Netflix’s Wednesday Is a Huge Hit. I Think I Know Why Critics Hate It.
SlateNetflix’s new hit series Wednesday, a Tim Burton–helmed Addams Family spinoff focused on the eponymous deadpan daughter, has captured the record for the most hours viewed in a week for an English-language series on the streamer. But while most critics have praised Ortega and other incredible ancillary performances, some have hit Wednesday with the TV writer’s classic weapon: They’ve called it “like something on The CW.” The CW, the love child of former networks UPN and the WB, hosts many DC superhero shows and specializes in deliciously melodramatic adolescent dramas that often have fantasy elements—like The Vampire Diaries or The Secret Circle. It’s a way to belittle the series for reproducing what they see as the CW’s classic failings: unoriginal or predictable plots, unrealistic and juvenile dialogue, and an overly heavy reliance on what Collider calls “boilerplate subplots,” including “rival-school drama, sins-of-the-parents revelations, romantic competition.” According to Collider, this renders Wednesday “algorithmically derivative”; to CBR, it’s “disappointingly conventional.” Though the Hollywood Reporter acknowledges that the series proves that you could write a show about the impassively morbid Wednesday Addams using classic YA dramedy tropes, it backhands its near compliment by asking, “But why would you?” Uh … for many reasons! Wednesday doesn’t “drag what should be regarded as higher-level Netflix-quality content down to The CW’s level,” as Decider argues, but rather takes an impassive young character we all know and puts her in situations that give her a greater tolerance of the human condition.