You settle in for a marathon Netflix session, determined to navigate a route through the abstruse waters of a new adult mystery series - let's say 1899 - only to be sirened away by the breezy promise of a kids show.

And you're not alone.

Wednesday, Netflix's offshoot of the Addams Family franchise, has proven to be a heavy hitter for the platform, clocking more hours viewed in its premiere week (341.2 million) than juggernaut Stranger Things.

This officially makes Wednesday the most successful English-language debut in Netflix's history and a mega-hit of these proportions is just what the doctor ordered. The once-dominant streaming service continues to shed subscribers in a market flooded with competitors at a time when cash-strapped households are reviewing their spending, especially on entertainment.

Sorry kids, it's five subscriptions only from now on.

What do you mean we don't love you anymore?

Yes, desperate times do call for desperate measures and Netflix has shown its own desperation by doing something it said it would never do: screen commercials.

Although the streaming giant's new budget option is in its infancy, other platform providers will be taking great interest in the efficacy of the bargain-basement business model, surely with one eye on emulating any success.

Gulp.

But ads or not, there's no substitute for good content, precisely what Wednesday represents.

Tim Burton serves as executive producer and directs four of the series' eight episodes with obvious glee. The versatile filmmaker has often been linked to an Addams Family project and you get the feeling Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz in 1988's Beetlejuice (a sequel is on the way) was his own Wednesday Addams avatar.

The latest incarnation of the daughter of darkness is brought to life by Jenna Ortega, who is droll and taciturn and vulnerable all at the same time.

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Wednesday doesn't play well with others and after facilitating a high school bully's orchidectomy via piranha, the troubled teen is bundled off to her parents' alma mater, Nevermore Academy, nestled in sumptuous New England (filming actually took place in Romania).

Cleverly, boarding school means neither we nor Wednesday are encumbered with the rest of her creepy and kooky clan. We enjoy fleeting interludes with mum Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), dad Gomez (Luis Guzman) and brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) but don't have to live with them.

Charismatic severed hand 'Thing', however, gets a big role here and should be a shoo-in for best supporting appendage come the Emmys.

To this day, much of Wednesday Addams' bankability can be attributed to Christina Ricci, the edgy actor who made the role her own in the 1990s film versions of the 1960s black-and-white American sitcom created by cartoonist Charles Addams.

Ricci's contribution to the canon has been acknowledged with a role as a teacher in Wednesday, and, as she showed in Yellowjackets, one of 2021's streaming standouts, her stock and trade continues to be the creation of inscrutable characters.

Within the well-worn walls of Nevermore, an institution of freaks and geeks where "outcasts" and "normies" mingle in typical schoolyard caste-system unease, pangs of familiarity come thick and fast. We could be at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, even Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters - we've been down this gothic garden path before, which only adds to the enjoyment, if not feed our expectations.

As Wednesday negotiates her way through the teen angst of hormonal werewolves and vampires and gorgons, she also investigates a series of murders beyond the school gates but, really, this is all peripheral to the core attraction of the series, which is found in the performances and, particularly, the writing.

Wednesday is a delightfully literary show. As the name of the school suggests, Poe (a celebrated former student) is everywhere; local shops name-check Dickensian villains, and Wednesday, herself named for a nursery rhyme, devotes an hour of quotidian toil to her typewriter.

We're peppered with dialogue dripping with the joy of language, archaic and fresh.

Wednesday "looks like a living Instagram filter", she receives a "toe-curling tchotchke" from her mother.

It's lovely stuff.