Through the magic of Netflix, Charlotte has recently discovered those sitcom evergreens of my childhood, “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family”. Growing up in the 1970s, I mostly missed the afternoon kid’s TV blight of animated advertising like GI Joe, He-Man, and Transformers and instead spent my afterschool hours watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and re-runs of 1960s sitcoms. Forty years later, the animated advertising is still there, sorry to say, but the chestnuts of television comedy aren’t — they’ve been relegated to night-time cable channels like TV Land, where people my age continue to watch them. The cultural disconnect is huge because the shared vocabulary of knowledge of our shared past is lost. I know much much more about life and pop culture of the generation ahead of me because I spent hours watching their leftovers. Charlotte has very little reference to life in the 1970s or 80s and no tie at all to those older times. So I was more than a little bit pleased that not only did she watch those two shows, she *loved* them. She devoured both series, watching every single episode of both of them over the period of the last couple of weeks.
Meanwhile…with Christmas on the way, we’ve been trying to find a “big” gift item for her, but frankly have been left cold by the idea of buying another electronic gadget or pointlessly excessive toy. Every time we have a purge of unwanted/broken/outgrown stuff around here, it feels like we would have been just as well served to make a pile of dollar bills and light them on fire for the warmth. Then, last weekend, as I was scouring Boston.com looking for things we could do for amusement on Sunday, I noticed that the Broadway adaptation of “The Addams Family” is coming to Boston in February. As is usually the case with recent Broadway shows that tour, the tickets aren’t cheap, but as soon as I saw that I knew it would be the perfect “big” Christmas gift. We all love to go to live performances, Charlotte has never seen a real Broadway show, it will be a big night out for all of us, and, I hope, an evening to remember. Plus, the timing of having it be “The Addams Family” is just perfect. The only downside will be having to wait seven or eight weeks to actually go.
So, while all that is going on, the scuttlebutt from Hollywood is that the guy who wrote and produced the show “Pushing Daisies” a couple of seasons ago has been given the greenlight by NBC to do a “reboot” of “The Munsters”. Of course, there has to be a modern twist, so the advance word is that the show will be an “edgy” one-hour drama, no doubt to cash in on the popularity of the fairy-tale drama “Once Upon A Time” and the slightly more horror-tinged “Grimm”. Which is too bad, because it means the whole thing will be a complete and utter failure; if it even makes it out of pilot season, it will die a horrible death after two episodes in prime time, because everyone LOVES the goofy antics of Herman and Grandpa, and will be completely put off by some gothic monster story. The reason there even IS a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family” is because the several Hollywood film versions of it stuck very very close to the cherished shtick of the sitcom. “The Munsters” rebooted should embrace Fred Gwynne’s mincing Herman and Al Lewis’s New York-inflected Grandpa and find a way to make that work for an audience that loves nothing better than to reconnect with well-loved characters. Next thing you know, there’ll be a reboot of “Gilligan’s Island” that tries to be like “Lost”. I think Mary Elizabeth Williams’ take on it is probably the wisest: stop with all the remakes and find an original idea already.
