The nation’s headlines in the early months of 1973 were dominated by Roe v. Wade, the Wounded Knee capture, the Watergate scandal, George Steinbrenner’s purchase of the Yankees, the official opening of the World Trade Center, POWs released from Vietnam, and the growing fear of . Causes of gas shortage in the United States.
But the biggest story was something that was happening on TV.
Two years after more than 300 hours of footage was shot over the course of seven months inside the Santa Barbara home of Pat and William C. Loud and their five children, an experimental documentary of their daily lives unfolds over the course of 12 weeks. PBS. By the time it ends, “An American Family” has captivated the nation as it divided it, the Louds were divorced and TV was forever changed.
It’s hard to understate—and impossible to overstate—how daring this television idea was for 1971: it took a film crew half a year to record every day of its run for broadcast as a primetime series. taken to a family home. The “fly-on-the-wall” cinema variety movement that originated in France in the early 1960s began to influence Hollywood filmmaking (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “Take the Money and Run”), but It was outside the small yellow curtain.
However, creator-producer Craig Gilbert was firm in his belief in drama found in the daily lives of ordinary people. “An American Family” was inspired by his own at the time (he had recently separated from wife Susan) and informed by his 20 years in the documentary world. (One of his earlier famous efforts focused on Irish writer Christy Brown, who later became the subject of the 1989 Daniel Day-Lewis film “My Left Foot”.) He persuaded then-employer WNET, New York’s public television station Kia funded the project, then considered more than two dozen families who expressed interest in participating before choosing Loud – Bill Loud (50), wife Pat Loud (44) and children Lance (19), Kevin (18) , Grant (17), Delilah (15) and Michelle (13). Filming began in May 1971.
Most everything was fair game – Bill and his salesman job, Pat and her housewarming ennui, the kids and their teenage angst. Earthliness and activity, harmony and division, at home or away, individually or as a group or with friends – whatever the Louds did was recorded. Twenty years before “Seinfeld” made fun of being a show about nothing, a new series based on the very idea was underway.
A little in the middle of the seven-month shoot, however, a show about nothing became a show about everything When Pat Loud announced on camera to her husband that she wanted a divorce. The news shocked Gilbert and his crew, who thought they would have to pack up both their equipment and their more ambitious plans as a result. But he chose to keep the camera rolling instead. This portrait of an American family now had to be one of those Change American Family. By the time recording was finished on New Year’s Eve 1971, Bill Loud had moved out, and Pat and four of the five Loud children were facing a new year under their Santa Barbara roof with a changed family dynamic. . (Lance, who had revealed himself as gay during the shooting, was discovering life – and himself – in New York.)
After more than a year of editing, “An American Family” premiered on PBS on January 11, 1973, its content, if not its existence, mostly unknown to audiences in the less-connected world. It opened with a brief prologue showing Gilbert above Santa Barbara beach, where he explained the development of the project and gave a brief history of Loud and how they came to live in California. And he warned: “The Louds are neither average nor typical. There is no family. They are not an ‘American family’. They are simply ‘an’ American family. Then the series of the same name with a main-title sequence started that called for “the” The Brady Bunch” via the then-hit-drama “Mannix.” Catchy theme music and all.
Half a century’s worth of theorists have tried to explain what happened next—that is, what America’s families saw that night. And they kept watching. Ten million or so every week – Super Bowl numbers for public television. From January to March 1973, Thursday nights in this country came down to choosing between “Ironside,” “Kung-Fu” and “An American Family.” And as the series took root and Loud took off, social commentators took note of what it described as either a depiction of sinister family machinations or its exploitation. Or both. And viewers in turn took sides that more and more began to resemble a squabble rather than a family, the result of an apparent generation gap between parents and children and a communication gap between the 21-year-old married Louds.
By the ninth episode—in which Pat Loud tells her husband to move out, giving him her lawyer’s business card on his way out the door—PBS had a family that rivaled “The Waltons.” And the country found itself caught in a whirlwind coast-to-coast conversation about family dynamics in a changing world. Peter N. Carroll wrote, “While audiences laughed at Bunkers in the struggle and Ms. Magazine published a free marriage contract, the airing on public television of a documentary series … attracted national attention by its raw display of a widespread crisis in domestic relations.” In his 1982 book “It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s”.
The Louds – alternately pilloried or admired, scrutinizing Pat and Bill’s parenting and studying their children’s every move (especially that of breakout star, Lance) – were part of a cultural maelstrom . Halfway through the 12-week rollout, fearful of how “An American Family” was presenting them, they appeared on Dick Cavett’s Afternoon Show as a group to plead a misrepresentation case due to selective editing. went on talk shows. (Pat Loud: “We have lost dignity, been humiliated, and our honor is in question.”)
However, the loud train was not slowed down. A week after the momentous ninth episode, the family appeared on Newsweek’s cover line: “The Broken Family.” The exposure served only to drum up publicity for the show’s March 29 finale, which presented Loud in all of their New Normal – after which the seven went back to their (changed) lives. Pat Loud wrote a memoir; Lance Loud began pursuing a career as a celebrity; And Craig Gilbert, who was damned during the show’s run for his role in the many musings about the destruction of the American family (and television), went into seclusion.
The endless debate over “the American family” and its importance – or lack thereof – has gone on for 50 years. There is no disputing, however, the project’s influence on both the business and art forms of television, each of which was already on the rise due to the arrival two years earlier of Norman Lear’s convention-smashing “All in the Family” in 1973. was in significant change—which began shooting the same month (May 1971) that “All in the Family” was named Outstanding New Series (as well as Outstanding Comedy) at the Emmy Awards. A TV revolution was indeed underway that saw the medium’s previously clean portrayal of family life replaced by a “real-er” more relatable portrayal.
And the popularity of “An American Family” announced that nonfiction storytelling was a welcome addition to primetime TV. Indeed, by the end of the decade, NBC had introduced “Real People”, followed a year later by ABC’s “That’s Incredible!” In the 1980s, so-labeled reality programming was the hottest new genre on the TV scene, spreading like kudzu and in as many guises as outlets (not all of which invoked narratives as great as Gilbert’s). – from “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Rescue from 911” to “America’s Most Wanted” and “Police” and “Fully Hidden Videos”. In 1992, MTV launched “The Real World”, a program for twentysomethings. was a fly-on-the-wall experiment, described by producers Mary-Elise Bunim and Jonathan Murray as inspired by “An American Family”.
with watchwords cheap And EaseIn the 21st century, the genre grew to the point of replacing sitcoms, particularly (but not exclusively) on broadcast television, as the success of scripted programming diminished as offerings on premium networks and later streaming services.
While “An American Family” is often seen as TV’s first reality show, the form dated to radio and was a precursor to “Candid Camera” such as “Candid Microphone”. But it still left a huge mark on television and the culture at large. Not only did this project introduce a gay lead in Lance Loud at a time (four years after Stonewall) when representation was important, it dared to portray the experience of divorce in a country that was constantly being changed by Was.
“An American Family” has received several updates and accolades in the decades since, most notably 2003’s “Lance Loud: A Death in an American Family” – recorded in 2001 as a tribute to Lance Loud, then in hospice. . (The eldest Loud, HIV-positive at the time, had parlayed his 12 weeks of TV fame into a well-documented and self-confessed 20-year crystal-meth addiction.) AIDS and hepatitis-C in December He died from complications of. of 2001.
A decade ago, HBO aired a film about the making of the series called “Cinema Verite,” starring Tim Robbins and Diane Lane as the Loud parents and James Gandolfini as Craig Gilbert. It was equal parts meta and ironic in its documentation of the entirety of the project from beginning to end. At 90 minutes, though, it largely failed to capture the seismic impact of “An American Family” — but it received strong reviews and nine Emmy nominations. (side note, “An American Family” never received an Emmy nomination.)
One of Lance Loud’s last wishes in 2001 was that his parents be reunited. After his death, he did. Loud remained together until Bill’s death in 2018. (The family’s Facebook announcement of his passing ended thus: “If you never met him or only knew him from television… you missed out greatly.”) Pat Loud died in 2021.
Craig Gilbert, not bothered by criticism of “An American Family” when and after it aired, died in 2020. A brooding East Coast neurotic with a compulsive need for privacy, and to impose my twister vision of life on a preoccupied public. The man who changed the face of television never made another documentary.
