Shows Like Wednesday: Dark, Weird, and Witty

Season 2 is done, Season 3 is filming in Ireland and won't land until 2027, and I am not emotionally equipped to wait that long in silence. (If you're still processing that finale, the full autopsy is here: Wednesday Season 2 Ending Explained: Every Death, Twist, and Reveal Fans Can't Stop Talking About.)

So: what actually scratches the same itch? Not everything with a black-and-white color palette qualifies. The specific Wednesday cocktail is a girl who refuses to perform likability, a school full of monsters where nobody's the weird one, a murder plot, and jokes delivered at a funeral pace. Below are the shows that hit at least two of those, sorted by which part of the itch you're scratching.

Gothic Boarding School Vibes

Nevermore did a lot of heavy lifting: uniforms, gargoyles, a roommate with fangs, faculty hiding something in the basement. If that's the appeal, start here. Every gothic teen drama on this list is built on the same premise — a kid who doesn't fit anywhere gets sent somewhere that everyone doesn't fit.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020 · Netflix)

Sabrina Spellman is half witch, half mortal, and on her sixteenth birthday she's expected to sign her name in the Devil's book and enroll full-time at the Academy of Unseen Arts. She'd rather keep her human friends, her human boyfriend, and her soul. Her aunts — one a warm baker, one a coven enforcer — live in a funeral home and have opinions.

Four seasons of witch politics, exorcisms, and one genuinely deranged Christmas special. It's the closest sibling to Wednesday on this entire list: same macabre-family energy, same aggressively art-directed New England town, more actual Satan.

The Wednesday overlap: the supernatural boarding school, the mortician-chic aesthetic, a heroine who argues with authority as a hobby.

Fate: The Winx Saga (2021–2022 · Netflix)

Bloom grew up in California believing she was a normal teenager until she set her parents' house on fire with her mind. She's a fire fairy, she's been placed at Alfea — a magical boarding school in the Otherworld — and nobody there will explain where she came from. Meanwhile, creatures called the Burned Ones are killing people in the woods.

A grimdark live-action reboot of a bubbly cartoon, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Two seasons, cancelled, ends without resolving much. Watch it for the dorm politics and the very good "what am I" mystery, not the ending.

The Wednesday overlap: new girl, secret bloodline, faculty who lie constantly.

The Magicians (2015–2020 · Syfy · streaming varies by region)

Quentin Coldwater, a depressed grad student obsessed with a Narnia-style children's book series, gets recruited to Brakebills — a hidden university where magic is a difficult academic discipline with homework and exams. Then he discovers the fictional world from his childhood books is real, and it's much worse than advertised.

This is dark academia at its most literal: cramped libraries, brutal coursework, and a group of very clever people making catastrophic decisions. It gets weird in season 3 in a way I fully support.

The Wednesday overlap: magic treated as a curriculum, not a gift.

Quick rule for this genre: if the headmaster seems reasonable, he's the problem.

The Order (2019–2020 · Netflix)

Jack Morton starts at Belgrave University with one goal — join the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose, the secret magical society he blames for his mother's death, and burn it down from the inside. Complication: the campus werewolf pack has its own war with the Order, and Jack ends up on both payrolls.

Cheap, silly, and weirdly compelling, with a memory-wipe gimmick that resets relationships every few episodes. Two seasons, cancelled on a cliffhanger. Go in knowing that.

The Wednesday overlap: secret societies, campus factions, an outsider running a personal investigation.

Dark Comedy Meets Supernatural

The other half of Wednesday's appeal is tonal: a corpse turns up, and someone makes a joke about it in the next breath. These are the Addams Family adjacent picks — shows where death is furniture and everyone's fine.

Dead Boy Detectives (2024 · Netflix)

Edwin died in 1916. Charles died in 1989. Both refused to move on, and they now run a detective agency in London solving cases for ghosts and the occasional living client, while Death herself tries to collect them. They pick up Crystal, a psychic with a demon ex and no memory of her own life.

Funny, macabre, and openly emotional, with a butcher shop full of talking meat that I think about regularly. One season only — Netflix cancelled it, which I'm still bitter about.

The Wednesday overlap: teen investigators, deadpan delivery, a supernatural bureaucracy with paperwork.

The Umbrella Academy (2019–2024 · Netflix)

A cold billionaire adopts seven children born on the same day to mothers who weren't pregnant that morning, trains them as superheroes, numbers them instead of parenting them, and dies. They reunite at his funeral, immediately resume old grudges, and discover the apocalypse arrives in eight days.

The powers are almost beside the point. It's a show about siblings who cannot be in a room together, told with a jukebox soundtrack and a lot of very stylish violence.

The Wednesday overlap: the dysfunctional-macabre family unit, played completely straight-faced.

What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2024 · Hulu / Disney+)

A documentary crew follows four vampires sharing a decaying house on Staten Island: three ancient bloodsuckers who conquered nothing, one energy vampire who feeds by boring coworkers at meetings, and their human familiar Guillermo, who wants to be turned and keeps not being turned.

Six seasons, no filler, one of the funniest shows of the last decade. Zero teen angst, which makes it a good palate cleanser.

The Wednesday overlap: the joke is always delivered flat, and nobody finds the supernatural remarkable.

School Spirits (2023– · Paramount+)

Maddie wakes up in her high school with no memory of how she died, joins a support group of students stuck haunting the same building since the 1950s, and starts investigating her own disappearance — which the living are still treating as a missing persons case.

A murder mystery where the victim is the detective. Genuinely twisty, and the period-specific ghosts are a good running gag.

The Wednesday overlap: teen girl solving the crime committed against her, in a school she cannot leave.

If what you actually want is women being feral in a hostile environment rather than jokes in a haunted hallway, that's a different mood entirely — covered in Shows Like Yellowjackets: Dark Female-Led Thrillers.

Three more, briefly:

• Santa Clarita Diet (Netflix) — a suburban realtor turns undead and develops a taste for people; her husband handles logistics. Cancelled after three seasons, ends mid-plot.
• Locke & Key (Netflix) — three siblings move into the family mansion after their father's murder and find keys that do impossible things. Younger-skewing, strong first season.
• Pushing Daisies (2007–2009 · HBO Max) — a pie maker can revive the dead with a touch, but a second touch kills them permanently. Whimsical, morbid, cancelled by a writers' strike.

If You Want More Jenna Ortega

She's been working since she was nine, so there's a back catalogue, and it's more varied than the goth typecasting suggests.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) — she plays Astrid, Lydia Deetz's teenage daughter, who thinks her mother's ghost-whisperer TV career is a scam. Tim Burton again, Winona Ryder again, and a mother-daughter dynamic that's basically Wednesday and Morticia with the polarity flipped.

Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) · Paramount+ — Tara Carpenter survives a Ghostface attack in the opening scene of the first one, then spends two films being hunted alongside her sister. Fun, mean, self-aware slashers with a body count.

The Fallout (2021 · HBO Max) — Vada is a high schooler who survives a shooting at her school and spends the film failing to process it. No jokes, no genre cushioning; it's her best performance and it's a rough watch. Know what you're picking up.

You, Season 2 (Netflix) — a supporting run as Ellie, the sharp fifteen-year-old neighbor who befriends a man the audience knows is a serial killer. Excellent tension, minimal screen time.

Death of a Unicorn (2025) — she and Paul Rudd hit a unicorn with their car on the way to a billionaire's retreat, and things escalate from there. Uneven, but the premise delivers on what it promises.

What's coming, if you'd like to plan your year:

• Klara and the Sun — October 23, 2026. Taika Waititi directs the Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation; she plays an artificial friend purchased for a sick child.
• The Great Beyond — November 13, 2026. J.J. Abrams, newlyweds, a supernatural entity, Glen Powell.
• The Gallerist — premiered at Sundance in January, opposite Natalie Portman.
• Wednesday Season 3 — filming near Dublin, with Eva Green as Morticia's missing sister Ophelia. Expect 2027.

Start with Sabrina if you want the closest match, Dead Boy Detectives if you want the jokes, and School Spirits if you mainly came for a girl solving her own murder. Then we wait.