Don’t give up on Wednesday: the longer it lasts, the better it gets.

Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff series gets off to a rocky start, admittedly, with Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) struggling to survive high school with the normies. It’s not that she can’t hold her own against the mean girls and dumb jock bullies that seem to have been copied and pasted directly from the pages of the script of Heathers. It’s that she comes perilously close to murdering them.

After one incident that gets her kicked out of school (but somehow not arrested), Morticia and Gomez Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman) deposit Wednesday on the doorstep of the Nevermore Academy, their alma mater. Nevermore is a boarding school for children with, well, enhanced abilities: werewolves, gorgons, sirens and other mythical beings, who despite having great strength and magical powers, still need to learn biology. It’s a gothed-up Hogwarts.

Even in a school tailor-made for kids like her, Wednesday doesn’t fit in; in fact, she seems to kick even harder against the status quo here. She’s perpetually angry, wants to escape, and rebuffs any overtures of friendship. And if the show was just about one weird kid’s refusal to assimilate with the other weird kids, it wouldn’t be much fun.

Thankfully, the series, produced by Al Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville) and partly directed by Tim Burton (he helmed the first four episodes), adds some breadth and depth to the story by adding in a murder mystery, a secret society, and by allowing Wednesday to thaw a little bit and make friends, while still retaining her acerbic charm.

Wednesday has started having visions, which warn her of impending danger. Like a pigtailed Cassandra, though, she has trouble getting anyone to take her warnings seriously. But after a series of gruesome murders thins out the cast, Wednesday and the remaining students, who are part of a secret society that her parents once belonged to, band together to figure out who’s the real big bad on campus.

The mystery is compelling but the family Addams is much missed. Instead of the charmingly kooky family, who here are only credited as guest stars, we have angsty teen oddballs like Bianca the siren (Joy Sunday) and Enid the werewolf (Emma Myers) for Wednesday to play off of. The endearing charm of the 1960s series and the movies, though, was the contrast between the creepy, yet wholesome and loving Addams family, and supposedly “normal” society. That’s mostly missing here; the town Nevermore Academy abuts has the closest thing to regular folk that the show offers, and even they are on the odd side, especially Riki Lindhorne as school counselor Dr. Valerie Kinbott.

Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) is delightful as the composed yet somehow menacing headmistress Larissa Weems, and Christina Ricci, who played Wednesday in the 1990s Addams Family films, appears all too briefly (at first) as the botany teacher Marilyn Thornhill.

Ortega is great as Wednesday, especially in the latter episodes as she gets more into the spirit (and spirits) of Nevermore. Her look and demeanor are pitch perfect just as Ricci’s was, back in the day. Give in to the dark side and enjoy Wednesday on Netflix. All eight episodes are available to stream now.