news How Netflix’s Wednesday became a pop culture phenomenon | US television

It's official: Wednesday, the Netflix Addams Family reboot directed in part by Tim Burton, is a smash hit. Just three weeks after its release, the young adult series has racked up

a staggering billion hours' worth of views, a Netflix benchmark surpassed only by Squid Game and Stranger Things 4.Consequently, social media feeds have also been clogged by fans

(Lady Gaga included) in their best Wednesday Addams cosplay. The children of TikTok have been diligently recreating her Siouxsie and the Banshees-inspired performance, in which

star Jenna Ortega's now-viral choreography to the Cramps' 1981 cover of Goo Goo Muck may have single-handedly revived Gothic subculture for Gen Z (the series also picked up two

major Golden Globe nominations this week).Given the incalculable hours fans have spent analyzing Wednesday's outfits, dance moves and lip color (a dark berry liner diluted with

clear gloss, according to a few beauty influencers), entertainment execs everywhere are asking themselves: what's the magic formula that propels such viral popularity ? Following

Netflix's dismal year of plummeting stock value and lost subscribers, Wednesday arrives as a mixed bag of surefire storylines with a little something for everyone. This is a

supernatural, coming-of-age, murder-mystery young adult comedy, where Ortega, officially the It Girl of the moment, plays the daughter of a familiar and beloved TV family.

Wednesday is both the underdog misfit and the hottest girl in school, the product of the unlikeliest of mergers: think Addams Family meets Emily in Paris, sprinkled with a heavy

dose of Harry Potter.In the first episode, we see our titular protagonist's expulsion from her normie suburban high school, after unleashing a few bags of piranhas on the high

school water polo team. It's retribution for her little brother's bullying, she makes sure to let them know. “No one tortures my brother but me.” With a ready arsenal of barbed

quips and erudite comebacks, Wednesday transfers to Nevermore Academy, a remote boarding school for marginalized fangs, furs, stoners and scales. She's the perfect student –

​​a gifted polyglot, cellist, novelist and fencer (all talents that contradict a public school education) – but still, she finds herself “an outcast in a school of

outcasts”, a committed misanthrope who bristles at human contact.“Sartre said hell is other people,” she tells her therapist. “He was my first crush.”You could succinctly

describe Nevermore as Hogwarts styled by the CW, and Wednesday's narrative arc as goth Emily in Paris. Like Emily, an outsider at a new job, Wednesday's an outsider at a new