Wednesday Addams is the rare Halloween costume that three generations recognize from three different actresses: Lisa Loring on ABC in 1964, Christina Ricci in two 1990s films, and Jenna Ortega on Netflix since 2022. Netflix wrapped filming on the third season of Wednesday on 30 September 2026 and has put the new episodes in 2027, so this October the braids belong to Ortega again.1
The 14 rankings below hold her as a costume, a goth icon, a dancer, a sitcom kid, a child film role and a Netflix series that the Emmys filed under comedy.
Wednesday Addams is three characters sharing one pair of braids, and almost every list on this page has room for only one of them.
Wednesday Addams vs Ghostface: the costume with no mask
The Halloween costume ranking is mostly masks and monsters: Ghostface, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Pennywise, Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. Wednesday Addams is the only option on it that is a person with her face showing.
That is the whole appeal. The costume is two braids, a white collar and a black dress, and most of it can come out of an ordinary wardrobe. The silhouette has barely changed since the 1964 sitcom, which is why a costume built for Ortega's version reads as Ricci's and Loring's too.
Ghostface has the opposite case. It is one mask from one film series, worn by a different killer in almost every Scream movie, and it works because nobody has to recognize the face underneath.
The bedsheet ghost and the witch are the oldest options here. Both are cheaper than either of them.
341 million hours: Wednesday and Stranger Things on Netflix
The best Netflix original series ranking holds 22 shows, and two of them share a record. Wednesday logged 341.23 million hours viewed in its premiere week in November 2022, and by early December Netflix called it the third most popular English-language series it had ever released, behind Stranger Things 4 and Dahmer.2
Stranger Things is the natural rival. It owns the 1980s small-town horror template Wednesday borrows from, ran for nearly a decade, and ended with a fifth season.
Wednesday's case is speed. It reached that audience with eight episodes and a lead character who started life in New Yorker cartoons.
Most of the other 20 shows are prestige drama: The Crown, Ozark, Mindhunter, Dark, Narcos and Squid Game.
Buffy, Veronica Mars, Eleven: Wednesday among TV's teenagers
The greatest TV teenage characters ranking is 44 names long, and it spans Kevin Arnold to Rue Bennett. Wednesday Addams entered it late. For most of her screen life she was a little girl, and only the Netflix series made her a high-school student at Nevermore Academy.
Buffy Summers is the obvious comparison. Sarah Michelle Gellar's vampire slayer also spent her teens fighting monsters at school, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer set the rules every supernatural teen show since has followed.
The difference is temperament. Buffy wanted a normal life; Wednesday treats normal life as the threat.
Veronica Mars, Eleven and Rory Gilmore are also here, each a teenage detective or prodigy of a kind.
Wednesday Addams vs Lydia Deetz: Tim Burton's two goth girls
The greatest goth characters ranking collects twelve figures in black, among them Elvira, Lily Munster, Eric Draven of The Crow and Lisbeth Salander. Lydia and Wednesday share a director.
Tim Burton made Beetlejuice in 1988, and Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz introduced herself as "strange and unusual". Burton returned to the type 34 years later, directing four episodes of Wednesday's first season.
The two characters have since merged on screen. Ortega played Lydia's daughter, Astrid, in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in 2024, and Ryder joins the Wednesday cast for season 3.1
Morticia Addams is the elder of the group, and the most likely to argue that her daughter learned all of it at home.
"Goo Goo Muck": the Wednesday dance and the Carlton
The most iconic TV dance scenes ranking puts Wednesday's Rave'N dance next to the Carlton, Elaine Benes's "little kicks" in Seinfeld and Monica and Ross's Routine in Friends.
Jenna Ortega built the routine herself for episode four, "Woe What a Night", set to The Cramps' "Goo Goo Muck". She told NME: "I choreographed that myself! I'm not a dancer and I'm sure that's obvious."3
The Television Academy nominated Wednesday for Outstanding Choreography for Scripted Programming in 2026, for season 2.4
Alfonso Ribeiro's Carlton is the closest match. Set to Tom Jones's "It's Not Unusual", it started as a joke about a preppy cousin and outlived The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air by decades.
The sitcom entries are older and looser. Elaine's kicks were written as the worst dancing in Seinfeld's office, and Monica and Ross's Routine was a sibling act left over from their school days. Wednesday's dance belongs to the same family: a character doing something stiff and deliberate, and an audience copying it badly at parties.
Emmys and Netflix comedy: Wednesday next to Sex Education
The best Netflix original comedy series ranking is the list where Wednesday looks most out of place, and the Television Academy put it there. In 2023 the Academy nominated Wednesday in its Outstanding Comedy Series category and Ortega as lead actress in a comedy; the show has 18 Emmy nominations and 4 wins in all, for costumes, makeup, production design and its main title theme.4
Sex Education is a fair opponent. It is another boarding-age school show, British and frank where Wednesday is American and gothic, and it ran four seasons.
Everything else here is comedy in the usual sense: I Think You Should Leave, BoJack Horseman, Russian Doll, Derry Girls.
Wednesday's case for belonging is the delivery. Ortega plays every line flat, and the jokes are in what she declines to react to.
Wednesday vs Elite: Nevermore Academy and Las Encinas
The TV shows set at a boarding school ranking is short and mostly teen television: Elite, House of Anubis, Zoey 101, The Worst Witch, Malory Towers.
Wednesday is set at Nevermore Academy, a school for outcasts that the Addams parents attended. Elite, Netflix's Spanish drama, is set at Las Encinas, an elite private school where a murder opens the first season. Both are crime stories that use the school as a closed room.
The British entries are the old guard. Malory Towers and The Worst Witch both began as children's books long before either Netflix show.
The Big Bang Theory vs Wednesday: too popular to be left alone
The most overrated TV shows ranking is a list of hits, and that is what qualifies Wednesday. Guinness World Records credits it with Netflix's biggest single week for an English-language show: 411,290,000 hours in the seven days ending 4 December 2022.5
Its detractors point to the love-triangle subplot and to a mystery that resolves the way teen mysteries usually do.
The company is the defence. Game of Thrones, Friends, The Office, Stranger Things and The Big Bang Theory share this list, and a show only gets called overrated after a lot of people have watched it.
Jenna Ortega's best role: Wednesday Addams vs Tara Carpenter
The best Jenna Ortega performance ranking holds 13 roles, and Wednesday Addams turned her into a lead. That role earned her a 2023 Emmy nomination.
Tara Carpenter is the strongest rival. Ortega played her in Scream (2022) and Scream VI, the opening victim who survives, and the role made her a horror name earlier the same year Wednesday premiered.
Astrid Deetz in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Ellie Alves in You complete the short list of parts people quote. Several of the rest come from her Disney Channel years.
Wednesday Addams vs Enid Sinclair: the roommate problem
The greatest Wednesday characters ranking is the only list on this page where Wednesday Addams competes with her own supporting cast: Thing, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Principal Weems and the Galpins.
Enid Sinclair, played by Emma Myers, is the color-loving werewolf who shares her dorm. The show's warmest scenes are the ones where Enid forces a friendship Wednesday says she does not want.
The list also holds Marilyn Thornhill, played by Christina Ricci. The Wednesday of 1991 returned as a botany teacher with secrets of her own.
Wednesday Addams vs Kevin McCallister: the kids of 1990 and 1991
The greatest child characters in movie history ranking is where Christina Ricci's Wednesday Addams lives. The Addams Family opened on 22 November 1991 and grossed $113,502,426 in the US and Canada (Box Office Mojo figures).6
Kevin McCallister arrived a year earlier. Home Alone made Macaulay Culkin the most famous child actor of the decade, and Kevin is the comic opposite of Wednesday: a boy who sets traps for burglars, where she sets them for her brother.
The heavier names are Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist, Mathilda of Léon: The Professional, and Scout Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird. Ricci's case against them is tone. She made a 1960s sitcom child menacing, and Ortega's version starts from her.
Hocus Pocus and The Addams Family: Halloween films released off-season
The top Halloween movies ranking holds John Carpenter's Halloween, Hereditary and Get Out, and two family films released at the wrong time of year.
The Addams Family reached cinemas three weeks after Halloween, in late November 1991.6 Hocus Pocus went the other way and opened in summer 1993. Both found their audience on television every October afterwards.
Wednesday belongs here because of the 1991 film, whose best scenes are hers.
Addams Family Values vs The Godfather Part II: the sequel that earned less
The best movie sequels ranking is 48 films deep and led by giants: The Dark Knight, The Godfather Part II, Terminator 2 and Aliens. Addams Family Values is a small name among them.
It is also a sequel that did worse business and better work. Values opened on 19 November 1993 and took $48,919,043 in North America, less than half of what the first film made.7
Its reputation rests on Wednesday. Sent to summer camp with Pugsley, Ricci turns the camp's Thanksgiving pageant into a revolt, and the sequence is the one most people remember from either film.
The Godfather Part II needs no defence here. It won Best Picture; Values won a following.
ABC, 1964: The Addams Family on the classic TV list
The best classic TV show ranking is where Wednesday began on screen. The Addams Family premiered on ABC in 1964, three decades after Charles Addams sold his first drawing to The New Yorker in 1933.8
Addams had drawn the family for years without naming them. The girl's name came from the nursery rhyme line "Wednesday's child is full of woe", and a poet, Joan Blake, later wrote to The New Yorker to say she had suggested it to him at a party.9
The Munsters arrived the same season, and people still mix the two families up. Both sit on this list with I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Lisa Loring's Wednesday was a small part in an ensemble sitcom. Everything this page covers grew out of it.
One character, three eras, rarely on the same list
Loring's Wednesday competes with sitcoms, Ricci's with children and sequels, Ortega's with Netflix records and dance scenes. The lists that hold all three at once, the costume and the goth icons, are the ones that judge the look and ignore the performance.
Each of the 14 rankings above works through head-to-head matchups, bracket or pairwise. If a character of your own has worn several faces, give each face a slot and build the ranking that sorts them.
More rankings, more angles
- Stranger Things Broke Netflix's Record, Then Missed the Emmys — the Netflix hit Wednesday overtook in its first week
- Friends vs Seinfeld: Which Sitcom Is Better? 13 Lists — Elaine's kicks and the Routine, sitcom against sitcom
- Halloween: a $325,000 Movie and a $13 Billion Night — the holiday that keeps the braids in stock
Sources
- What's on Netflix — Wednesday season 3 wraps filming (30 September 2026), 2027 release, season 3 cast including Winona Ryder: whats-on-netflix.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- Netflix — Top 10 week of November 28, 2022: 341.23M hours in Wednesday's premiere week, third most popular English-language series: about.netflix.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- NME — the song in Wednesday's dance scene and Jenna Ortega on choreographing it (12 January 2023): nme.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- Television Academy — Wednesday: 18 Emmy nominations, 4 wins, by year and category: televisionacademy.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- Guinness World Records — most viewed show on Netflix in one week (English language): guinnessworldrecords.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- Box Office Mojo — The Addams Family (1991), release date and domestic gross: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- Box Office Mojo — Addams Family Values (1993), release date and domestic gross: boxofficemojo.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- Tee and Charles Addams Foundation — Charles Addams biography and timeline: charlesaddams.com (checked 2026-10-27)
- The A.V. Club — how Wednesday Addams got her name (30 July 2018): avclub.com (checked 2026-10-27)