I was a little surprised last week to learn that Bill Loud, patriarch of the Southern California family depicted in the first reality-television show (An American Family, PBS, 1973), had died—at the patriarchal age of 97. But of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised: A generation or more has passed since the Loud family’s celebrity came and went, and the lifespan of celebrity is usually exceeded by human longevity. As with more than a few pop-cultural landmarks, An American Family must now be explained as well as remembered.
It seems difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when television programming was not only confined to a handful of commercial networks but almost invariably staged and orchestrated. The successful launch of communications satellites in the early 1960s allowed for “live” broadcasting from distant locations—especially useful to news divisions—and the establishment of the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (1967) gave America a pale imitation of Britain’s BBC. Commercial TV had begun in the immediate postwar era of mass-market uplift, but by the time the Public Broadcasting Service commissioned and ran An American Family, the culture of television had long since taken a downward trajectory.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that while An American Family is credited with inventing reality TV, that is not quite accurate. A few years earlier a New York-based documentary filmmaker named Robert Fresco had gained permission to film a minor criminal proceeding in a Denver county court. Almost no American trial had ever before been filmed, much less recorded and photographed, for any length of time, and the resulting four-part PBS series—Trial: The City and County of Denver vs. Lauren R. Watson (1970)—demolished that particular barrier.
I record this, by the way, for a personal reason: Some months later I happened to work with Fresco on a project, and he seemed genuinely touched that I not only recalled having seen Trial but also remembered the (unforgettable) name of the presiding judge: the Hon. Zita Weinshienk—an early lesson in the evanescence of fame.
An American Family was an altogether different sort of enterprise. A husband-and-wife documentary team for several months followed around an affluent Santa Barbara couple, Pat and Bill Loud, and their five adolescent children, and then distilled hundreds of hours of raw footage into 12 hour-long episodes.
I was a senior in college at the time and, once again, it should be explained that my access to television in those halcyon days was limited to a semi-functional set in a common room in my dormitory. I had little interest in An American Family. But two of my best friends in the dorm were besotted by the series, and in their case, it’s not hard to see why. Whereas the Louds struck me as exceptionally banal and annoying—conversation was devoid of ideas and ambition seemed to concentrate on fame—they saw wretched excess and irresistibly cheap melodrama. And like most of America, they were quickly addicted to each installment and delighted, as well, when all seven Louds earned the official imprimatur of celebrity in bygone times: a cover portrait and analytical story in Newsweek.
Bill and Pat Loud seemed to have been recruited from central casting: He was a handsome, self-confident, Jaguar-driving manufacturer of machine parts and she was a boozy, chainsmoking, mildly frustrated character out of a John Cheever story. The Loud children, male and female, were largely encased in 1960s-’70s uniforms—big hair, garish colors, bell-bottom trousers—and seemed interchangeable to me. But the breakout star of the series was the eldest son Lance, flamboyantly gay, in love with the camera, habitually aimless, alternately laughing and weeping.
The viewing public, needless to say, was equally hypnotized and appalled. On the one hand, it was both shocking and inexplicable that anyone, much less a seemingly respectable family, would allow themselves to be recorded by a film crew, all day and every day, for months on end. To be sure, the Louds were devoted, one to the other, in mysterious ways and, in the fashion of families, deeply self-absorbed. Yet there was turbulence beneath the sun-drenched surface, which exploded in a famous on-camera revelation of Bill Loud’s infidelities and Pat Loud’s demand for divorce.
So An American Family raised two questions about celebrity culture and its handmaiden television that remain current and are probably unanswerable: To what extent was the Loud family’s behavior, especially its misbehavior, prompted by those inquiring cameras, and is there anything Americans will not do in full view of strangers?
To their credit, the filmmakers’ claims for their project were comparatively modest: Despite the title of the series, they did not regard the Loud family as representative either of America or of families—not even in a decade when the chattering classes were largely persuaded that both had seen better days. They filmed, as it were; you decided. And in Bill Loud’s defense, he complained that the footage was deliberately edited to present “only the negative, bizarre, and sensational stuff,” as it may well have been. Forty-five years later, his surviving four children—Lance died in 2001, at 50—and even Pat Loud seem to regard him with affection and gratitude.
The problem, of course, is that the primal instinct that drew Bill Loud toward the camera and pop-cultural immortality is a two-edged sword. Speaking of his father a couple of years ago, one of the younger Loud sons recalled that his business “provided a family of five kids with a very comfortable life, and took [us] around the world. As a kid I never thought much about it. As a middle-aged guy, I can only shake my head in awe and respect.” Indeed, Loud’s life can be seen from another perspective: He had been a PT boat commander on D-Day, received a Bronze Star in Korea, and built a prosperous business enterprise from scratch.
And yet that same paragon of the American dream was a precursor of a coarsened popular culture that, in the decades since, makes the dialogue and set-pieces of An American Family seem like Molière by comparison. “But I’m really grateful,” he told an interviewer when the series was broadcast. “It was a very gratifying experience.”
