It was the first reality tv show, it’s been talked about for years. Criterion should try and get the rights and do up a nice package.
Well, Johnny, considering you were 13 years from birth when the show aired, and considering it’s not been released on DVD, you’d have to be pretty well read in American culture to know of its existence. Don’t beat yourself up.
The local PBS station ran it again recently, and I managed to catch a couple of episodes, and they didn’t live up to the hype — there’s a good deal of paint drying in what I saw. A lot of time spent watching Mr. Loud unpack groceries in his bachelor pad, or watching Lance make a grand exit from an airplane, or preparations for a pep rally that must have meant a lot to the folks participating but didn’t exactly have me eager to see more.
I read that the main reason the series isn’t on DVD is that music clearances would be prohibitive.
“music clearances would be prohibitive”
That’s why The Wonder Years ain’t out on DVD
Z Bart- that’s the point, I usually know all this useless pop culture trivia!
No surpise that it’s still not very well-known. Probably almost none of the reality tv producers even know of it, they’re stupid hacks. The reality tv stars, subliterates who have never even read a book, they’re terminally clueless and self-absorbed.
An American Family is a pretty famous case-study used in quite a bit of media theory, sociology, and psychology. It is true that as much as I’ve read about it and heard about it, I have never had the chance to actually watch it myself. I believe that it is an important enough document that it should be more widely available, but I have not done the research yet to find if it’s available in some archives or catalogs or libraries somewhere.
But yes, An American Family is one of those documents that at first you have never heard of, and then thereafter its significance keeps cropping up again and again and again. As a “first reality television show” it revealed some of the cliches and some of the significance of what happens when you put a camera in front of “real people”. Secrets that were meant to be revealed softly get let out in a flood, arguments and dysfunction that would normally be carefully resolved becomes more intense and dividing, the camera as spectator completely changes the family dynamic and “real people” start becoming characters.
—PolarisDiB
The New Yorker has had some great columns about all of this recently:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/05/09/110509crat_atlarge_sanneh
And definitely read this! http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/04/25/110425ta_talk_winer
that new yorker article is actually where i heard about this.
PS i would also be interested in a Criterion dvd
That the show were all involved came to a bad end? At least that was the urban legend back in the 70s….
Kind of like the Poltergeist of TV.
Phew, thank god they weren’t written by Richard Brody.
johnny
A popular reality TV show from 1971 featuring an openly (extremely) gay main character? And mysteriously nobody, at least my age (27) seems to know about it?
I’m really shocked that I haven’t heard of this before today. I read an article about an HBO movie that just came out about the show starring Tim Robbins and Diane Lane.
Forty years later and people are still freaking out about Glee.