Blog entry:It's Going To Get Loud In Here!

Cristina Quinn, World Compass Cristina Quinn is a Boston, MA-based World Compass Staff Member and Blogger. ...

The team here at WORLDcompass is gearing up for the event of the year...the airing of...(drumroll...) An American Family! (The crowd reacts with a deafening roar.) Ok, so maybe it's not the event of the year (is there ever an event of the year?), but it is a big deal because when PBS first aired An American Family in 1973, it was an unprecedented television series because for seven months a camera crew followed the Loud family through the inner-workings of their daily lives in Santa Barbara, California. As ungroundbreaking as this idea seems today with every TV network peddling cornucopian amounts of reality television ad nauseum, An American Family's debut was a seminal event in bringing cinema verite to the American public. 

Whenever I hear the words "reality television" today, I cringe--not because I hate reality TV, but because it's a loaded and often misleading term. I understand the allure of watching "real" people doing "crazy" things like having 19 kids (that is crazy), wedding dress shopping (not that crazy), wife-swapping (crazy--depending on the wife), competing for cash on a desert island (not that crazy after 12 seasons), eating toilet paper (crazy, though to be fair I've never tried it)--I think you get my point, which is that a lot of the allure is the validation of our voyeuristic urges. Reality TV allows us to be flies on the wall: anonymous viewers of an alternate universe in which we are free to celebrate, criticize, and revel in our feelings of superiority over the folks who expose their idiosyncracies to the whims of the American viewers. However-- the reality of reality television is that it's highly scripted.

What sets An American Family apart from what we identify as reality television today, is that the show was entirely unscripted. The Loud family wasn't told what to say, they weren't directed on how to handle a situation. There were no scripted arguments and there was no scripted crying. Some may counter that editing is a different approach to scripting, and it's true that the public only saw 12 edited hours of the 300 hours of original footage. But what took place within those 12 hours changed the American TV family as we knew it.

An American Family shook the bedrock of family television, raising controversy in the homes of viewers with the outing of the eldest son Lance, and by casting light on the marital problems of Pat and Bill Loud, which resulted in a divorce that unfolded before the entire country's eyes. The series galvanized the American public to look more closely at its own nuclear families, and made it abundantly clear that the "average" American family (defined at the time by a white, middle-upperclass suburban family,) had as large a share of problems and drama as any other family. But it also showed how the constant presence of a camera crew in the home can take a toll on the stability of a family, which is something that the producers Alan and Susan Raymond are quick to acknowedge as a lesson learned.

An American Family, whether it knew it or not, essentially declared for the first time on television "There is no perfect family. And that's OK", perhaps alleviating a pressure that had been on people since the Beavers appeared in their livingrooms in the mid-1950's. And as shocking as divorce and homosexuality were back in 1973, these are now the part of the very stock and trade of reality television programming, celebrated and reviled publicly along with many other previously more "private" human experiences, for better or for worse.

As we anticipate the 12-hour marathon that will take place on WORLD TV this Sunday, let's give a little credit where it is due. It wasn't MTV and The Real World that paved the way for reality television--it was PBS, WNET and the Loud family. And although the demographic of the American family has shifted dramatically over the past four decades, there are conditions that are a constant in every family, from the quotidian to the sublime, that transcend socioeconomic status and race. As you tune in to An American Family this weekend, you may find yourself laughing, crying and empathizing with the Louds, because like your family and mine, they are an American family living in a constantly changing world, just trying to figure it all out.