top of page
Search

Wednesday, Discovery, and the Problems of Recalibrating in the Streaming Era

Star Trek: Discovery - People in navy uniforms with badges stand on a futuristic starship bridge, displaying serious expressions. The setting is metallic and sleek.
Star Trek: Discovery

The first season of Star Trek: Discovery was, to put it bluntly, terrible. But unlike many other internet dwellers, a terrible first season wasn’t enough to make me totally lose hope in the project. Star Trek: The Next Generation is widely beloved these days as a television classic—so much so that we mostly politely forget just how unwatchable it was for almost two whole seasons (and remember, this was back when TV seasons were over 20 episodes! At least Discovery only made us suffer through 14 at most).


The difference is, Star Trek: The Next Generation came from an era of TV where shows were given more space to evolve, retool and recalibrate themselves. Watching the first three seasons of TNG, you can feel the show inching its way towards the version we all know and love through trial and error. On the surface, it’s the same show as always—the crew of the starship Enterprise going planet to planet on diplomatic or humanitarian missions, or just to discover what’s out there—but on a deeper level, the show was subtly evolving.


Discovery, meanwhile, came out in the streaming era, where that kind of evolution just doesn’t happen. If anything, the opposite happened: on a surface-level, you’d be forgiven for thinking the show was in a state of constant evolution given how frequently and dramatically it changed its core concept: going from a prequel to a show set in the far future, for instance. But on a deeper level, the same storytelling and writing pitfalls persisted no matter how many new coats of paint were used.


It reminded me of the Jodie Whittaker seasons of Doctor Who; the first of which made a concerted effort to only feature new aliens, new villains, and generally abstain from the established continuity of the program whenever possible, whereas the second season brought back multiple classic villains, and made enormous changes to decades-established lore. If you describe what happens in the show you might assume two completely different writing teams worked on the seasons, but actually watching them, you can feel it’s the same creative team, because the same fundamental issues of writing and characterization persist.


I was thinking about this a lot while watching the second season of Wednesday, the Netflix show focusing on the youngest member of the Addams Family. A spinoff/reboot of the popular cartoonist institution, the first season of the show focused on Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday as she was enrolled in Nevermore Academy: a Hogwarts-like school for magical misfits and outcasts, where she finds herself embroiled in a mystery and has to save the school from a terrifying monster.


Right away, there are huge issues with that premise. The whole gag of the Addams Family, going all the way back to the original New Yorker cartoons, is seeing the way this macabre family of gothic-horror freaks contrast against the mundane normalcy of the world around them: sending Wednesday Addams to a school full of werewolves, sirens and vampires feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes them work.


What’s more, Wednesday Addams is the wrong family member to put in a “save the school” plot. The character has undergone changes over the years, beginning as a wan and woeful child in the original cartoons before evolving into the snarky and sadistic version from the movies that most people are familiar with today. That’s the version that the Wednesday series draws the most inspiration from, with Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday herself often voicing how little she cares about the people around her and how much she enjoys suffering.


So then, why is she a hero? Why put her in a story where she has to save the day? More specifically, why does she choose to save the day? This isn’t an interesting contradiction born out of character, like how Agent Scully in The X-Files is an avowed skeptic while also being a woman of faith. This simply doesn’t make sense for her character; and that’s before she’s placed into the love triangle. Wednesday Addams, in a love triangle with two boys who seem like they came right out of a YA novel. There’s the potential for a great dark joke there, or at least a clever way to contrast her away morbidity with their normalcy, but the show never makes it.


Additionally, there are all the expected problems that typically accompany streaming shows: episodes blend together in a haze, with individual moments standing out (there’s a dance at a prom that became pretty popular on social media) but no structure to make the episodes themselves memorable. 


Season two, which dropped in parts between August and September (because Netflix refuses to bite the bullet, admit that binge releases have been a disaster for them, and just drop episodes weekly like they so clearly want to at this point) made piecemeal solutions to address these problems. 


There’s no love triangle, for one. There’s also the increased presence of the rest of the Addams clan around campus, effectively staving off the critique of the first season that it was just unrelated magic school fanfic that happened to star Wednesday Addams. Putting Morticia and Gomez on the PTA is the best possible use for those characters.


But it wasn’t enough. Like with Discovery, it’s another streaming service that made surface-level cosmetic changes without addressing the core issues of the show; namely, the writing and structure. The “freedom” of Netflix episodes to be any length has led to a total abandonment of the usual three-act structure characteristic of broadcast network TV shows: and it turns out that without that structure serving as a helpful backbone, quite a few writers turn out to be hacks.


Moreover, there’s the issue that streaming, fundamentally, doesn’t give creative teams enough time to actually make the kinds of episode-to-episode changes that used to be possible. It’s not profitable in the short term, which means in the eyes of Netflix executives, it’s not worthwhile in the long run. 


As should be obvious, this is completely untenable. Netflix has been experiencing a total artistic collapse for a while now, and it’s hard to imagine a literal collapse is too far behind; we all know what they say about ventures that are too big to fail. Like I said, they’ve been inching towards a total abandonment of the disastrous dump-whole-seasons-at-once model, but until they embrace more classic models of TV production—which is to say, put some structural constraints back on their TV shows—the best case scenario for them is, unfortunately, Wednesday season two.



Edited by Tatenda Dlali


Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.  



Disclaimer


Any facts, views, or opinions are not intended to malign and/or disrespect any religion, group, club, organization, company, or individual.  

This article published on this website is solely representative of the author. Neither the editorial staff nor the organization (Political Pandora) are responsible for the content.  


All illustrations in this piece, if any, are original works created exclusively by the Design Department of Political Pandora.  


These illustrations are protected and are not available for replication, reproduction, or redistribution in any form without explicit written consent from Political Pandora. Unauthorized use, including but not limited to copying, modifying, or redistributing, is strictly prohibited.  


Photographs in this particular article, if any, are taken from external sources and are not a property of Political Pandora. The use of these images is not meant for commercial purposes.  


While we strive to present only reliable and accurate information, should you believe that any information present is incorrect or needs to be edited, please feel free to contact us.



References:






Keywords: Star Trek Discovery, Streaming Era, Netflix Model, Wednesday Addams, Addams Family, TV Structure, Binge Releases, TV Writing, Characterization, Love Triangle, Morticia Gomez, Storytelling, Episode Length, Creative Teams, Streaming Shows, Season Two, TV Critique, Narrative Arc, Show Structure, Series Reboot

Comments

Join the 
Pandora Community

Join Political Pandora! We offer exciting opportunities for passionate youth.

 

Publish your work on a global platform with an engaged audience, often cited in academic research. Your voice matters—be part of the conversation!

bottom of page