Wednesday and the Art of the Cliche
I enjoyed Wednesday on Netflix, and judging by how well the show did, I know I wasn’t the only one who did. Despite also having elements which felt inherently new, the whole show felt somehow nostalgic. Perhaps this is due to watching episodes of the various Addams family adaptations over the years. Other elements really reminded me of another teenage detective series from the early 2000s, Veronica Mars. But there’s also something more inherently familiar about the show.
When looking into how others felt about the show, I came across a few critics complaining about how cliche Wednesday was. And I think there’s a lot of truth to it. The cliches Wednesday relies on are inherently familiar and inescapable when watching it. However, unlike some of these critics, I would argue that the cliches in Wednesday are used purposefully and artfully in order to create the exact feel of the show that I felt. Netflix’s Wednesday uses cliches in order to craft a narrative that is inherently familiar, while also being able to create an interesting, diverse and different show.
When we talk about the cliche there is something inherently negative about the use of the term - its only used when talking about something that potentially shouldn’t be there. A cliche is something that points to the original author lacking some kind of original thought - a phrase or thought or trope that’s overused to a point of it being a problem. The only true difference between a common motif or a trope from that of the cliche is simply how the audience feels about it’s use.
Wednesday is full of common tropes - or cliches - that the audience will be immediately familiar with. We have the plot trope of the teenage detective. We have the protagonist who responds with deadpan witticisms, separating themselves from the community through not only the way they are but also through the way they act and what they say. Wednesday embodies the trope of the outcast - the protagonist that doesn’t fit in. She embodies this in all forms of herself. She dresses different - while all the other uniforms are black and blue, Wednesday’s is black and grey. She speaks different. Her words land more blankly and monotone, a flatness that contrasts with other people’s high emotions. Her somewhat dark academia style clothing, always in black, also contributes to her status as outcast. While others wear contemporary clothing, Wednesday’s style mixes the contemporary with vintage in such a way that makes her stand out as not quite fitting both place and time.
The outcast protagonist is fairly common across all sorts of media, and especially in urban fantasy narratives. Like a lot of urban fantasy shows, from Hilda to the Wynx Series, is an allegory for racism and xenophobia. The outside force is represented in the supernatural figure, rather than the differently skinned human, but to demonstrate how the complete outsider can still be a force for good. Wednesday uses these tropes to help represent this theme in a slightly different way while also staying true to it’s elements.
Potentially a good comparison would be another Netflix show, which started its popularity in 2016: Stranger Things. Like Wednesday, Stranger Things relies on familiar tropes and potentially cliches to tell their story. It’s not exactly groundbreaking to talk about Stranger Things’ reliance on 80’s sci-fi horror - the creators don’t exactly hide it. In fact, they try to remake exact scenes from movies like E.T. And like these movies, Stranger Things tries to tackle the conversation around the “Other”.
Even though the original elements their drawing from is from the 1980s, there were - and continue to be - similar sentiments in the Untied States in 2016. In fact, in the acceptance speech for Outstanding Performance in an Ensemble Drama Series, actor David Harbour drew the show’s primary theme out directly.
“We will repel bullies, we will shelter outcasts and freaks, those who have no home, w will get past the lies, we will hunt monsters. And when we’re lost amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals and institutions, we will - as per chief Jim Hopper - punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy what we have envisioned for ourselves and the marginalised.”
Stranger Thins achieves this by relying on tropes and commonly found motifs, but presenting them in ways which demonstrate their position. Like E.T, the outcast of Eleven is the hero and saviour, while the true horror is not the outsider, but the government itself. While 80s movies typically painted the ultimate need of protection to be middle-class white nuclear families, it’s the marginalised who are painted as the true heroes in Stranger Things - the alcoholic sheriff, the poor single mother, and the group of directly nerdy kids. The drawing on familiar movies which also questioned this position in the 80s, Stranger Things positioned itself to directly contradict the political and social movements of Trump’s America.
My initial view of Wednesday as inherently similar to Veronica Mars is actually pretty spot on for a lot of reasons. Both are quite predictable when it comes to the plot and basic feel of the shows. Both follow teenage protagonists working on mysteries while attending school. Both feature social outcasts who struggle to find a place for themselves and a community to call their own.
The similarities are present because they are not exactly novel ideas to begin with. They weren’t new with Veronica Mars, and they sure aren’t new now with Wednesday. They’re inherently familiar tropes we have come to know and love, ones that make us settle into the idea of the plot with familiarity and comfort. Like Stranger Things, Wednesday presents with a situation we are inherently familiar with, bringing on elements of nostalgia while also displaying some of the inherent problems with the things we are nostalgic over.
By showing us the disenfranchised parts of society in the 1980s, Stranger Things questions the nostalgia of the 80s being a perfect and comfortable time for families. Similarly, Wednesday works to break down the nostalgia of the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s first choice was in choosing Wednesday as our protagonist. And yes, the Addams family has been around for more than just the 90s. The comics were started far before this in the 1930s. However, it wasn’t until the 90s that the Addams family came to television screens and started it’s rise in popularity in common mainstream pop culture. In fact, the television series stripped the original comic of some of it’s more scary elements and presented it as more kooky than spooky, to borrow a phrase. A series of movies also helped to propel the characters into popular consciousness - a strange family of spooky characters who also, inherently, loved each other as a family unit.
For those who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, the Addams family was a familiar sight, even if you didn’t watch the show itself. Like a lot of cartoon sitcoms, it took the nuclear family unit as the source of the show and the drama, but by depicting a strange and gothic family that also inherently loved one another - especially the clear love and attraction that exists between Morticia and Gomez - was a strange flipping of the typical narrative of tensions and underlying anger between family members.
By also displaying tropes of the teenage detective, we also fall into the familiarity and nostalgia of shows like Veronica Mars. But like Stranger Things, Wednesday flips some of the elements of this trope. For one, the intensity of Wednesday’s otherness compared to her classmates is far more direclty drawn than Veronica Mars. This is partly due to different narrative reasons for difference - Veronica was ostracised after being popular for a time, while Wednesday never really experienced popularity to begin with. This means that Wednesday’s otherness is even more felt when put in a directly urban fantasy narrative of other “outcasts” as they are called - or, in other terms, supernatural creatures. Wednesday is not ever detailed or depicted in similar ways to her supernatural classmates, though does experience visions. And yet, she often feels like she is an outcast among outcasts.
While occasionally pointing to issues of racism, Wednesday’s primary focus of otherness is on the LGBT community. This is pointed out more inherently. The first time we see this is in the rounding up and persecution of the outcast community by Christian groups - something that could be referring to many different groups, but is felt in our current society strongly by many in the LGBT community. Enid also faces a common issue for LGBT kids when her mother suggests taking her to conversion therapy for her werewolf problem, something that even Enid points out as wrong and terrible. Ms Weems also is appalled when Wednesday confronts her about what someone’s supernatural background was and argued that she never asks for her students to define themselves. In fact, when Lady Gaga, a huge gay icon, re-enacted Wedneday’s famous dance scene on TikTok, Netlfix shared the video, captioning it as “Mother Monster has arrived at Nevermore” referring simultaneously to the monsterous nature of the school while also paying homage to Gaga’s referral of her fanbase as “monsters” because of their typical marginalisation from society. While not being overt about the gay experience directly, Wednesday is able to draw connections of monstrosity often felt by the LGBT community - a monstrosity put onto them by outward society, making them outcasts.
Wednesday would not have been as successful of a show if it didn’t rely on the tropes and cliches we have come to recognise and find comfort in. What makes Wednesday interesting isn’t the use or not use of tropes, but rather the interpretation put on a commonly used motif. The nostalgia of both the plot and the characters help us to find comfort in something that is making a larger statement about the discomfort of our contemporary society. The hate has not gone away from the town surrounding the school, and unlike Veronica Mars, there is no reason given for the hate from the town. This is because it’s echoing hate that is often not given reason.
The use of kids as protagonists is important as it demonstrates hate as a learned behaviour, rather than something that is inherent. Teenagers are young enough to still change their mind as they slowly become adults, but also have already been given the innate hate from their parents through learned behaviour. We see the struggle of this in the very cliche prom episode, when Lucas Walker, the son of the mayor, spends enough time with Enid and the other outcasts to feel like they’re also just teenagers like him. The coming of age narrative, something that in itself is a trope, is one which is a process of unlearning.
So yes, Wedneday is full of cliches. But that doesn’t make it necessarily bad. In fact, without these I don’t think the show would have been nearly as successful as it was. Tropes are tropes for a reason, cliches are overused for a reason: we find comfort in them. Narratives structures like the Hero’s Journey or the 3 Act structure are structures that give us comfort, and what makes up these structures is also important. Wednesday relies on this comfort to craft what matters most to the show itself, and to lull their viewers into a sense of ease. And this ease is important to make sure the audience is on the show’s side when it comes to their primary statements about outcasts and the Other.
While Wednesday is full of cliches, it’s also full of cliches for a reason. And I say, bring on more of it all.