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Perhaps most important to its success, however, was the sharp casting of Ortega as a now teenage Wednesday Addams. Ruthlessly brutal in her deadpan comic timing and literally unblinking in her thousand-yard death stare in every scene, Ortega seemed to fulfill the character’s destiny of becoming a Goth icon, as well as create an impressive star turn for the young actor. Genuinely, we expect Wednesday’s already viral dance sequence in the first season to become the stuff of Halloween party legend, which is all the more impressive since Ortega apparently choreographed the entire scene herself at Burton’s urging.
The show’s success also seems to come at a pivotal moment for Netflix as the streamer’s search for “the next Stranger Things” is reaching a precarious moment. While Stranger Things is expected to expand into a larger shared universe, as per its creators the Duffer Brothers, spinoffs are never a guarantee for continued success. And similar attempts to mix genre trappings, including horror, with YA storytelling and buckets of nostalgia has proved elusive in garnering a massive audience for multiple streaming shows, be it by way of Netflix’s own The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (which was a clear influenc on Wednesday) or Amazon’s deceased Paper Girls.
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While Wednesday is a different animal than Stranger Things, with the new show being both more cartoonish (as befitting its source material) and more formulaic in its serialized YA storytelling, it has struck a pop culture nerve in its first week of release. One might even wonder if the nostalgia for The Addams Family—as in the 1991 movie and its immediate sequel two years later—is stronger than folks realized, with those films hitting the same 30-year anniversaries that strengthened the appeal Stranger Things’ earliest touchstones, such as Ghostbusters, E.T., and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Or maybe folks just like Ortega’s dance moves?
Either way, Wednesday’s early success suggests Netflix’s days of dominating the streaming wars with a water cooler show that appeals to multiple generations and demographics are not behind them just yet. That’s something to snap your fingers about.