The Addams Family (1964 TV series)
The Addams Family is an American Gothic sitcom based on Charles Addams's New Yorker cartoons. With an ensemble cast, the 30-minute television series took the unnamed characters in the single-panel gag cartoons and gave them names, backstories, and a household setting. The series was spearheaded by David Levy, who created and developed it with Donald Saltzman in cooperation with cartoonist Addams, who gave each character a name and description. Shot in black-and-white, The Addams Family aired for two seasons on ABC from September 18, 1964, to April 8, 1966, for a total of 64 episodes — its opening theme was composed and sung by Vic Mizzy.
The show was originally produced by head writer Nat Perrin for Filmways, Inc., at General Service Studios in Hollywood, California. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer now owns the rights to the series.
Premise
The Addams family is a close-knit extended family with macabre interests and supernatural abilities, though no explanation for their powers is explicitly given in the series. The wealthy, enthusiastic Gomez Addams is madly in love with his wife, Morticia. Along with their daughter Wednesday, their son Pugsley, Uncle Fester, and Grandmama, they live at 0001 Cemetery Lane in an ornate, gloomy, Second Empire style mansion. The theme song contains the lyric, "Their house is a museum", which is borne out by the variety of objects in the interior scenes, some of which are collector's items and others of which are only bizarre all props that were stolen once the series was cancelled.The family is attended by their servants – towering butler Lurch, and Thing, a hand that appears from wooden boxes in various places in the house. Other relatives with recurring appearances included Gomez's Cousin Itt, Morticia's older sister Ophelia, and Morticia's mother Grandma Frump.
Much of the humor derives from the Addamses' culture clash with the rest of the world. They treat normal visitors with great warmth and courtesy, even when the guests express confusion, fear, or dismay at the house's decor or the sight of Lurch or Thing. Some visitors have bad intentions, which the family generally ignores, and suffer no harm. The Addamses are puzzled by the horrified reactions to their own good-natured and normal behavior. Accordingly, they view "conventional" tastes with generally tolerant suspicion. Almost invariably, visitors to the Addamses leave and don't return.
Characters
Main characters
| Actor | Role | Character |
| John Astin | Gomez Addams | A retired lawyer, Gomez is of Castilian descent, as he refers to Spain as his "ancestral home". Gomez is passionately in love with his wife, often referring to her with Spanish pet names such as "Querida" and "Cara Mía". His ardor is greatly intensified when she speaks French. Gomez is very wealthy, apparently as a result of owning numerous companies and stocks, and is often following the tape from a stock ticker installed in the living room. Gomez has a desk drawer and a safe full of cash. He squanders money in a cavalier manner and loses it on stocks, yet remains wealthy. His hobby is gleefully crashing and detonating model trains. He sometimes stands on his head as he reads the newspaper or plays solitaire. He is a member of the Zen Yogi society which seems to be a form of yoga where the positions often look strange or difficult for the human body. Regularly dressed in a double-breasted and chalk-striped suit with a black tie, Gomez is almost always seen smoking a cigar. Astin based the character of Gomez on Groucho Marx. Like Groucho, Astin was also a cigar smoker; he then quit cigars after the series ended. As of Oct. 1 2025, John Astin is the only surviving member of the cast. |
| Carolyn Jones | Morticia Addams | A cultivated and beautiful woman, she knits, dabbles in art, plays the shamisen, raises a carnivorous plant, and trims roses by clipping off the buds and arranging the thorny stems in a vase. With long, straight ebony-black hair, she is always attired in a floor-length, black hobble dress that ends, apparently, in a full set of tentacles. With her aristocratic bearing and detachment, she is often the calm center of the chaotic events of the household, but she performs magical feats effortlessly; for instance, in "Winning of Morticia Addams", she bounces a basketball through three baskets. She is an elegant woman that is devoted to her family; she and Gomez are deeply in love. |
| Jackie Coogan | Uncle Fester | Morticia's exuberant uncle, he is completely bald and usually dressed in a dark, floor-length coat or robe with a large, fur collar. Fester is quite fond of dynamite and blasting caps. He often relaxes on a bed of nails, by inserting his head into a book press, or by being stretched on a wooden torture rack. Fester powers light bulbs by placing them into his mouth. |
| Ted Cassidy | Lurch | The Addams' loyal butler, he mainly speaks in grunts or groans. Morticia and Gomez summon him with a hangman's-noose bell pull, to which he immediately appears on screen and replies, "You rang?" On occasions, items such as an emergency bell or banging the knight armor can summon him if the usual bell ends up out of order. Lurch is very tall and physically imposing, and plays the 1503 vintage "Krupnik" harpsichord that was originally in Cousin Crimp's family for 400 years. After Lurch answers the door, he removes the hats of male visitors, usually crushing them in the process. He is frequently seen with a feather duster. Cassidy made a cameo appearance as Lurch on an episode of the Batman TV series, and on TV music shows while promoting the pop song of the era "The Lurch". |
| Blossom Rock | Grandmama Addams | Gomez's mother, she is a witch who conjures potions and spells and dabbles in fortune telling with a crystal ball, and knife throwing. Sometimes, she is carrying a battle axe or sharpening it on a grinding wheel in the middle of the living room. |
| Lisa Loring | Wednesday Addams | Gomez and Morticia's daughter and the youngest member of the family, Wednesday is a strange yet sweet-natured little girl who enjoys keeping bizarre pets such as a black widow spider named Homer and a lizard named Lucifer, in addition to playing with a headless doll named Marie Antoinette. |
| Ken Weatherwax | Pugsley Addams | Gomez and Morticia's son and Wednesday's older brother, he is chubby, kind-hearted, and smart, and occasionally conforms to conventional standards contrary to his family, such as joining the Boy Scouts. He also enjoys engineering various machines, playing with blasting caps, and playing with his pet octopus Aristotle. |
| Itself | Thing | A disembodied hand, it appears out of boxes and other conveniently placed containers. Thing also appears from a knothole in a tree in the front yard, and in "The Addams Family in Court", Thing reaches out of Gomez's briefcase to hand him a legal paper in court. Gomez's constant "companion" since childhood, Thing is always ready to assist family members with minor daily services and diversions, such as lifting the receiver on telephones, retrieving the mail, lighting cigars, pouring tea, and playing chess. The tagline is, "Thank you, Thing". Thing sometimes appears from different containers at opposite ends of the room within seconds of each other. Though Ted Cassidy often portrayed Thing, assistant director Jack Voglin sometimes portrayed Thing in scenes in which Lurch and Thing appear together. Thing is sometimes a right hand, sometimes a left. Thing was billed as "Itself" in the closing credits; animals in Filmways productions were billed the same way, for instance, Mr. Ed was billed as "Himself". |
Pets
- Aristotle – Pugsley's pet octopus
- Cleopatra – Morticia's pet African strangler
- Fang – Pugsley's pet jaguar
- Homer – Wednesday's pet spider
- Kitty Kat – The Addams Family's pet lion, in "The Addams Family Tree", Gomez mentioned that Kitty "can't stand the taste of people." In "Cat Addams", Kitty Kat's dad was claimed to have eaten the father of Dr. Mbogo, which explains why Dr. Mbogo will not treat Kitty Kat.
- Lucifer – Wednesday's pet lizard
- Tristan and Isolde – The Addams Family's pet piranhas
- Zelda – The family's pet vulture. This character was performed by a live male vulture named Igor.
- Grandmama also has an unnamed alligator in the basement pit that she is often seen wrestling.
Relatives
| Actor | Role | Character |
| Felix Silla and Roger Arroyo | Cousin Itt | Gomez's cousin, Itt is a diminutive character composed entirely of floor-length hair accompanied by a bowler hat and sunglasses. He speaks in rapid, unintelligible gibberish that only the family can understand. He has a low-ceilinged room of his own in the house, but sometimes he is in the chimney of the living room fireplace. The character was created specifically for the television series. |
| Carolyn Jones | Ophelia Frump | Morticia's flighty flower child older sister who is the "white sheep of the family". In the two-part, second-season episode "Morticia's Romance", it is shown in a flashback that Gomez is originally engaged to Ophelia in an arranged marriage, but when he sees the then-22-year-old Morticia, they fall in love with each other. The flowers entwined in Ophelia's hair actually have roots that travel down into her foot, and the foot raises when one of the flowers is tugged on. She sings in three-part harmony and has a love of judo that enables her to flip men onto their backs. Ophelia was played by Carolyn Jones in a blonde wig, and along with Cousin Itt, was created specifically for the television series, appearing in family portrait artwork by Charles Addams after the show's debut. |
| Margaret Hamilton | Granny Hester Frump | The mother of Morticia and Ophelia and the grandmother of Wednesday and Pugsley, and sister of Fester. She is a witch and an old friend of Grandmama Addams'. |
| Hazel Shermet | Cousin Melancholia | A cousin of Morticia, she was repeatedly jilted. In "Morticia the Matchmaker", after her last fiancé ran off, Morticia and Gomez take her in and try to find her a husband. |