I wasn't expecting much. My wife watched the first episode and told me this was great, I have to watch it. It had all the hallmarks of a bad Netflix reboot. We're going to take an old franchise, refocus on a young female character, introduce a bunch of new characters, and make something entirely unlike the window dressing of the franchise we're using to trick you into watching it.

And it is exactly that. But it's actually good! Apparently you CAN do all of that, and it doesn't have to be horrible.

The title character Wednesday is portrayed very well by Jenny Ortega, who manages to be funny and charismatic in the role while being true to Wednesday's dark and angsty personality.

The plot is interesting and the mysteries of the show are engaging and satisfying. Even the teen drama aspects, which I was fully prepared to cringe at, were handled well. The characters felt like real people dealing with real problems, even when they were silly supernatural creatures dealing with ridiculous supernatural problems. Even when the interactions carried obvious "social justice" messages, it didn't feel preachy or like some school anti-bullying video.

The only big negative for me was that the show seemed to have a hard time with the balancing act between Wednesday's character as an antisocial psychopath who loves death and murder, and the fact that Wednesday is also supposed to be our protagonist who's really a good person and cares about everybody and does the right thing, the nice thing, etc. There were a few moments when I found myself thinking, "okay, so she's a actually a big sweetheart pretending to be Wednesday Addams."

But overall, loved this, and I was pleasantly surprised.