“An American Family” Turns 50

The 50th anniversary of the landmark PBS documentary mini-series An American Family occurred at the beginning of this year; I opted to kick the can down the road ’til today, which would have been Lance Loud’s 72nd birthday. How PRIDE can ya get???

There are many shows called An America Family by now. The one we refer to is a series of 12 one-hour episodes that aired in early 1973, and by general consent, has been called the First Reality Show. Producer Craig Gilbert and his crew Alan and Susan Raymond spent seven months filming the ostensibly “typical” Loud family of Santa Barbara, California: parents Pat and Bill and their five children, all teenagers and young adults. In addition to inevitable quotidian stuff, the film-makers captured such things as Lance coming out as gay, and Pat asking Bill for a divorce. It clearly took a long time to sift through all the hours of footage and edit the show. It was shot two years before it aired. There is an excellent clue about when it was filmed baked right into the program. Lance, who is in the process of moving to New York to realize his dream of becoming part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, assumes that his favorite band, The Velvet Undergound, is still a going concern. Technically, it was at that point, but the leader of the group Lou Reed had quit in 1970.

When I first saw the show it was about 10 years old. The context was likely the airing of a follow-up special on HBO An American Family Revisited: The Louds 10 Years Later. But I’d likely encountered many of its cultural ripples by that point. It was referenced in a 1977 story thread on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a series of 1978 comedy sketches on Saturday Night Live, and Albert Brooks’ 1979 movie Real Life. It was later parodied in the series The History of White People in America (1985-88), and served as the inspiration for MTV’s The Real World (1992). There were the follow up films Lance Loud: A Death in the American Family (2003) and An American Family: Anniversary Edition (2011), along with a 2011 fictionalized semi-biographical drama called Cinema Verite with Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, James Gandolfini, Kathleen Quinlan, and Patrick Fugit.

Oh yes, and EVERY SINGLE REALITY SHOW THAT HAS BEEN CREATED SINCE. That’s a long shadow indeed. So much has changed in the past half century, though. As we become increasingly immersed in 24/7 videography, people from all walks of life grow increasingly comfortable with the concept of being recorded. Ordinary people are quite good on-camera nowadays. They tend to be relaxed and natural and confident, relatively speaking, because talking into the camera has become a natural and integrated part of life. Even in fairly artificial situations, where the events are contrived. This was far from the case a half century ago. An American Family was shot on 16 mm color film. Clunky lights had to be set up in the Loud house. A boom mic was always just above the frame. And there was nothing “natural” about being on television, at least not back then. Consequently, the Louds are highly self-conscious on the show. It feels extremely canned.

Today it’s especially interesting and valuable as a time capsule, and for Lance’s storyline, which is an important moment in LGBT history. Scarcely anyone was out of the closet in those days. Loud clearly felt empowered to go there both by his infatuation with New York’s arts scene (Warhol’s Factory, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Chelsea Hotel) and by the fact that he knew that he was on television. His move was courageous, but no doubt there was also encouragement in the fact that he knew there would be supporters out there backing him up. Which also brings up one of the show’s central flaws. The film’s producers have always protested that they didn’t manipulate events, but my feeling has always been that they didn’t need to. The presence of the camera, equipment and crew was all that was required to alter the family’s narrative. From the very first time I ever saw the show, every instinct in my bones cried “bullshit”. No one on the show is being natural. They’re all extraordinarily self-conscious and performative. They all seem very much focused on trying deliver lines they think will sound good on television. The dialogue drives events. Would the divorce have happened if they weren’t on television? I’ve always doubted it. Both the subjects of the film, and those recording them, seem invested in portraying the family as some kind of cross between The Waltons and The Brady Bunch.

My other major problem with the show has to do with the selection of this particular family. Frankly, as a working class American, please allow me to blow the bullshit whistle on the entire experiment. There was nothing “typically American” about it. This is an affluent family with a swimming pool. The father is some kind of executive, the mother’s a housewife. They have enough dough to bankroll Lance’s vanity move to New York. They whine about it, but they give him the money he asks for. The only people who’ve ever thought this was representative of America in any way have been A) Those who watch PBS in the first place; B) New York Times readers, who have no idea what goes on outside their bubble. (I approve of both PBS and the Times obviously, but they do have their blind spots, to put it mildly). So, nothing depicted in the film reflected my experience of “America” or of “family”. It was the most patently phony thing I’d ever seen, from beginning to end, full of class bias and self-congratulation. To me, it was bad science, bad journalism, and even bad entertainment. I even hated the family, with the stiff, Nixonian father, and the histrionic, repulsive mother. They even owned (retching sound) poodles.

Obviously, in time, the cameras did reach the other America, but not really. Trash TV came along a couple of decades later, and then Down the Shore and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo. But although those efforts certainly depicted (and no doubt appealed to) other demographic groups, it was exploitational and no more representative of working class people than ignoring them had been. For something with a bit more public spirit behind it, I would suggest British shows like Michael Apted’s Up series, or Paul Watson’s shows, such as The Family (1974), which depicted a working class family in Leeds.

After An American Family, Lance went on to found a punk bank called The Mumps, whose members later joined The Patti Smith Group and Iggy Pop. He realized his dream of becoming friends with Warhol Superstars like Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, and he wrote for publications like Interview, Details, and The Advocate. He died of HIV related complications in 2001. In 2012 Pat wrote a book called Lance Out Loud. She passed away in 2021. Bill died in 2018. Lance’s four younger siblings are all alive at this writing.

For more on show business history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And please stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023. And to support Travalanche directly, please check out my Patreon.