TMC
01-12-2023, 07:27 AM
https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2023/01/an-american-family-50-year-anniversary/
Andy Dehnart
Jan. 11, 2023, 9:00 pm
Fifty years have passed since PBS warned Americans in an advertisement that a new, 12-episode show would shock them: “There has never been anything on television—or anywhere else—to prepare you.”
Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, in TV Guide, that the show “is, I believe, as new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel—a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.”
How right she was. That new invention, the new show, was An American Family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Family): 12 hours of television that established a new genre with episodic, dramatic television following real people.
Artificially constructed contexts, like The Real World’s loft of strangers and Survivor’s island game, would come later. But reality TV was born when a camera crew followed a family around and edited their lives into a show that was both entertaining and instructive.
I did not know of An American Family when I fell in love with reality TV, stumbling across an episode of The Real World as a teenager, but I am immensely grateful for it. I’m especially grateful for someone whose name I did not know until he died in 2001: Lance Loud (https://www.pbs.org/lanceloud/american/). It was Lance, the 20-year-old son of Pat and Bill Loud, who accidentally kicked down a door and made it easier for gay people like me to be our authentic selves.
Andy Dehnart
Jan. 11, 2023, 9:00 pm
Fifty years have passed since PBS warned Americans in an advertisement that a new, 12-episode show would shock them: “There has never been anything on television—or anywhere else—to prepare you.”
Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, in TV Guide, that the show “is, I believe, as new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel—a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.”
How right she was. That new invention, the new show, was An American Family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Family): 12 hours of television that established a new genre with episodic, dramatic television following real people.
Artificially constructed contexts, like The Real World’s loft of strangers and Survivor’s island game, would come later. But reality TV was born when a camera crew followed a family around and edited their lives into a show that was both entertaining and instructive.
I did not know of An American Family when I fell in love with reality TV, stumbling across an episode of The Real World as a teenager, but I am immensely grateful for it. I’m especially grateful for someone whose name I did not know until he died in 2001: Lance Loud (https://www.pbs.org/lanceloud/american/). It was Lance, the 20-year-old son of Pat and Bill Loud, who accidentally kicked down a door and made it easier for gay people like me to be our authentic selves.