If you haven’t already watched it, you’ve likely heard about it from a friend or colleague. ‘Wednesday’, the trending Netflix Original Series starring Jenna Ortega, since its release on November 23, 2022, has been the subject of exciting fanfare. Unfortunately, for reasons we will explore in this article, Netflix chose to sacrifice Gomez and the entire predicate of the original Addams Family story in the production of this gen-z remake. While changes are expected in a remake, the transformation that has taken place within Wednesday, compared to the original Addams Family, is like a botched gender reassignment surgery.
However, despite poor castrating, excuse me, casting choices and pivoting entirely from the original premise, all of the negatives mentioned in this review are balanced by Ortega’s ability to become Wednesday. Her cold, dead, unblinking eyes, her dark disposition, and her sass-filled moxie outshine the aforementioned cringe. The acting skills of Ortega, mixed with her beauty, carries this series from start to finish.
.
By the end of this article, the mystery of why Netflix would make these decisions will be completely realized. You will arrive at a conclusion which explains their divorce from classical Addams Family lore and why Netflix has been chosen as a pulpit to push Marxist ideology instead of a company in the business of entertainment. On the bright side, despite all of the disappointments, I’d still recommend watching Wednesday.
Lord knows Netflix could use the views.
Identification of woke Marxist ideology in media is not something that comes naturally to everybody. Most seek entertainment as a way to wind down after a hard day. I highly doubt the mainstream American puts on their Inspector Gadget cap when escaping into the entertainment wonderland, chomping at the bit to discover leftist politics woven through the media.
After watching the entire series with my wife, I felt compelled to write this review — not only to illustrate these sad manifestations of leftism on Wednesday, but also to show how this has become a standard operating procedure at Netflix. Certainly, if you are not already aware, you will realize how Netflix compromises its work by forcing leftist ideology into everything. If they can make it fit, even when it hurts the final product, it will be there.
Luckily for Netflix, this series is bringing in lost viewers, most too young to understand these inconsistencies, at a time when a shot of adrenaline directly into the heart is desperately needed. Although Wednesday has animated the corpse of Netflix into something like a self-aware zombie, it is unlikely this recent hallmark will sustain the once esteemed platform for streaming.
This once dominant figure of online streaming has awakened to a new dawn filled with competition galore. Instead of recognizing this challenge and pivoting back to what made them successful, focusing on the quality of their work and not the political message within, they just doubled down on more wokeness.
The stock value for Netflix on 10/23/2021, as shown in the graph below from Yahoo Finance, was at an all-time peak. Yet only 6 months later, by May of 2022, it seemed Netlfix had died suddenly. Since Netflix is only 26 years old, maybe this is similar to the mysterious force which seems to be creating deaths for 18 to 49-year-olds who coincidentally received their 4th Covid booster. Fortunately for Netflix, myocarditis is the least of their worries post-Wednesday! On 10/10/2022, People.com ran an op-ed on the coming series, which appears to have created a meager recovery.
Since the acquisition of Netflix by the Obamas, the streaming platform has made a distinct pivot in its cross-platform messaging. Netflix began to incorporate leftism into everything it possibly could. These woke leftist elements began to increase in frequency and volume over time to the point viewers started seeking platforms not dripping in woke liberal bias.
Americans want to be entertained and would rather watch reruns of 1990s classics than sit through another Netflix series engineered for a specific subset of American political culture. In the 1990s, producers made shows and commercials that were purposefully provocative, with edgy humor, which made them entertaining. The Addams Family was a distillation of this, helping define this era of entertainment excellence. Today, Netflix couldn’t get away with the comedy genre of the 1990s. The quick-to-cancel culture woke-left cult of modern-day puritans Netflix currently serves would have them all jobless, sobbing apologies on the nightly news for their deviations from woke dogma.
I guess it is no surprise to see rumors already flying about the eagerly awaited Wednesday Season 2 NOT being viewable on Netflix. While this is true, in reality, it seems more a consequence of pure timing in regard to the recent MGM merger with Amazon. As reported by MSN.COM
As of the writing of this article, Wednesday remains watchable on Netflix. However, Wednesday might end up renewing for a second season on Amazon’s Prime Video instead. Wednesday Season 2 is heavily rumored right now to be headed to Amazon Prime Video primarily because of Amazon Studio’s merger with Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM) Studio, the producers of the show.
The $8.5 billion merger was closed back in March 2022. Amazon said then that this will not affect ongoing projects that were already in production at the time of the merger, which included Wednesday. Hence, that’s why Netflix managed to keep Wednesday for its debut.
Article at MSN.com
Why did Netflix pick a man who, in every way, is the complete opposite of the original character? Why did Netflix choose a character to play Gomez that resembles Pugsly when that lack of consistency in the original was essentially part of the episodic humor? Why did Netflix sacrifice these and many other hallmark characteristics of the original series? Will Amazon pivot on Wednesday, Season 2, on any or all of these?
In 2021, Hollywood.com released an article titled, “10 reasons Morticia & Gomez are #RelationshipGoals on ‘The Addams Family`,” where notably, on number seven, the author points out that “They both have looks that can kill.” This integral feature of the Addams lore seems to be preserved for Morticia’s character, played by the beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones, while wholesale neglected for the character of Gomez.
The casting of Luis Guzmán as Gomez Addams is the biggest letdown in the entire series. Interestingly, this is not due to poor acting or a lack of humor on his behalf. Indeed, his performance was the best he could manage, given the shoes he was assigned to fill.
The disappointment lies within the mere selection of Luis Guzmán over an actor that would better resemble the original.
donnie creekmore
The night and day contrast between Guzmán to the suave, masculine presence of the original Gomez was incredibly difficult to overcome. Suspension of belief was nearly impossible in every scene in which he was a part.
There is no doubt Jenna Ortega, like bringing Uncle Fester back from the dead, is directly responsible for forcing blood into the dying heart of Netflix. Her skillful acting and beauty, as said before, carry the entire series. Imagine how better it would have been if Netflix had chosen a more suitable companion for the role of Gomez Addams, such as Antonio Banderas.
Casting Banderas, a modern Spanish heartthrob, would have completely enshrined the original character with an actor known for his manly presence on the screen and skill for being tantalizing. Furthermore, by staying true to the original, an actor such as Banderas would have supported the character of Wednesday in a way that was completely lost with Guzmán.
It would shine a bright contrast against their overarching template of the counterintuitive teen female hero. It would conflict with the leftist idea that masculinity is somehow toxic or can be toxic, while femininity somehow can not. It would conflict with Netflix and Hollywood’s obsession with demoralizing strong male characters, as discussed by Dave Chapelle in the video below.
Another part of Wednesday they got all wrong was portraying her as a teen disgusted with the passionate displays of her parents. While this is an understandable reaction to the disgusting visual of Guzman, minus clothing, making passionate love to Morticia Addams, played here by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Alone, this stands in complete contrast to the way Wednesday and Pugsly seem completely unaware of their parents’ thirsty passion for each other in the original hit series and subsequent full-featured films. Their ignorance and blindness to their parent’s heavy petting made for consistent laughs and character development.
Had Netflix made this obvious choice of consistency with the original series and movies, they would have no doubt faced a wave of shrieking backlash from the very woke liberals they mistaking see as an adequate target market to sustain their business. The same woke leftists who can never be appeased are now claiming Tim Burton casting a black female actor to play the Siren on Wednesday are “racist.” No doubt the cries over toxic patriarchal optics would make national headlines.
All previously mentioned are, but the proverbial tip of the woke iceberg. What follows is a list of cringe-worthy political garbage that’d be better off part of other woke teenage sitcoms like “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.”
So we find it is no surprise Netflix has chosen to sacrifice the Addams Family for the pure sake of rebirthing it in an image of themselves: a virtue-signaling 26-year-old, born in the mid-’90s, who lacks any semblance of self-awareness, and who simultaneously is itself an omnipotus. It is also no surprise to see the stock value of a company conducting itself as such to be hemorrhaging customers. However, It is particularly frustrating to watch a series based on a classic show deviate so wildly from the original, and that change is predicated on nothing but political ideology and fear of being canceled.
It seems as though voting with our viewership, money, membership, and everything else we can leverage may be the only hope for humanity if it is ever to shake the demon of leftism. Until then, I suggest we hold our noses and try to suspend disbelief as best we can so we can enjoy these sad Gen-Z remakes, even only for the purpose of later discussing their gross wokeness.
0 Comments