In my family, "The Addams Family" is sacred. Well, let me rephrase, the early nineties films directed by Barry Sonnenfeld are sacred. As much as I appreciate and enjoy the sixties TV-series and the recent animated movies, the definite and quintessential Addams family members to me are those brilliantly portrayed by the cast of those two hilarious films: Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Christopher Lloyd as Fester, and Christina Ricci as Wednesday. Since I'm the same age as Ricci, she - as Wednesday - was my very first childhood crush. We watched either "The Addams Family" or "The Addams Family Values" once per week.

Now, this useless bit of personal background information only serves to indicate that I was both skeptically and excitedly looking forward to "Wednesday" when I found out about its existence. Excited because it's another new chapter in one of my favorite film/television sagas, and if there's one character in the Addams' family who truly deserves a spinoff, it's definitely Wednesday. Skeptical because, although immediately confident about the choice of Jenny Ortega for the titular role, I can't imagine any others playing Gomez, Morticia, and Fester. Eventually, it turned out of minor importance, as they are just making guest appearances. For the record, though, beautiful and classy Catherina Zeta-Jones as Morticia sounds like a great idea on paper but it doesn't work, for some reason, and although much more reminiscent to their originally drawn characters by cartoonist Charles Addams, Luiz Guzman (as Gomez) and Fred Armisen (as Fester) are plain terrible.

Again, though, it doesn't matter. This is about Wednesday. She's now a 16-year-old but tremendously atypical teenage girl and standing on her own feet for the first time as she gets sent off to Nevermore Academy, after getting expelled at another normal school. As the Poe-inspired name suggests, Nevermore is a school for eccentric outcasts and supernatural beings, like sirens, werewolves, gorgons, shape-shifters and whatnot. This makes the series oddly comparable to the Harry Potter film-series, especially because of the omnipresent "coming-of-age" aspects the teenage protagonists go through.

The biggest differentiator of the "Wednesday" spinoff is the story. Whereas all previous "Addams Family" films and series had thin storylines and mostly revolved around sinister characters and morbid humor, this series needed a solid enough and compelling plot to last for eight episodes. The creators mainly succeeded. At her new school, and in the neighboring town of Jericho, Wednesday hunts down a murderous creature that may or may not gets controlled by someone else. During her search, she unravels the dark pages of Jericho's pilgrimage history, stumbles upon her own parents' history at Nevermore, and develops a lot more emotional connections with peers than she wants.

The story is very good but makes use of several cheap and ancient tricks to mislead the viewer. The script desperately tries to drag you along into Wednesday's tunnel vision theories regarding the prime suspects for the monster and master. If you manage to step out of that perspective, the answers aren't too hard to find. But hey, this certainly doesn't spoil the fun. The series has a splendid youthful cast and great direction (particularly, of course, the episodes directed by none other than Tim Burton). Wednesday's stoic body language and facial expressions are priceless, not to mention her genius and wit comments, comebacks, and observations.

I can't wait for Wednesday's adventures during her sophomore year at Nevermore and, judging by the immense success of the Netflix' series, I'm not alone.