In the 90s and 00s, we had The Craft and The Crow, but we have not had a young, female gothic character who leads a show for decades. Until now. From her lush, black bangs to her ghostly pallor, Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams is a teen goth queen worthy of her small-screen reign.

Wednesday is beautiful, weird, and funny. She is regularly confused by the norms of life and for all of us who are puzzled by the ever-changing rules of what’s acceptable and not, she’s eminently relatable. Anyone who has survived high school, or is currently battling through their senior years, will understand Wednesday’s dilemma.

We live in a remix-remake culture with varying degrees of success in reinventing nostalgia for perpetually distracted doom-scrollers. Simply reincarnating The Addams Family would have been a wasted opportunity, and veteran director Tim Burton has gone the full mile to create a contemporary story and context for Netflix’s iteration.

Until now, Wednesday has always appeared as a child in comics, movies and animations. In Burton’s new series, Jenna Ortega is a teenage Wednesday, awkwardly navigating the savage sociocultural complexities of high school and hormones. Even with her witchy mystical powers, her esoteric sensitivities and her unusually eclectic family, Wednesday reflects any of us who have felt like perpetual outsiders. She neither relates to the sporty rich kids, nor the…