The series has featured many actors (over 250 since the show begun), including Jerzy Bończak, Tadeusz Fijewski, Mieczysława Ćwiklińska, Edmund Fetting, Stanisława Perzanowska, Krzysztof Chamiec, Mieczysław Czechowicz, Hanka Bielicka, Maciej Damięcki, Jan Englert and others.
The Matysiaks family mirror many events from contemporary Polish history; however, despite being created during the People's Republic of Poland, it was not communist propaganda, or a mouthpiece for the government, one of the reasons which may explain the show's popularity.
Created in December 1956, soon after the events of the Polish October, in the first episode that year, the family members were donating to a charity for Hungarians.
For the most part, however, the series is concerned with everyday life issues: living on a small worker's wages and pension, children's education, local events in Warsaw, and so on.
People involved with the Matysiakowie show helped organise such gestures of goodwill: a nursing home in the 1960s, a monument to Bolesław Prus in the 1970s, and to Ignacy Paderewski in the 1980s.