“Wednesday” is another one of Netflix’s successful exclusive series.

It is a fresh take on the 90s movie franchise The Addams Family. Jenna Ortega stars as the character, Wednesday, and she does a fantastic job at portraying the role. The show was met with heavy praise from fans and media due to its ability to encapsulate the Addams family feeling with a fresh high school drama/murder mystery feel.

The series is now three years old, having premiered in 2022, and has been the subject of numerous reviews. One very important aspect of the series is that it deals less with Latino/o/x representation despite the Addams family’s Hispanic heritage. Although subtle, the aspects of Latino culture and its representation in this series are a considerable improvement over adaptations on other platforms and media.

The first four-episode part of Wednesday’s second season will premiere on August 6. The second, with four more episodes, will launch on September 3.

The biggest deal, prior to the show’s release, was it lead star Ortega. This was severely important because up to this point the only Latino member of the Addams family was the father Gomez Addams, this time played by the well known actor Luis Guzmán.

Having several prominent characters played by people of Latino descent is very important and not done nearly enough in Hollywood. In an NPR article written by Mandalit del Barco, it states that, “USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and UCLA’s latest Hollywood Diversity Report show that Latino actors get just 7% of film leads.” Even though Latinos are the second largest demographic in the United States, at the time with 55.8 million people according to Kristin C. Moran in “The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media”, they are still underrepresented on the big screen.

The fact that Ortega is so well known in pop culture and how outspoken she has been about the importance of the Latino identity of her character made people get very excited about the strides this show could make in inclusivity.

Ortega herself stated in an interview, “Wednesday is technically a Latina character and that’s never been represented. So for me, any time that I have an opportunity to represent my community, I want that to be seen.” Ortega being as popular as she is and of Latino descent playing a character that has yet to have been portrayed as a Latina, it was bound to get Latinos that may have felt overlooked, excited.

Despite the hype surrounding this, the show itself really didn’t focus on too many aspects of Latinidad. It was definitely implied in the show that they are of Latino descent, specifically Mexican, but there aren’t many really big moments during that have to do with it.

The main one that is implied is “familismo” due to the tight nature of the Addams family. Wednesday has a close relationship with her father and even after a lot of hiccups in their relationships throughout the show they stayed very close. Wednesday is also shown to be extremely protective of her younger brother. Even the mom, who’s relationship with Wednesday is strained throughout a large portion of the show, is still shown to be close with her daughter in the end.

In addition, the topic of “machismo” was challenged in this series as the father is not shown to be the dominant member of the family and is often saved by his wife and daughter. The character Wednesday too is shown to be very independent, succeeding in finding a murder that had been causing havoc in the town. The breaking down of stereotypes and gender roles in this show is very important and is easily noticeable by the audience. Other aspects of the Latino culture though are harder to see without looking deeper.

Some critics argue that the subtle showing of the culture versus “shoving it down your throat” is better. Ortega in another interview says, “I feel like a lot of [Latinx representation in Hollywood] is very calculated diversity, in terms of how they hire people to check off a box. I do hope to see a world where we start to see Latinos being cast as everyone and not just a side character where their heritage is their entire personality.”

This feeling is shared by others who want there to be representation, but for it to be more normalized rather than forced.

Ian Kumamoto, a reporter for Huffpost, stated in his review about the Latino representation in the show that, “the recent record-shattering success of the Netflix series ‘Wednesday’ feels like a new type of win for Latinx representation at a time when the word ‘representation’ is often a stand-in for tokenism.”

Other critics argue that the show fell far short of its high expectations for Latinx representation.

“Wednesday relies on simply telling its audience that the main character is Latina and moving on,” said Nicole Froio in her review on Wednesday for Refinery 29. It is easy to see it from this point of view as a watcher of the show because it really is difficult to see sometimes the tie with Latino culture.

In my personal opinion, I believe that both of these sides have truth to them. I agree that it is better for the representation to be normalized rather than forced or just done to check off a box, but in order to do this correctly, there needs to be some type of cultural significance or representation through the characters. If they are just said to be Latino/a/x and then do nothing to represent that culture than what was the point? It is still definitely important to have more Latino actors in lead roles in media so I believe Wednesday did a great job in that sense, but there was still work to be done.

Jack Bogda, a journalism and kinesiology double major at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), contributed this article to Noticiero Móvil.

This commentary is part of the “Latinos in the Eyes of the Media” special series. In this section, Noticiero Móvil publishes pieces by UNR students that dive into films and television shows in which Latino characters, culture and norms are portrayed. The goal is to explore and illuminate how a lack of Latino representation in the media continues to promote some of the discriminatory and stereotypical practices that affect Latinos to this day in the U.S.