Wednesday Returns With a Much Higher Rotten Tomatoes Score Than Season 1

See what critics are saying about Wednesday season 2 part 1.

August 6, 2025, 1:30pm

Happy Wednesday. The first four episodes of the two-part Wednesday season 2 premiered Wednesday on Netflix, with the Tim Burton-directed “Here We Woe Again” returning to the outcast academy Nevermore after an eventful summer for the woeful Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) and the rest of the Addams Family. Having spent summer vacation using ancestor Goody’s (Ortega in a dual role) book of spells to master her psychic ability, she’s as much a Nevermore legend as her mother, Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones).

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But even the psychic, pig-tailed goth girl might not have seen this coming: Wednesday 2 also arrived on Rotten Tomatoes with an all together ooky 86% approval from critics. The sophomore season is better received than Wednesday season 1, which earned 73% when it debuted back in 2022.

“It’s been three years since we last saw Jenna Ortega’s macabre take on the classic Addams Family character in Netflix’s Wednesday, and that seems to be the amount of time the wildly popular show needed for a glow-up,” writes USA Today critic Kelly Lawler, who points out the first season “at times felt incomplete and shallow” despite becoming Netflix’s most-watched English language series and spawning the viral Wednesday dance on social media. “It was the first draft of something, with greatness peeking in around the edges … The story this time is far more streamlined and, quite honestly, interesting.”

ComicBook’s Marco Vito Oddo describes Wednesday 2 as “bigger, bolder, bloated,” with the four-episode Part 1 finishing as “a compulsively watchable piece of gateway horror” despite some overstuffing.

Writes Clint Worthington for RogerEbert.com of the “spookier, stranger” Wednesday 2, “The show’s macabre sense of humor remains intact, even as its pace suffers somewhat under the strain of the too-familiar Netflix hour-long runtime … The problems that remain with Wednesday are part and parcel of the Netflix formula, more than anything specific to the premise or the excellent cast. The show’s still finding its way towards porting a horror sitcom family into the more procedural structure of a murder mystery.”

“It may not reach the heights of Stranger Things, but with Tim Burton returning to direct two of the four episodes, it’s a consistently entertaining watch,” says TheWrap‘s Michel Ghanem. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Daniel Fienberg criticized Part 1 as “overcrowded,” adding, “The new season of Wednesday is so generic that my biggest challenge was separating my memory of the first season from nearly identical dynamics that played out in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the overall run of Harry Potter.”

Still, despite splitting the eight-episode season into two parts — and giving more air time to the guest-starring Morticia, Gomez (Luis Guzmán), Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), and Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) — “doesn’t diminish the exquisite details embedded in the show, its mystifying darkness or Ortega’s commanding control of her character,” writes Variety AU‘s Aramide Tinubu.

In season 2, “Wednesday’s journey is darker and more complex as she navigates family, friends, new mysteries, and old adversaries, propelling her headlong into another year at Nevermore,” co-showrunners and executive producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar said of the series, which has been renewed for a third season.

Wednesday season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.