Dark house, then a harpsichord vamp — and two finger snaps, which is possibly the shortest audition in television history and still the one everybody passes. On this day in 1964, ABC opened that front door for the first time. Vic Mizzy wrote and sang the theme himself, and sixty-two years later a room will still snap on cue at a wedding, unprompted, slightly embarrassed about it.
What I love is the paperwork. Charles Addams had been drawing the family in single panels for The New Yorker for years and never named a soul; they didn't need names, because a gag panel doesn't require you to shout upstairs. Television does. So when David Levy and Donald Saltzman built the show they went back to Addams, who obligingly named and described every one of them — a cartoonist filling in the census forms for his own household.
And then the cast, in black and white, made the choice that keeps it alive: they played it warm. A couple genuinely fond of each other, children indulged, a butler treated as family, guests welcomed with real courtesy into a room with an axe on the wall. Sixty-four episodes across two seasons, done by April 1966, and it has outlived shows that ran ten years. Look at the portrait below — the peacock chair, the checkerboard floor, the alligator lying about like a dog. Nobody in that photograph is trying to frighten you.
Constance, Vic Mizzy played that harpsichord himself, and the snaps are his too — overdubbed, his own fingers. A one-man band in about thirty seconds, and no drummer needed, which I say with love.
Constance, the drawings did it with almost nothing: a wash of black ink, one white shape for a face, and vast empty paper where a lesser cartoonist would have crammed in furniture. Addams let the room stay unfinished so your eye fell straight on the one wrong detail — that is the whole joke, and it needs no caption to arrive.