“The Addams Family” television series first aired in 1964. The original American sitcom premiered on ABC on September 18, 1964, introducing television audiences to the macabre but affectionate Addams household.
The series was based on Charles Addams’s single-panel cartoons published in The New Yorker. The cartoons featured eccentric characters but did not originally provide the extensive names, relationships, and backstories developed for television. Producer David Levy and Addams helped shape the televised family, including Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, and Grandmama.
Starring Carolyn Jones and John Astin, the black-and-white show ran for two seasons and produced 64 episodes. Its distinctive theme, written by Vic Mizzy and punctuated by finger snaps, became one of television’s most recognizable opening songs.
A frequent source of confusion is the 1991 feature film or the later animated adaptations. Those versions revived the characters, but the first television incarnation belongs to the 1964–1966 ABC series, which premiered in the same era as the similarly macabre sitcom “The Munsters.”