A lot of 'leading men" were diminutive. The screen can make them look bigger.
Fun Fact: Pat Priest, aka “Marilyn” on The Munsters was Sue Ann Nivens’ “baby sister” on Mary Tyler Moore.
“Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”
Who? Fred Astaire? 
Grandpa and Herman and Lily were all played by experienced character actors. They made a fairly lightweight show into something more.
Kinda like Car 54, Where Are You?, right?
I’m 5’6", but most of that is legs, with my 34" inseam. One has nothing to do with the other.
Oh, so we’re forgetting Beverley Owen now. Nice.
She left the series to get married. Marriage is evil!
Alan Ladd was one of the shortest leading men — the tall ones were off fighting WWII or were slacker chicken hawks like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. Ladd supposedly had to stand on a box to kiss his leading ladies (caution: may be an urban legend). Sterling Hayden may have been the tallest, at 6’5”.
That said, Meredith was never a leading man. Even in something like Of Mice and Men, where he and Lon Chaney Jr. had the biggest parts, they were both still character actors. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Trivia time: What Russ “King of The Nudies”* Meyer movie did Yvonne De Carlo star in? Hint: it’s the one with Tom Selleck.
- This actually appears on his headstone.
I can’t say one is better than the other, but the Munsters were my favorite.
Herman and Grand Pa.
The cars
Spot
Just my opinion, but I thought the Addams Family was funny. The Munsters were silly rather than funny.
Don’t remember the name, but I’ve seen one that featured Satanism and some nubile coeds.
In the Sixties I preferred the Munsters, but I was a child then. Today I strongly prefer the Addamses.
Gomez Addams was both rich and sexy.
John Astin’s Gomez was sexy, and Raul Julia’s even more so. The original Charles Addams cartoon Gomez, however, seemed to be some sort of oversized troll. Definitely subhuman, anyway.
The Munsters were goofy, the Addams Family were darker.
I liked them both, with a slight nod to Herman and Co.
mmm
Leggy brunettes? Sexy? Carolyn Jones or Yvonne de Carlo? You don’t have to scroll down much, if at all:
NSFW[spoiler]
gImages, “Yvonne de Carlo hot” — https://goo.gl/Qbd1Nb
gImages, “Carolyn Jones hot” — https://goo.gl/mhXsxP
[/spoiler]
It’s really not even close, Lily Munster by a mile. Maybe not leggy, but busty. ETA, well, the legs are there too.
A while back, we watched the first few episodes of The Munsters and The Jetsons, and for each, that was about as much as we could stomach. The ‘humor’ was stale crappy grownup jokes from the 1960s - topics like rush-hour traffic and mothers-in-law - done crappily.
And somewhere around that same time, we watched every episode of Gilligan’s Island, so it’s not like we’re coming from some highbrow place. The Munsters and The Jetsons were a lot worse than Gilligan’s Island, from our POV.