In 1964, television audiences met one of the strangest families ever to move into a sitcom neighborhood.
The Addams Family premiered on ABC on Sept. 18, 1964, introducing viewers to Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Lurch and Thing.
But despite the enormous pop culture footprint the family would eventually leave behind, the original series wasn’t actually around for very long.
The Addams Family aired for just two seasons, producing 64 half-hour episodes before ending its run on April 8, 1966.
Those 64 episodes, however, helped turn characters that originated in Charles Addams’ cartoons for The New Yorker into a franchise that would continue through movies, animated shows, television revivals and even Broadway.
Shot in black and white, The Addams Family aired Friday nights on ABC and starred John Astin as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams.
They were joined by Lisa Loring as Wednesday, Ken Weatherwax as Pugsley, Jackie Coogan as Uncle Fester, Ted Cassidy as Lurch and Blossom Rock as Grandmama.
The television adaptation also transformed Addams’ cartoons in a significant way. The characters in the original single-panel cartoons had been unnamed. For the series, they were given names, backstories and a household setting, helping establish the versions of the Addamses that audiences recognize today.
Cousin Itt was among the characters created specifically for the TV series.
And then there was Thing.
The disembodied hand appeared from boxes and other containers around the Addams home to perform everyday tasks, including retrieving mail, answering the telephone, lighting Gomez’s cigars and even playing chess. Thing was credited as “Itself” in the show’s closing credits.
The sitcom’s humor largely came from flipping conventional ideas about normality upside down. Gomez and Morticia were wealthy, deeply devoted to one another and unfailingly hospitable to visitors. It was everyone else who couldn’t understand why the Addamses considered things like pet spiders, torture racks and dynamite perfectly ordinary.
Series creator David Levy explained to the Pittsburgh Press before the show’s premiere that the goal wasn’t to portray the family as monsters, but as fully realized people while maintaining the spirit of Charles Addams’ cartoons.
The series arrived at nearly the same time as another black-and-white sitcom about an unusual family, The Munsters. But Astin later explained to MeTV that there was a fundamental difference between them: the Munsters looked like monsters while behaving conventionally, whereas the Addamses looked human while finding conventional behavior bizarre.
The Addams Family also gave television one of its most instantly recognizable theme songs.
Composer Vic Mizzy wrote and arranged the opening, which prominently featured harpsichord and bass clarinet. Mizzy improvised the famous finger snaps while presenting his composition for approval, and they worked so well that they became part of the finished theme.
The original series ended in 1966, but the Addamses didn’t stay buried.
Members of the original cast returned for a 1977 television reunion, while the family later inspired the 1991 movie starring Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd and Christina Ricci. Addams Family Values followed in 1993.
More adaptations arrived in the decades that followed, including the enormously popular Netflix series Wednesday, several animated movies and a Broadway musical.
It all traces back to a television series that premiered 62 years ago today and needed only 64 episodes to make the Addams family very difficult to kill.
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