An American Family

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"Loud Family" redirects here. For , see The Loud Family (band).

An American Family was television's first reality show, shot documentary style in 1971 and first aired in the United States on PBS in 1973. The show was twelve episodes long, edited down from about 300 hours of footage, and chronicled the experience of a nuclear family, the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, during a period of time when parents Bill and Pat Loud separated and Pat filed for divorce.

The parents had five children. One of them, Lance Loud, was a gay 20-year-old man who occasionally wore lipstick and women's clothes and took his mother to a drag show in the second episode of the series. Scholars sometimes mention that Lance came out of the closet on TV, but this is technically incorrect—he was simply gay without announcement or drama; his family says that they had known for quite a while. As such, Lance was the first openly gay character on television and has become something of a gay icon.

On airing, the show drew over 10 million viewers—phenomenal viewership for PBS standards in 1973 or even today—and drew considerable controversy. The series was widely discussed in the media in 1973, and the Loud family appeared on the cover of the March 12, 1973 issue of Newsweek magazine.

In 1983, PBS broadcast American Family Revisited, and in 2003 PBS broadcast the show Lance Loud, shot in 2001, visiting Lance and his family again at Lance's request. Lance was 50 years old, had gone through 20 years of addiction to crystal meth, and was HIV positive and died of hepatitis C that year.

Family members

As seen in An American Family, the members of the Loud family are:

William C. (Bill) Loud (born c.1921)
Patricia (Pat) Loud (born 1926)
Lance Loud (1951–2001)
Kevin Loud (born 1953)
Grant Loud (born 1954)
Delilah Loud (born 1955)
Michelle Loud (born 1957)

References

An American Family: A Televised Life, Jeffrey Ruoff. (University of Minnesota Press; 2002) ISBN 0816635617
Pat Loud: A Woman's Story, Pat Loud and Nora Johnson. (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; 1974) ISBN 0698105788

External links

[January magazine article about the series and its historical context]
[''An American Family: The Story of the Louds] Includes episode transcripts from [Subterranean Cinema]

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