How The Addams Family Got Their Names...Then Blackballed

The top brass was skeptical. Yes, Filmways Television had sent their head of development, Daniel Levy, on the hunt for new ideas, but they weren't sold on what he'd found. Look, Filmways was on a roll. Since jumping from commercials into the sitcom game, they'd scored with Mr. Ed (1961), The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), and Petticoat Junction (1963). Their formula was simple enough, bucolic family comedy with a problem of the week. And now Levy was pitching monsters. 

No, Levy said. A family of monsters. With the same problems as the rest of us. 

Levy was selling characters from Charles Addams' New Yorker single-panel cartoons run since 1933--and not getting far. Sure, monster movies were having a Sixties revival, and sure, Addams had become known for his humorous subversions of everyday life, a traditional world viewed through a mirror darkly. He'd published multiple collections and won a special Edgar from Mystery Writers of America. 

In 1938, one of his panels introduced a femme fatale housewife and her hulking butler hearing out a vacuum salesman in a dusty haunted house. An eerie figure peers through the upper-floor balustrades. Over the years, those characters would evolve and expand into a family of grotesque archetypes. A gnome-ish father, warped children, a hag grandmother, a criminally insane uncle in a frock.

There was a problem, one that underscored the Filmways brass' concern about a series made from sight gags. Addams had scarcely bothered to name the characters.

Nor did he have much need. The characters featured in a sliver of Addams' output. Addams maintained a diverse world of inverted reality for a simple reason: Getting paid. The New Yorker prized clean-cut sophistication and creative variety. They also received a ton of submissions. Addams leaned into his vision of everyday bizarre so that his submissions stood out. He saved his family for when they packed a selling punch. 

Levy hadn't reached head of development by being bad at it. He'd already recruited a bemused Addams onto the project. Job one: developing character profiles, to include proposed names. As a starting point, in 1961 Addams and FAO Schwarz had inked a deal for limited edition dolls of two family members. One was the mother, who had evolved into a vampish caricature, now dubbed Morticia for her complexion and personal interests. The second was the death-obsessed, void-eyed daughter, who'd first appeared in 1944, now dubbed Wednesday from the child of woe in the Monday's Child nursery rhyme.

For everyone else, Addams leaned into sharp puns, with Lurch for the lumbering butler and Fester for the deviant uncle. The simple appellative Grandmama clicked for the family matriarch. That lurking presence in panel backgrounds became Thing, changed for television to be a disembodied hand.  

Levy had talked Filmways into a pilot, in part because Levy hadn't picked a loser yet and a lot because ABC signaled interest. Addams' pick of Pubert for the mischievous, dynamite-packing boy was a non-starter. Pugsley was a more refined take. Addams floated Repelli for the father. It was clever in all the wrong ways, and the name would look terrible on the merch boxes. John Astin, already cast in the role, preferred the second choice, Gomez. That was that. 

Thomas E. Dewey,
Gomez's model

Addams didn't fret the creative control. Television paid better than freelance cartoonist. Besides, he never considered the sitcom as reflecting his art. He had a vision; Filmways had a derivative product. Where Levy made this gothic gag family into mere eccentrics, Addams' version was as dark as their archetypes. When Addams drew a ghoul, it was a ghoul.

When Filmways needed an expanded family to drive new plotlines, Addams stayed collaborative. With his permission, Levy developed Cousin Itt as a comical walking shag of hair. Itt was an instant favorite. Addams knew a winner when he saw one and retconned the cousin into his drawings.

Itt, though, had a publication problem. The New Yorker. Editor William Shawn refused to accept any further artwork from Addams featuring his namesake televised family. Other submissions were welcome. The New Yorker styled itself too up-market to amplify a mainstream sitcom. They certainly weren't in the free advertising business. Shawn continued to decline Addams Family panels long after the show's 2-season run ended. 

It was only in 1988, after Shawn retired, that the now-named Addams Family returned to The New Yorker. It'd been fifty years since their first appearance and a quarter century of editorial exile. Addams died a few months later.

Today, of course, the Addams Family is big business, their names pop culture givens. Back then, Levy sensed those cartoons' broad appeal, a family that was kooky, spooky, and altogether ooky--but still a family. That was one part of Addams' message. Monsters had problems, too. Monsters loved and bonded just like anyone else.  

Like anyone else. Like all of us. That's the rest of Addams' message. If good is tucked away in evil, then evil things hide in what is held out as good. Tradition, conformity, the need to pretend life is idyllic. Addams was calling out an uncomfortable fact. Life isn't pretty. Life isn't safe. It's just weird, wondrous, and short. 

We might as well embrace the ride.

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Happy Halloween, everyone!