Wednesday: Tim Burton’s series is a hymn to the imperfect adolescence of each of us

We’ve always been used to seeing Wednesday Addams as a typically Burtonian child: thin, pale, with raven hair, sunken eyes and a black humor that seems to clash with today’s prevailing respectability. But what kind of teenager would she be? To answer could only be Tim Burton who, in his first series available on Netflix, tries to tell us about a whole new Wednesday, grappling with the first cottarelle, with a novel to complete and, above all, with a mystery to solve. However, let’s start from the beginning: Wednesday experiences the classic phase of rebellion with her parents Gomez (a little convincing Luis Guzmán) and Morticia (a great Catherine Zeta-Jones), until she is expelled from her school for throwing piranhas in the pool to punish the boy who locked his brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) in the locker. Hence the idea of ​​sending Wednesday to a boarding school full of weirdos and outcasts: the school is called Nevermore, it is the same one that Morticia attended as a girl and could represent for Wednesday a place in which to grow and test oneself.

Inside the new school, in fact, the girl – played brilliantly by Jenna Ortega, perfect not only to restore the fixity of the original character’s gaze but also to slip into it a necessary charisma to get to the end of the eight episodes – she confronts new classmates, with a principal, played by Gwendoline Christie – the Brienne of Tarth from game of Thrones – who clearly has something to hide, and with a murder to investigate. Indeed, for some time the town of Jericho near Nevermore has become the scene of gruesome killings on which Wednesday cannot fail to be involved, given that she often and willingly finds herself having psychic visions that allow her to see what will happen in the future. The friendship with her roommate Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) – who shows her a school populated, among others, by werewolves, gorgons and mermaids – and the closeness with the charming Xavier (Percy Hynes White) they help Wednesday carve out a little place for herself while waiting to become an adult.

The series created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and directed by Tim Burton – which was able to count on the extraordinary participation of Christina Ricci, who played Wednesday in the legendary two films of the Addams family of the nineties – it is indeed an ultra-dark coming-of-age storybut not far from the de vein Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and of Riverdale: in fact, we always talk about special teenagers, tormented and looking for their place in the world, forced to deal with a season of life – adolescence – among the most difficult ever and with a microcosm from which it is very easy to get out with the broken bones. However, Burton’s care, the elegance of the staging and the skill of the protagonists – Ortega above all – make this journey not interesting, but also unmissable since, beyond the black humor and the monstrous creatures that inhabit the forest – there is always a forest or a forbidden forest in the middle of fantasy, who knows why -, Wednesday and his companions are exactly like many of us: ready to put ourselves on the line to understand who we are.