FRESH BLOOD

Netflix's smash-hit series Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega as its eponymous macabre heroine, has returned for a second series, with new arrivals Joanna Lumley and Steve Buscemi in tow... expect spellbinding performances all round

- By Gabrielle Donnelly

THE TEENAGE Addams girl is back, and this time, she’s more Wednesday than ever. It’s a new season of Wednesday, the popular spoof horror TV show featuring the macabre teenage daughter of the proudly grotesque Addams family, and a new term at Nevermore Academy, the elite New England boarding school for children with, let us say, a particular variety of complex needs.

In part one of the second series, which began streaming, fittingly, on Wednesday this week, our eponymous star — played once more by 22-year-old Jenna Ortega — is returning to the school a heroine, having saved it from a monster and thwarted a plot that would have resulted in the destruction of the entire student body.

Being Wednesday, she does not take well to the adulation. “I only sign my name in blood,” she snarls to a group of autograph-seekers, adding pointedly: “I never said it was my own blood.”

Besides, she soon has other matters than irritating fans taking up her attention. There is, for instance, a mysterious stalker who follows her everywhere. Then there’s the grisly killings executed by the murder of crows that has suddenly appeared on and around the school grounds.

She also has alarming visions of the death of her perky werewolf roommate Enid. But most disturbing of all, her parents, Morticia and Gomez Addams, have moved into a cottage on the school grounds while Morticia is acting as chair for the upcoming Nevermore Gala...and along the way keeping a maternal eye on Wednesday, who she thinks is working too hard on her magic to the detriment of her health.

A recipe for conflict? Absolutely. But that, says Morticia — better known off-screen as Swansea’s own Catherine Zeta-Jones — is often what families are all about.