Review for Wednesday: The Complete First Season

Introduction

It’s been a long time since I bought a TV series on the strength of the trailer alone, but once I started seeing the promos for Wednesday, the Addams Family spin-off from the imagination of Tim Burton, I just had to see it. And given that it’s on one of those subscription streaming sites that I refuse to subscribe to, Blu-ray was the only option. The surprising thing is that this is a Netflix show, and the received wisdom is that Netflix shows remain in Netflix jail until they’ve finished being lucrative, and maybe then, just maybe, they’ll deign to give it a physical home media release. But practically a year after Wednesday was streamed, it’s here on Blu-ray. Of course it might just be the gateway drug, and when it comes to Wednesday Season Two, Netflix will resort to the jail once more, and we won’t see it on disc for five years. However, this is one Blu-ray release that you’ll look at, and wonder why they bothered, as it offers little beyond the streaming experience anyway.


Wednesday Addams has issues. That’s she’s antisocial is an understatement, and she deals with the bullies of her brother Pugsley in imaginative but deadly ways. It gets her thrown out of another school, but this time her parents take her in hand, and send her instead to the boarding school they attended when they were young. Nevermore is the ideal institution for outcasts, but with an overbearing principal, obnoxious roommates, and compulsory therapy sessions, Wednesday’s initial impulse is to leave the small town. But a murderous monster in the woods, a strange prophecy regarding her combined with the sudden advent of psychic visions, and a mystery regarding her parents’ time at Nevermore, are all reason enough to stay.


Eight episodes of Wednesday Season One are presented across two discs from Warner Brothers.

Disc 1
1. Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe
2. Woe is the Loneliest Number
3. Friend or Woe
4. Woe What a Night

Disc 2
5. You Reap What You Woe
6. Quid Pro Woe
7. If You Don’t Woe Me By Now
8. A Murder of Woes

The Discs

Wednesday gets a 1.85:1 widescreen 1080p transfer on these discs, with the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround French, Spanish and German, with subtitles in these languages, and Chinese, Dutch, and Korean. It’s a great image on these discs, clear and sharp with rich, consistent, if gloomy colours. The show is very spooky and atmospheric, so the darker colour palette is to be expected, and even in its more colourful moments, it aims for the autumnal rather than the neon. Detail levels are good, contrast is excellent and the visual effects are seamlessly accomplished. The audio is fine, the dialogue is clear for the most part, the action is expressed well through the soundstage, and Danny Elfman returns to the Burton-verse to provide music.

Extras

You get two discs on each inner face of a thin BD Amaray style eco-case, wrapped in an o-card slipcover. The inner sleeve offers some creepy artwork. The discs boot to static menus.

And that’s your lot.

Conclusion

You have to give collectors more if you want to keep physical media alive. A simple case with a couple of barebones discs isn’t enough anymore. If you’re not one of those people like me who refuse to buy subscription television, or one of those people who still can’t get a decent broadband connection, then the only reason to buy this release is as a hedge against the inevitable day that Netflix decide to save some money and shut down a server or two, and this show vanishes from your territory. Let’s face it; if you gave them enough money, you probably streamed this show in 4k. Having said all that, there is still something to be said for decent disc authoring, and a consistent, high quality 1080p transfer, with lossless audio, and no broadband bottlenecks in the way to introduce glitching or pixellation. And you’ll see the credit sequences in full! But yeah, this would be far more easier to recommend if you could see some extra features, behind the scenes, interviews, deleted scenes, commentaries; your basic expectations of physical media.


Still, the show is well worth the expenditure, a deliciously, darkly comic cross between Scooby Doo and Harry Potter, with Tim Burton taking a fresh crack at The Addams Family, this time focusing on the deadpan and deadly character of Wednesday Addams. That Wednesday is a problem child should come as no surprise, but it turns out that she’s too much of a problem child even for the spooky and kooky Nevermore Academy, where she gets transferred after a particularly sadistic incident in her last ‘normal’ school. Nevermore is a school built for outcasts, close to the historical settlement of Jericho; it’s where the vampires, werewolves, gorgons and other supernatural misfits go. It’s also the boarding school that Wednesday’s parents attended, and she already has a reputation when she walks in; one she’d much rather defy.


Once she gets there however, she uncovers a series of mysteries. There’s a monster loose in the woods preying on people, there are secrets about her own family that she never even knew, and she’s suddenly dealing with psychic visions that obscure as much as they reveal. And as is typical in these stories, all these mysteries seem to converge. There are three types of mystery stories, the one where the investigator knows who the culprit is from the beginning, and spends time putting together enough evidence to convict. The second type is where they collect the evidence, investigate and then figure out who the villain is. This is the third type, and perhaps understandable when you have an amateur sleuth. Everyone is a suspect until proven otherwise, or killed, and a whole bunch of theories are explored before the truth is uncovered. It’s messy, but it certainly is a fun journey.


What really appeals about the show are the characters, along with the spooky and comic atmosphere. Deadpan sarcasm makes for a great title character, and Wednesday’s like a hand grenade thrown into an orderly world when it comes to the staff and students of Nevermore Academy, and the residents of the local town of Jericho. Jericho was established by the Puritans, while Nevermore is a haven for the weird, so it makes for a fractious relationship between the school and the town. There’s also a nice level of character development through the show, as while Wednesday never quite loses the perspective of an outsider looking in, she does lose that lone wolf demeanour, and starts to make some connections, and even friends, even if it’s on her own terms. She doesn’t have much of a choice, when she gets the peppiest werewolf in school, Enid as a roommate, an explosion of colour in comparison to Wednesday’s monochrome.


It’s a delectable first season, and conforming to the current television ethos, it’s exactly as long as it needs to be to tell its story, with none of the budget having to be stretched to pay for filler episodes. It’s only a sign of how good it is, that the eight episode run leaves you wanting more. But it’s here that the curse of modern television also strikes. There is a second season, scheduled for 2025. This one came out in 2022, and the discs followed after fifteen months (a short gap for a Netflix show). Will Blu-rays still be made in 2027?