What would it take to get me to resubscribe to Netflix, which I put on pause two months ago?
Yeah, that'll do it.
That's the first six minutes of the second season, apparently, which makes it one heck of an in media res opening, if true. Also hooky as hell. It's like a series of riffs on the character but then that's what the entire Addams Family franchise is built on, so give the people what they want I guess.
It's certainly what I want although I was very suspicious at the start. I'm not a big fan of plotlines involving serial killers and it seemed a bit off-brand for Wednesday. The six minute clip sold it, though. Now I'm wondering if the plan is to transition Wednesday into some kind of crime show: Wednesday Addams - Psychic P.I. That would be a swerve.
Nah. I think we're good. Back to school we go. Wednesday Season 2 starts tomorrow.
Of course, the other thing that would have gotten me to re-sub would have been the final series of Stranger Things, now due in the autumn, I believe. I came very late to that one. It had been going for a couple of seasons before I started watching (Didn't have Netflix before then.) and it turned out to be nothing like I expected.
Stranger Things has such a long, convoluted narrative arc I really ought to do some kind of a rewatch before it starts up again. But who has the time? Even this super-condensed catch-up compilation for just one season of Wednesday is twenty minutes long!
That's the thing about TV series - they take soooo loooong to re-watch. Which is one reason I'm becoming increasingly fond of novelizations. It's a form so disrespected it barely merits contempt in literary quarters, where its very existence is seldom acknowledged. It's something the authors who work in the field appear to find exhillaratingly liberating.
The more adaptations and spin-off novels I read, the more I come to realize how much I've been missing by ignoring them all these years. As I said back in February, I recently read the three adaptations of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a show I very much wished had lasted longer than the four seasons Netflix allowed it, and they were excellent. So were most of the Buffy novels I read.
Curiously, all of the shows I've named so far, with the possible exception of the Roswell twins, are more than arguably part of the broader horror genre. Although I have always said - and believed - that I don't like "horror". I'm slowly coming to realise that doesn't seem to be a position well-supported by the evidence.
Indeed, it was only in the last couple of weeks, as I was digitizing and editing one of the two novel-length pieces of fiction I wrote in the 'nineties, that it occured to me both of those could quite reasonably be described as at the very least horror-adjacent, if not straight-up genre horror. There's certainly a lot of ritual and blood magic, demonic possession and vampirism going on, anyway. Weird I never noticed it at the time. I think I thought I was writing urban fantasy.
SciFi, horror and super-hero TV shows often end up being adapted into video games too, although I would suspect with considerably less artistic success than most novelizations. The stakes there must be many orders of magnitude higher - it costs a lot to make a video game, a lot of people are involved and visibility is very high. Spin-off novels, by contrast, cost next to nothing to produce, have only a couple of people making the decisions on what goes into them and release to a deadening critical silence, even if they sell really well.
With that in mind, I wouldn't put a great deal of confidence in the quality of the proposed video games Netflix is reportedly planning to spin up out of some of its most successful properties, Stranger Things among them. I'm sure we'd all love a Secret World style game set in the Stranger Things universe but I somehow don't think that'll be what we get.
All the same, best to never write anything off until you've had a good look at it. That's a lesson I'm learning all the time.
Apparently I like horror now. Who knew?
Certainly not me.
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