The problem with Netflix's Wednesday is that one of the main things about the Addams Family is that they are counter cultural. Specifically counter to cishet, white, American, suburban norms.
Part of that is being the opposite of the shitty sitcom family where the wife is a nag, the husband is an idiot, the mother-in-law sucks, and no one seems to like each other very much. The Addamses actually love each other. There's no 'take my wife' bs. If Gomez calls Morticia a battle-axe or the ol' ball and chain he means it to be highly complimentary. There's none of the nonsense like in the pics OP posted. Gomez or Morticia lives with their mother in law (it depends on which version whose mother she is) who is literally a witch (geddit, 'my mother-in-law is such a witch...') and get on great. They genuinely and openly support, love, and care for each other through thick and thin.
But the biggest problem that Netflix's Wednesday has is that to make a really good Addams show rn would mean scrapping the Sabrina the Darksided Witch/boarding school Monster High concept, going back to basics, and having them live next to an upper-middle class, conservative values, MAGA family and letting their differences fuel the plot.
A really good Addams Family show would have Morticia fighting against book bans at the school and having hilarious misunderstandings about what her neighbour means about "Liberal witch hunts." It would celebrate queerness, and gender (and species) non-conformity because the Addamses are queer and gender non-conforming, and not always definitely human (Cousin Itt, for example). You know Fester's gender identity is probably something like 'an abomination.' If one of them gets asked, "What are you?" the answer is a prompt, "An Addams."
They would be fighting for co-ed sports so Wednesday can trounce a boy at fencing, and would find out her chromosomes are just 'spooky' or something.
There'd be an episode about immigration and being targeted by ICE. OFC several Addamses come from somewhere weird and arrived in the USA via broomstick, or tunneling from some underground community of cryptids, or other hilarious misadventure. Gomez would desperately want to be blackbagged and treated like a dangerous animal (cue a major flirting moment between him and Morticia). They would permanently scare ICE out of the town.
Wednesday would fiercely support Landback. Pugsley would get redpilled and learn a lesson real quick. Gomez would get into (and out of) Crypto, and Morticia would have run-ins with MLM 'huns.' They would advocate for freedom of religion. Granny would rally alongside Evangelicals to have religion in school, only to reveal she meant witchcraft. They would support UBI, and be anti-landlord. Easy episode idea: Gomez is a landlord and goes on a spiral about it ("But, Gomez, you love leeches and scum" "Not this kind! Morticia, they've painted everything white, in my name!!!" "No!") and they wind up in a battle with the town because he wants to unburden himself of this shame and the town wants to stop free community-owned housing.
The point is that Netflix isn't going to touch any of that with a ten foot pole. They don't want to; that's way too political for them. Instead, they made this wildly unrelated supernatural teen drama that has nothing to do with the original concept or world that the Addams Family exists in (they're outsiders in the real world, that's the point).
And, worse, Netflix's Wednesday actively goes against the original themes by being vaguely conservative in its values.
Netflix's Wednesday fails the assignment so bad I'd laugh, if it wasn't so disappointing and enraging. Just take a look at what the Mary Sue had to say about the whole "werewolf conversion camp" debacle for a microcosm of the many things wrong with this show.
"It wants to use hot-button topics like conversion therapy and colonization but it doesn’t understand how to work them into the metaphor. In fact, it barely knows how to work with the basic metaphor of “monsters” and how they function in the horror genre in general. In storytelling, the monster or the freak has always been the stand-in for the societal outcast. For the person who can’t be controlled by the dictates of polite society. They are the subtext for the outcast. But Wednesday makes the subtext text by literally splitting the characters into “outcasts” and “normies.” And yet the outcasts, the monsters and freaks who live on the fringe, are also the privileged and elite."
In my opinion, Netflix's Wednesday is wholly unworthy of the Addams name and is an outright blight on the franchise.
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