Wednesday

Netflix ★★★★☆

I don’t know what the world’s coming to. You denude one bullying high-school jock of a testicle (at a swim meet, with piranhas) and then you’re packed off to a boarding school full of weirdos and outcasts.

This is the fate of Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega, above) in the opening scenes of the latest Addams Family reinvention, part horror story and part murder mystery but mostly a coming-of-age tale with classic tropes of high-school drama.

Wednesday is sent to Nevermore Academy, where preppy roommate Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) gives her a tour of the school’s cliques and introduces some characters that will become central to the mysteries Wednesday will investigate. The show’s main director, Tim Burton, gives the whole thing the eldritchtinged aesthetic it needs

It loses something by not setting Wednesday against normality and by having a more fissured version of the Addams clan. But it has enough wit, charm and propulsive energy for that not to matter. Certainly, the 11-year-old I keep on hand to test programmes aimed at the younger demographic was rapt for the whole series.