilyn Thornhill), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Morticia Addams), Luis Guzmán (Gomez Addams) and Isaac Ordonez (Pugsley Addams).

You can see the first season of Wednesday on Netflix now.