Hacker Cinema
Wednesday
2022 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Miles Millar, Alfred Gough
Science FictionFantasyMysteryComedy
Smart, sarcastic and a little dead inside, Wednesday Addams investigates twisted mysteries while making new friends — and foes — at Nevermore Academy.
2 negative16 neutralfrom 18 commenters
Where to watch
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19 comments on Hacker News
I've gotten fooled by these fake-movie trailers before, ones made by AI and ones made of "fan edits" using the actors from other scenes. It's definitely annoying, especially when you're anticipating a film and excited to see the new trailer, it's weirdly bad or off and then you realize it's a fake trailer!
> Screen Culture had created 23 versions of a trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps by March, some of which outranked the official trailer in YouTube search results. More recent examples include HBO’s new Harry Potter series and Netflix’s Wednesday.
Also this is interesting:
> Our deep dive into fake trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on these videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros Discovery and Sony, secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI-heavy videos flowed in their direction.
https://deadline.com/2025/03/youtube-ad-revenue-fake-movie-trailer-screen-culture-1236354143/
Seriously?
The Crown, Stranger Things, Unbelievable, Russian Doll (wow, just wow), Orange Is The New Black, Narcos, Narcos: Mexico, GLOW, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Ozark, Nobody Wants This, Altered Carbon, Dirk Gently, Mindhunters, The Queen's Gambit, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. And that's my taste, there's more not to my taste like Squid Game, Wednesday, Bridgerton, etc. And not including the films, documentaries, shorts, etc. they done like Love, Death and Robots.
NPR had 3 stories last week in their NPR News Now Podcast about K-Pop Demon Hunters. Like I said it has 4 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 all in the top 10. It's the best performing movie ever on Netflix with over 236 million streams. It was so successful they actually did a run of showings on over 1,700 screens topping the box office charts for that week and grossing over 18 million in a weekend.
I'm not sure what else it would need to do besides dominate the music, box office, and streaming charts to be considered a success. It was widely covered in the news media as well. I predict that Rumi is going to be maybe the most popular costume with kids this year. My daughter and all her friends all claim they're going to be Rumi for halloween.
Stranger Things was huge, and maybe it's trailed off over the years. It never was quite as big as say Game of Thrones, but it was probably at least same tier as a Ted Lasso.
Wednesday is big as well, but hasn't dominated the work conversations as much as other shows, but I've heard it routinely mentioned in media. Wednesday Addams is also predicted as a top costume this halloween. The Wednesday dance was definitely a huge cultural meme last season.
But I guess to your point, there isn't something as big as a Game of Thrones out there right now on Netflix. But they have hit a pretty hot streak recently.
Netflix is right in its prime right now, K-Pop Demon Hunters is a smash hit and probably the biggest cultural thing going on right now, it has like 4 songs from it in the top 10. Wednesday is coming back this weekfor the end of season 2. Stranger Things is wrapping up in November,
Nobody Wants This; Bridgerton; Wednesday; Man on the Inside; 3 Body Problem; Emily in Paris; the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender; Love, Death, and Robots; How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast); Is It Cake?; Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney; and some others I’ve definitely had conversations about outside my own household.
Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent.
They also have continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
> I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.
I very much miss the shared social experience. In the 90s, you'd go to school on Monday and run down the latest X-Files episode. VCRs existed, but worst case you watched it later that night. Otherwise you missed out on the discussion.
Then the next week SNL did a parody and everyone got it because everyone saw the thing they were parodying.
Now that happens much less frequently. It still happens sometimes. When Wednesday came out, even people who hadn't seen the show knew what it was about. Same with Squid Games and Stranger Things.
If you want to see some data, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States#Series_by_year_2
The ratings share is what you want to look at. That roughly represents the percent of all households with TVs who watch a show. Look at the highest rated show for each year and what percent of people watch it.
Back in the day to be the highest rated, you had to be over 60%. Now a top rated non-sports show is maybe 10%.
Interestingly what I see now that I have my own kids is that they don't talk about scripted TV much at all -- they talk about video games and YouTube/tiktok videos that they all seem to have seen. So that seems to be where the social aspect is moving.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,800,000 CoComelon 601,200,000 Suits (2011) 599,100,000 The Blacklist 596,900,000 Manifest 581,900,000 Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000 Wednesday 507,700,000 Gilmore Girls 505,800,000 Breaking Bad 505,000,000 Queen Charlotte 503,000,000 Friends (1994) 448,500,000 Love Is Blind 439,300,000 Lucifer 434,300,000 The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000 PAW Patrol 392,300,000 New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000 Firefly Lane 342,700,000
It's a big problem because their catalog is also so spotty.
They should probably be ordering seasons in batches. Show runners don't really have much of a say, if they're told "okay we can give you one season and see how it goes" they're gonna say yes.
But in the case of 1899 was also a worse situation, to me, because the team had already proved themselves in another series (Dark) which was widely successful, except it didn't get successful until later on. These sort of series do require a bit more attention, people are not going to binge watch them like they do Wednesday. And that's okay (except apparently for Netlfix it's not okay).
And, I mean, I get it. Netflix strategy seems to be much more about optimizing a function that tries to minimize quality and maximize viewership. They literally don't care about high quality products. In fact, I would say, high quality products might even be undesirable as they might raise the bar of people's expectations.
Do you have actual evidence for that?
Because sure, if you've got Property Brothers on in the background while you do other stuff, that makes sense. You can go in and out.
But if you're watching Squid Game, or The Last of Us, or Yellowjackets, or even Wednesday -- you'd better be paying attention to every frame. Modern dramatic TV demands your full attention in a way that The Golden Girls didn't.
The idea that younger generations are binge-watching Yellowjackets while browsing TikTok doesn't make any sense.
I don't watch many sitcoms these days. Someone else mention It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If you really believe the media treats women as paragons of virtue there should be no female villains in sitcoms, right?
Velma and Clone High have women as bad as the men and female villains. Wednesday is pretty removed from it's Adams Family roots and is only occasionally a comedy, but also features at least one female villain.
The recent Beavis and Butthead made for TV movie had a subplot where a female politician is chasing Beavis and Butthead through the country and trying to murder them to cover up a scandal. That's certainly not treating women as "paragons of virtue."
I would model things differently. In particular, I disagree with point #3:
"3. Engagement is negatively related to quality."
On Netflix, the two most watched TV seasons ever were Stranger Things Season 4 and Wednesday Season 1 [1]. Both were higher quality compared to "sensitive" shows like 365 Days.
Generally, I don't think engagement is negatively correlated to quality - rather, I think it's only negatively correlated (sometimes) when we restrict the domain to the most engaging content.
If you took random samples of YouTube uploads, I'm confident you'd see a positive correlation between quality and engagement, while simultaneously finding that the highest engagement videos are not the highest quality.
I believe I've heard this called splitting tails of the distribution, where if X and Y are correlated, the highest Ys are still unlikely to be the highest Xs.
I'd amend "engagement is negatively related to quality" as "the highest engagement items are not the highest quality items", which is a much narrower claim.
[1] https://www.whats-on-netflix.com/what-to-watch/most-watched-series-movies-of-all-time-hours-watched/
No, shows actually require more work today. For example, Wednesday, is only 8 episodes but required 8 months of actual production. In comparison, Grey's Anatomy averages over 20 episodes a season (in its heyday, 27 episodes/season) but only required 6 months of production each season. (Writers who are part of the "writing room" are contracted to the show until production ends. They can write film scripts in their free time but can't work in another show's writer's room.)
The problem is that everything these days is heavily serialized, and directors and studios are far more willing to demand last-minute script changes. Because of the nature and extent of serialization, this requires significant amounts of work--often more work than the original writing, because changes have to be propagated throughout the season.
> [Fifth grade classmate] Did you watch the new Wednesday episode yesterday?
> [My kid] I could only catch the last half hour, it took a little longer than I thought to solder all the components on the TV's motherboard before I could turn it on again. The real issue is getting the forge hot enough to heat up the screwdriver I use as a soldering iron...
> 3) The lack of global hits is very strange.
Yeah, this part of the article really struck me:
> what’s really interesting is there aren’t that many global hits, meaning that everyone in the world watches the same thing. Squid Game was very rare in that way. And Wednesday looks like one of those too, very rare in that way.
I have to wonder what the problem is. I've watched more foreign-language shows in the last 3 years than in the rest of my 51 years combined thanks to shows on Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV+, etc. I'd love to see more of them, but they aren't surfacing in my searches and recommendations very frequently. I'd really like more variety in show selections. They don't even have to be big hits like Squid Games or Lupin. I'd be interested in any show that's good regardless of whether it's been a blockbuster hit.
On something like Hulu, there are tons of shows that mostly fall into Police/Medical procedural, Office-like sitcom, or Friends-like sitcom. Those are fine, and some are even pretty decent, but I'm really tired of those formats. Seeing shows about other cultures has been fascinating. And just having other types of stories is nice, too.
Another thing: both movies like M3GAN and shows like Wednesday have the prerequisite meme dance, ready for girls to replicate on TikTok.
Demographics and density matter.
1899 was a detailed slow burn, not something you could throw on in the background while you're doom scrolling and still capture 90% of. Wednesday was a shallow faux-dark drama for the kids on holiday. We watched one episode, decided it wasn't for us, watched one more just to make sure, then never picked it back up.
Minors are where the money's at. Just look at YouTube and Twitch. Content for mature audiences is effectively over.
I watched the first episode of 1899 and could see why it was cancelled. Just an amalgamation of mysteries that don't seem to have much connection.
On the other hand, I also watched Wednesday and thought it was missing a lot of what made The Addams Family great. But I guess it just wasn't made for me.
> And if other people are also reluctant to start it for the same reason, that's going to hurt the viewership... which makes it all the more likely to be cancelled! You can't win.
I don't think they look at viewership when deciding whether to cancel a show. They look at the percentage of people that continued watching more than just the first episode.
The 1899 cancellation is when I realized that Netflix has no competent strategy to rolling out shows. It was #1 and #2 on their charts for weeks, only dethroned by Wednesday, yet they cancelled it. I fear that Netflix is eventually going to just make "Fast and the Furious" quality of original content, or they will go with franchises with known names that are licensed. They created the Witcher, are pushing out another season of it (despite the lead leaving, bad reviews and backlash on direction) and have a spin off that is universally panned.
Cinema is suffering from the same thing, which is why superhero films and franchises rule the silver screen. It's not a good direction for the artform or any semblance of quality. So many great franchises were rough (or had poor TV ratings) in their first seasons that are now considered classics. From Seinfeld to Parks and Rec to X-Files to Star Trek TNG, there are countless examples.
TikTok and other social media need to be fed culture to have something to work with. Enough people watching current TV shows is what allows TikTok riffs and commentary to get popular in the first place.
Case in point, AFAIK the most recent craze on TikTok (and subsequently, on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, as these days they're downstream from TikTok and just rehashing or commenting on it) is "Wednesday dance" and other memes related to the new Addams family show on Netflix.