Reality TV's First Family
Today, (supposedly) "reality" shows that cynically and purposefully manipulate very real people into pre-arranged situations for maximum "dramatic effect" are just another week at the office in network television. But that wasn't the case in 1973, when a well-off Santa Barbara family somewhat aptly named the Louds made their TV "series debut." And perhaps no TV show did more to fuzz the line between scripted fiction and "real life" than the groundbreaking PBS documentary, An American Family.
The ethical questions of moving a camera crew into an all-too-real family's household, and following them around as the day to day dramas of life unfolded (and perhaps unfolded with a little help from the producers) are the substance of HBO's new scripted movie Cinema Verite, premiering this Saturday (April 23) and starring Tim Robbins, James Gandolfini, and Diane Lane. Meanwhile, in several select cities, some PBS stations will be re-running An American Family the following weekend (April 30), and the Paley Center(s) for Media in New York and Beverly Hills will be doing commemorative screenings of the series that same weekend.
Almost every encomium on An American Family goes on to say how it was the "first" TV show to show the fractured, liberated 1970s family for what it was, and get past the 1950s sitcom image. Of course, that isn't exactly true. Family feuds and generational quarrels were actually at the height of their small-screen success at the time, thanks to groundbreaking sitcoms like All in the Family and Maude (the latter of whom's family the Louds bore more than a passing resemblance to). In fiction, novels about sexy secrets in suburbia and upper-middle-class ennui had practically become a sub-genre by 1973, thanks to John Updike, John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Andre Dubus.
Still, they were fiction; the Louds were fact. Yet make no mistake, the Louds weren't the typical "American Family" any more than the family that Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland headed -- with their country club mini-mansion, brand new luxury cars, Ivy League prep school, and neighbors "keeping their fingers crossed about those mergers" -- were really "Ordinary" People. Today some might understandably consider the move (and the show) elitist, or a cynical, worthy-of-a-David-Brooks-satire attempt to reflect PBS's target demographic of upper bourgeois culture-vultures. On the other hand, if they had chosen a poor or minority family, the "narrative" would have been that it was by default a film about the effects of racism or poverty or single-parent households. The point of An American Family was to see if a family that seemed to "have it all" really did.
But what family or marriage could ever withstand the scrutiny of 24-7 surveillance by a bunch of outsiders determined to use one's own personal triumphs and horrors as mere fodder for their product? (If I lost my best friend to a car crash, say, would the producers have thought that they hit the motherlode, that the worst thing that ever happened to me was "the good stuff" for them? "Hey, he's actually crying! Zero in on the closeup and cue up the sound check!") As Princess Diana (who knew more than a little about invasion of privacy) once ruefully joked about Camilla, "There were three of us in this marriage, so it got a bit crowded." For as many critics who lauded the sociological value of the show, there were others who were shocked by and denounced the series’ keyhole-peeping "voyeurism."
But the show did certainly make an impact that went far beyond that one "American Family." Not three years after An American Family, small-screen maven Aaron Spelling and film and stage legend Mike Nichols teamed up to bring their own fictional reworking to the air, stolidly titled Family. That show's considerable success resurrected the "nighttime soap opera" thought to have died with Peyton Place, and led directly to two even bigger hits, as Family's story editor David Jacobs moved on to create Dallas and Knots Landing for CBS before decade's end. On the big screen, after the era of Ross Hunter and Joan Crawford "women's weepies" had run their course, movies had largely ignored family disintegration until the Louds let loose. Afterwards, films from Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People to Far From Heaven, We Don't Live Here Anymore, and American Beauty branched off the "Family" tree.
And while Roe vs. Wade and gay liberation were of course the prime movers (the most famous Family member was the late, openly gay artist Lance Loud), it's worth it to note that before An American Family, "family values" hardly even made it into a campaign speech for Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, except when their assistants were thinking up this "big government" program or that to combat ghetto or barrio poverty. Afterwards, it became the 800-pound gorilla of politics. To this day, no President, from pro-choice and pro-gay Republican Gerald Ford, to Jimmy Carter and his railroaded "Conference on the American Family", to today's hopefuls like Sarah, Newt, and Huckabee, can (or will) avoid these thorny personal issues.
Today, both An American Family and Cinema Verite are best viewed as a time capsule, both of an era before "reality TV" became Reality TV, before we expected and perhaps even demanded fix-is-in manipulation of real people as if they were merely fictional constructs on a page as part of our fun. And more importantly, as a real-time deconstruction of the where, when, and why the "traditional American family" first became in danger of cancellation.
As for TV itself, while shows like Family and Knots Landing were class acts by the standards of their day, we could turn those shows off at 11 o'clock feeling variously reaffirmed, titillated, intrigued, or just plain satisfied. An American Family may have been edited for television, perhaps even cynically so, but one thing it wasn't was reassuring or easy to take. It was messy and nasty and queasy and open-ended and so fascinating you couldn't turn away -- just like real life. It wouldn't be until shows like Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk, Swingtown, and Mad Men that hour dramas could or would dare to be that disjointedly disturbing and existentialist in their approach to interpersonal and family relationships. And while those shows may be great TV, like An American Family itself, they exemplify a very different kind of "family values."