Reality-TV Originals, in Drama’s Lens

WHEN the documentary series “An American Family” was broadcast on PBS in 1973, critical and popular reaction varied, but many viewers, including prominent ones, agreed that it was a watershed of some kind. The anthropologist Margaret Mead proclaimed the show “as new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel.” For a host of commentators, conservatives and liberals alike, the series heralded nothing less than the demise of the nuclear family. Looking back on it in the 1980s, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard described “An American Family” as a symptom of our altered relationship with reality, characterized by “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”

It’s only fitting that within the first few minutes of “Cinema Verite,” a new HBO drama (to be broadcast Saturday) about the making of “An American Family,” both Mead and Andy Warhol are mentioned. Mead devoted her career to the study of human behavior, and the Louds, the stars of “An American Family,” were the subjects of a highly public sociological experiment — or, as we now commonly think of them, the first family of reality TV.

Bill and Pat Loud and their five children, ranging from 14 to 20, allowed a crew into their Santa Barbara, Calif., home for seven months; from 300 hours of 16-millimeter film footage (this was long before digital camcorders), 12 hourlong episodes were produced. The premise was Warholian — applying a voyeuristic eye to unscripted moments — and so was the aftermath. Millions tuned in, and the Louds became a more or less new type of celebrity. As the openly gay eldest son, Lance, who had been a teenage pen pal of Warhol’s, put it in Time magazine, the series fulfilled “the middle-class dream that you can become famous for being just who you are.”

The fascination with the Louds also had much to do with their lives seeming to fall apart as America watched. Pat asked Bill to move out, on camera.

Spoofed in “Doonesbury” and by Albert Brooks in his anarchic 1979 comedy “Real Life,” the story of the Louds has been retold several times. A sequel, “An American Family Revisited,” was broadcast in 1983. Lance’s final days — he died of complications from AIDS in 2001 —are chronicled in 2003’s “Death in an American Family.”