The Addams Family is a classic, but Wednesday really takes things up a notch, so it’s no surprise she got her own show. When the first season premiered in 2022, it was a total hit. However, like any TV show, it did get some negative feedback from the audience as well.
With the new season, it looks like the public’s feedback has been heard, and improvements are being made. One major talking point on social media might set the tone for the upcoming episodes. Fans can expect things to be very different from now on.
Wednesday Season 2 Will Be Scarier
Many fans expect adaptations to stay true to the original, which makes it challenging to create a movie or series that appeals to a broad audience. The result won’t always please everyone, but some elements are crucial and can’t be ignored.
Wednesday is undeniably a scary character. However, since the premiere of the first season on Netflix, there’s been a lot of discussion about how the protagonist doesn’t really come across that way. Some people think this is because the target audience was younger, possibly even aimed at a more childlike group.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Jenna Ortega, who brings the character to life, discussed this topic and shared what fans can expect from the new season. According to her, the upcoming episodes will have a vibe that’s closer to horror:
I think the feel that we’re going for is a little bit more horror-inspired. Not to say that suddenly we’re the goriest show of all time. I mean, there’s six-year-olds watching.
We’re doing this thing now where Wednesday just kind of appears. She is a little bit of a jump scare herself.
Besides the new, much darker tone, it will also introduce new villains and more supernatural abilities, moving away from the focus on love relationships and teenage dramas. In the first season, many fans complained about the comedic tone and the lack of mystery in the narrative as well. The plan is for this to change completely from now on.
One of the inspirations mentioned by Ortega was The Masque of the Red Death, a movie based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The 1964 production is highly praised by horror fans and boasts a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Jenna Ortega Dealt With Backlash After Wednesday
Although the series has received mostly positive feedback, one reason some people didn’t like Wednesday‘s first season was Ortega’s performance. Initially, this was likely a script issue, as the audience found the protagonist to be forced and irritating.
This might not have been a major problem, but things escalated when the criticism shifted to the actress herself. The situation worsened when Ortega decided to make changes to the dialogue without consulting the team.
She’d already spoken out about not liking Wednesday’s love triangle and felt the scripts didn’t add up. Behind the scenes, this led to complaints about her, and she even became a topic of discussion by the writers’ union during the 2023 strike.
Last year, Ortega appeared in Variety’s Actors on Actors video series with Elle Fanning, where she discussed the criticism she was facing, including the pressure on young actors in the industry. Regarding her behavior on the set of the series, she expressed her regrets to Vanity Fair:
I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better. Everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me. I felt like a caricature of myself.
You’re never going to please everybody, and as someone who naturally was a people pleaser, that was really hard for me to understand. Some people just may not like you…and that’s entirely fine.
In the end, Ortega, Tim Burton and showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, took their experiences with the series as lessons. Now it’s just a wait and see for the new, different, and scary elements the show promises to deliver.
Wednesday is available to stream on Netflix. Season 2 is hitting early 2025.
