The 30-minute television series took the unnamed characters in the single-panel gag cartoons and gave them names, back stories, and a household setting.

The series was spearheaded by David Levy, who created and developed it with Donald Saltzman in cooperation with cartoonist Addams, who gave each character a name and description.

Shot in black-and-white, The Addams Family aired for two seasons on ABC from September 18, 1964, to April 8, 1966, for a total of 64 episodes — its opening theme was composed and sung by Vic Mizzy.

The show was originally produced by head writer Nat Perrin for Filmways, Inc., at General Service Studios in Hollywood, California.

Along with their daughter Wednesday, their son Pugsley, Uncle Fester, and Grandmama, they live at 0001 Cemetery Lane in an ornate, gloomy, Second Empire style mansion.

The theme song contains the lyric, "Their house is a museum", which is borne out by the variety of objects in the interior scenes, some of which are collector's items and others of which are only bizarre (such as the mounted swordfish head with a human leg protruding from the mouth and a stuffed two-headed giant tortoise)[2] – all props that were stolen once the series was cancelled.

They treat normal visitors with great warmth and courtesy, even when the guests express confusion, fear, or dismay at the house's decor or the sight of Lurch or Thing.

[8] Prominently depicting Thing and Cousin Itt was an example of how the show deemphasized the cartoons' dark themes and emphasized the Addams's comedic strangeness.

The series often employed the same type of zany satire and screwball humor seen in the Marx Brothers films, in addition to wordplay, physical comedy, and occasionally slapstick.

Other running jokes were about strange food and drink, e.g. toadstools and hemlock; bats, the dungeon, the cemetery, and other "creepy" things; and Gomez's glee at losing money on the stock market.

It lampooned politics ("Gomez, the Politician" and "Gomez, the People's Choice"); modern art ("Art and the Addams Family" and Morticia's painting in several episodes); Shakespeare and other literature ("My Fair Cousin Itt", and other episodes); the legal system ("The Addams Family in Court"); royalty ("Morticia Meets Royalty"); rock n' roll and Beatlemania ("Lurch, the Teenage Idol").

[9] The ABC network originally wanted to save money by using prerecorded library production music for the series, but producer David Levy insisted on hiring Vic Mizzy as composer.

A reunion TV film, Halloween with the New Addams Family, aired on NBC in October 1977 and starred all of the original cast, except for Blossom Rock, who was very ill at the time and was replaced as Grandmama by Phyllis actress Jane Rose.

The film also included extended family members created specifically for this production, such as Gomez's brother Pancho (played by Henry Darrow) and two additional children, Wednesday Jr. and Pugsley Jr.

A successful film, The Addams Family, was released by Paramount Pictures in 1991, starring Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Christopher Lloyd as an amnesiac Uncle Fester, and Christina Ricci as Wednesday.

A musical comedy adaptation entitled The Addams Family, opened on Broadway in 2010 and closed on December 31, 2011 after 35 previews and 722 performances despite receiving mixed to negative reviews.