Did you watch the first season of Netflix‘s Wednesday and come away wishing for more mystery and less humor, more of the secondary members of the Addams family and less of Jenna Ortega‘s Emmy-nominated performance, more of the supernatural world of outcasts and less of the real world for contrast?

It’s OK not to remember exactly. Wednesday premiered nearly three years ago, a duration also known as “adolescence” for most of the underaged supporting cast.

Fortunately, and conveniently, few of the specific plot details from that well-received season are all that relevant. There are enough expositional reminders here for a general catch-up, but the truth is that the new season of Wednesday is so generic that my biggest challenge was separating my memory of the first season from nearly identical dynamics that played out in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the overall run of Harry Potter. 

Going back to my first paragraph: I think it’s completely legitimate to have had those particular preferences, in which case the first four episodes of this two-part Wednesday season will probably satisfy you. But if you found most of the appeal of the first season to be Ortega’s breakout performance, a few of the supporting turns and residual traces of Tim Burton‘s darkly comic eccentricity, this is a large letdown. It’s more of the same, only more convoluted and less Ortega-y — which, I assume, was what the busy young thespian wanted, but not what this viewer hoped for.

The Alfred Gough and Miles Millar-scripted premiere catches us up on Wednesday’s summer vacation, which involved refusing to edit her novel, mastering her psychic abilities and using them to track down a serial killer. Sure. Why not?

Autumn brings Wednesday back to Nevermore Academy, where she has become a school-wide celebrity after her killer-catching summer and all the various things that happened last season. Wednesday’s roommate and bestie Enid (Emma Myers, the first season’s other breakout) apparently spent her summer doing werewolf things and exploring new love (Noah B. Taylor as a character whose name might as well be Fresh Love Interest), but she’s happy enough with her pal’s notoriety. 

Wednesday, unsurprisingly, is less pleased to be famous and even less pleased than that to be used as a school mascot by Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi), the just-arrived Dumblebore to this Slogwarts. She’s more pleased that bodies are starting to pile up in the community of Jericho — odd things make Wednesday happy — all with their eyes plucked out by crows and most with some connection to Wednesday. 

Adding to Wednesday’s discomfort — which isn’t nearly as funny this time around — is the injection of the entire Addams clan into the Nevermore scene. Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), who shoots electricity from his fingertips, is now an enrolled student, for whatever reason. Meanwhile, Principal Dort has decided that the key to his crucial fundraising initiative is getting money from Morticia’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones) apparently wealthy mother, and that the best way to do that is to put Morticia in charge of the fundraising committee, and the best way to do that is to put Morticia up at an on-campus cottage. Gomez (Luis Guzman) has nothing else to do, so he’s there too.

So whereas my original review of the first season praised Wednesday for having the restraint and focus to not simply become The Addams Family… Wednesday has simply become The Addams Family, complete with a recast, still underutilized, Lurch (Joonas Suotamo) and the always handy Thing (Victor Dorobantu). Only Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) hasn’t become a full-time member of the ensemble, but he appears in the “midseason” “finale” (words have lost all meaning).

Though a bunch of key characters from last season’s murder mystery have been written out or written into guest appearances, there are lots of new additions, including Billie Piper as a music teacher; Thandiwe Newton as a doctor at a nearby asylum (with Heather Matarazzo as an administrator at the same asylum); Christopher Lloyd as a head-in-a-jar; and, in the non-stunt-casting department, wide-eyed Evie Templeton as Wednesday’s No.1 fan. 

Even if Burton hadn’t already made a movie celebrating his appreciation of big eyes, you’d know that Templeton is the director’s preferred brand of ingenue, and she stands out from the frantically overstuffed cast. Along those lines, it’s a true puzzlement that Buscemi and Burton have only worked together on 2003’s Big Fish, though this underwritten role isn’t the best fodder for collaboration.

I can’t think of any more damning criticism for these four new episodes of Wednesday that, just two days after watching them, I legitimately can’t remember anything that Wednesday is trying to accomplish this season, nor any single withering line of dialogue. Though the one-liners were rarely as sharp as they should have been in the first season, they were reliably low-level clever and the show got tremendous mileage out of putting Wednesday in one un-Wednesday situation after another, peaking with the dance scene, one of those extraordinarily rare instances of a moment that was instantly iconic. 

The second season doesn’t attempt to immediately reproduce the dance scene, and thank heavens for that. But nothing so far has counted as the equivalent of that scene or an attempt to one-up that scene. With the possible exception of one stunt in the third episode, almost all of the “Wouldn’t it be funny if Wednesday…” brainstorming seems to have run dry. Wednesday has been reduced to a psychic gumshoe prone to seizures and crying blood (or unnamed black fluid) from the overuse of her powers. Ortega’s deadpan remains impeccable and her mournful gaze allows for viewer projection that goes beyond anything on the page, but Wednesday too often comes across as a piece of an ensemble at this point.

And as for the over-Addams-ing of the second season, I’m afraid that as much as I enjoyed Zeta-Jones and Guzman’s horny interpretations of Morticia and Gomez in their original guest turns, giving them more screen time has not, in fact, made either performance more interesting. In fact, re-contextualizing all of the Addams relatives into an exceptional world, in which what once made them creepy, kooky and altogether ooky is commonplace, drains them of any distinction at all. The family isn’t funny because they’re horror-friendly oddities; they’re funny because they’re horror-friendly oddities plunked in a mundane world. 

Contrast is funny. Season two of Wednesday has no contrast. It’s acceptably gloomy — production and costume design on the show remain top-notch — and sporadically droll, and when you’re seeing the world through Tim Burton’s eyes (he directed two of these four episodes), there will always be off-kilter treasures like the animated urban legend in the premiere. But the thing that’s most surprising about season two of Wednesday is how quickly Wednesday appears to have run out of surprises.