Some spoilers below.
Wednesday Addams is not like other girls. Portrayed by Jenna Ortega in Netflix’s Addams Family spin-off series, she’s a goth oddball from a loving family of fellow oddballs, and they don’t care about fitting in (or even seem to notice when they don’t).
After months of buzz and anticipation, Wednesday is now streaming, and with only eight episodes in the first season, viewers are wondering if there might be another one coming up to complete her story. After all, she does type, “The End?” at the last episode.
Here’s what we know about a possible second season.
Has Wednesday been renewed for season 2?
Not officially. Co-creator Alfred Gough shared in an interview that he and collaborator Miles Millar have been discussing it.
“Miles and I are talking amongst ourselves about it. There’s definitely more that you can explore in the world of the Addamses,” he said.
That hints at the alternative direction the show could take; potentially, there could be a series for every character in the family. In another interview with Vanity Fair, Millar and Gough explained they didn’t want Wednesday to be seen as a “reboot of the Addams Family.”
The show focuses on “what happened before” with the family and it was important to them while working with executive producer Tim Burton that the project be something new.
“That’s something that was very important to the show—that it didn’t feel like a remake or a reboot,” Millar said. “It’s something that lives within the Venn diagram of what happened before, but it’s its own thing. It’s not trying to be the movies or the ’60s TV show. That was very important to us and very important to Tim.”
Instead of a season 2 of Wednesday, we could get a first season of Morticia, for example. The show does give us a glimpse of passionate lovers Morticia and Gomez as teens and the terrifying murder mystery that was a part of their story.
What would Wednesday season 2 be about?
The Addams Family as a concept has been around for a long time, so there’s a lot of material to mine from. They began as cartoons created by Charles Addams in 1938 that were published in the New Yorker. From there, the comics became a popular TV show in the ’60s, and eventually were made into movies in the ’90s, which is probably where most of us recognize the characters from—especially Wednesday, who was played in the films by Christina Ricci. Ricci even makes a guest appearance on the show as a call back to her original role, except this time she’s the villain.
The 2022 slice of life series follows Wednesday Addams as she arrives at her new school, Nevermore Academy. She has newfound psychic abilities and supernatural powers, and there are some mysteries at her school and in her town to unravel, including monsters, mayhem, and murder. Nevermore and its amazing set design have been pretty central to the show and Wednesday did just start classes, so we would probably see a continuation of the Nevermore mysteries and general teen antics of a boarding school.
But the threads the show sets up in the last few moments of the eighth episode include a renewal of Wednesday’s rivalry with the school’s popular Siren, Wednesday receiving threatening anonymous texts from her “first stalker,” and a shot of Tyler transforming into his Hyde persona in the back of a black van. We have a new villain and a continuation of another monster’s story, which could be interesting to explore in a potential second season.
Who will be in the cast?
If season 2 is greenlit, Jenna Ortega will definitely need to come back as Wednesday, as well as her parents Gomez and Morticia Addams, played by Luis Guzmán and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The season 1 the cast also included Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester, Isaac Ordonez and George Burcea, with Christina Ricci and Gwendoline Christie as new characters from outside the family. Christie’s character as Nevermore’s principal meets an untimely end, so she probably won’t be back. On the other hand, this is a world full of ghosts. As for Ricci’s Ms. Thornhill, she is seemingly swarmed by bees later in the season, so that could be the last we see of her.
There are several iconic characters from the Addams world who still have not been cast, including Grandmama, and Cousin Itt. And the creators can always add new characters at their discretion, so there are probably some fun announcements and cameos ahead if Netflix gives us a season 2.
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.