Four Key Episodes – “The Addams Family”
By Robert R. Garver
This is Bob Garver excitedly making my debut for F.A.N. For this feature, I take a look at four important episodes of a famous TV show to get a feel for the overall series. I’ll always look at the first episode (first impressions are so important) and the second episode (the first “regular” episode after the excitement of the premiere has died down). I’ll also pick a popular episode from somewhere in the middle and I’ll always finish with the finale. I rate the episodes on a scale of one to five stars. For my first column I’m going to start near the top of the alphabet and analyze “The Addams Family”.
What I know about the series going in: A lot. Though the series only ran from 1964 to 1966, “The Addams Family” has been a relevant piece of pop culture for over 70 years. I have seen both feature films released in the early 90s, watched a few episodes of “The New Addams Family” series from the late 90s, and attended a performance of the hit Broadway musical. I even got to meet Rachel Potter (Broadway’s Wednesday Addams) at a bar where I bought her a Jack and Coke.
I’m familiar with the characters: mustachioed father Gomez, vampiric mother Morticia, deadpan daughter Wednesday, mischievous son Pugsley, bald oddball Uncle Fester, crazy old Grandmama, walking hairball Cousin It, disembodied hand Thing, and lurch-y butler Lurch (the character’s name has since become an adjective for someone who is large, stiff, and unintelligible).
The family has a passion for all things macabre. Death, violence, and grossness are a part of their daily lives. Yet because they are so accustomed to these elements, they manage to go about their business quite normally. And they are not what I would call a “dysfunctional family”. They are a loving unit with surprisingly pleasant personalities, forever sharing in their love of the grotesque. They are a bizarre, twisted version of the all-American family.
Oh, and of course they have that snap-happy theme song.
Let’s meet the Addams Family of the 1960s.
First Episode – “The Addams Family Goes to School”
Plot: A school truant officer visits the Addams house to convince the family to send Wednesday and Pugsley to public school. He is introduced to everybody and is terrified out of his wits. The family ultimately decides that the children should go to school, but they are immediately appalled by the sick nature of the fairy tales being told at storytime.
Thoughts: I knew “The Addams Family” was a comedy, but I never realized that it was a sitcom, laugh track and all. This episode has one of the most distracting laugh tracks I’ve ever heard, mainly because the jokes aren’t worthy of laughter. Wednesday breeds spiders? Gomez likes to crash toy trains? Morticia is fascinated by deadly plants? We get it, they’re weirdoes. Then again, the episode is designed to be sort of an Addams 101 for people who aren’t familiar with the franchise. Viewers were meant to be giddy with surprise over the characters’ mannerisms. I of course know pretty much what to expect, so the humor seems tired.
A few things I also did not expect: The opening titles look like they’re from a cheesy monster movie, not the sophisticated font that we’re used to. Wednesday is only six, much younger than she is in later versions. And I expected the Addams house to be darker and scarier. Instead it looks like a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum, with misshapen oddities (mostly animals) displayed everywhere.
The episode ends very abruptly, with the truancy officer all-too-suddenly realizing that the Addamses are ultimately peaceful people despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. We are told that he had an offscreen conversation with the district superintendent, a character we’ve been told is notoriously stuffy. A character that is discussed as much as the superintendent needs to be formally introduced so he can have a series of Addams interactions of his own. It feels like there were about five pages of script that got hacked off the end of the episode to make it fit into its timeslot.
On the plus side, we get a few good gags. My favorite is one where Lurch is playing the piano and family members hit him and he immediately changes the song. It’s like they’re fiddling with the dial on a radio. Thing, of course, is good for a few pop-out gags, and we are introduced to Uncle Fester’s ability to stick a light bulb in his mouth and light it up with the volts inside his body.
Rating: Two Stars out of Five.
Second Episode: “Morticia and the Psychiatrist”
Plot: The adults in the family are worried about Pugsley. He’s abandoning his old hobbies (torture, explosions, his pet octopus) in favor of “horrible” new ones (Eagle Scouts, baseball, a puppy). Unable to communicate with their son, Gomez and Morticia bring in a child psychiatrist. Naturally the psychiatrist has no idea what he’s in for.
Thoughts: This episode is worse than the first because it relies on so many of the exact same gags (specifically the deadly plants and exploding trains). It still beats the “loving bad things” jokes into the ground while adding a number of even less funny “hating good things” jokes.
There’s a running gag where the psychiatrist thinks that the strange things in the Addams house are part of Pugsley’s unhealthy new habits. He eventually gets Pugsley to set off some dynamite and then proclaims him cured. But the script is hazy on why the psychiatrist suddenly thinks that setting off dynamite is acceptable behavior and not one of Pugsley’s treacherous new activities.
Rating: One and a Half Stars out of Five.
Middle Episode: Halloween With the Addams Family
Plot: It’s Halloween night. While Grandmama takes the kids trick or treating, the rest of the family entertains two adult trick or treaters (Don Rickles and Skip Homeier), who are actually bank robbers using the Addams house to hide from the police.
Thoughts: Now this is more like it. There are several good gags in this episode. Fester makes a series of awkward faces while modeling for the jack o’ lantern. Gomez gives the guests a big pile of money when he mistakes their stolen loot for treats from the neighbors. Thing quietly switches one of the robbers’ guns with a banana. The family reads a Halloween version of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”. And what do they bob for instead of apples? Live crabs. Both robbers get pinched right on their noses. It’s corny humor, but it’s classic “Addams Family”.
On the downside, Rickles doesn’t get to work in his trademark insult style even though the freaks of the Addams family would be excellent and unique targets.
Rating: Three Stars out of Five.
Final Episode – “Ophelia’s Career”
Plot: Morticia’s woeful sister Ophelia comes to visit after yet another failed romance. Gomez and Morticia encourage her to pursue a career instead of a relationship. After failing as a chemist, Ophelia finds her niche with opera singing thanks to her ability to sing as multiple voices at once.
Thoughts: There’s a reason why the character of Ophelia has been lost to the ages. Her relentless self-pitying is somehow old before she even gets onscreen. On the upside, her botched attempts at singing are pretty funny. She uses Cousin It as a vocal coach, and he just communicates with squeaks. Her singing is equally squeaky and then Gomez and Morticia compliment her performance with more squeaks. And the whole multiple voices bit is a pretty good idea for a gag.
The episode features a number of scenes that seem unnecessary. Ophelia’s attempt at chemistry isn’t really important to the story, and a hockey game between Gomez and Morticia (where Fester swallows his referee’s whistle and starts squeaking when he talks) has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the episode. Watching these scenes, I get a strong impression that the writers really wanted to do the gags, but couldn’t fit them into a proper episode before the show ended. So they just tacked them onto this one.
Rating: Two Stars out of Five.
Final Thoughts: “The Addams Family” works best when the viewer is delightfully shocked by the family’s ghastly mannerisms. Viewers in the 60s probably were shocked, which is why the show is regarded as something of a classic. But we’ve had nearly fifty years to get used to these characters, and the shocking elements have grown more and more outrageous over the years. Seen through today’s eyes, I’m afraid this version of “The Addams Family” hasn’t aged well at all. It is too predictable, too cutesy, and worst of all, too tame.
Robert Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. Check out his movie review blog at www.bobatthemovies.com. He welcomes feedback, criticisms, and suggestions for future columns at rrg251@nyu.edu.