In 1970, television ate my family. The Andy Warhol prophecy of 

15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep.

Lance Loud

In 1973, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) transmitted a documentary for television in 12 episodes titled An American Family. The show, considered the first “reality”-style series on US television, followed the daily lives of the Louds, an upper-middle-class family from Santa Barbara, California. From this moment on, the home (domus, heim), the private place par excellence, began to be invaded by cameras and intervened by the media. With the elimination of the distance that configures the interaction between the public and the private (9.1), something that does not belong to the house—the gaze of the public, of the “other”—penetrated it.

Craig Gilbert, the show’s creator and producer, was inspired by his work as a documentary filmmaker for cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. The guiding idea behind An American Family was to look at an family in the same the way that an anthropologist would look at a primitive culture, for which Gilbert and his team adopted the cinema verité style that had been developed in France in the past decade. However, the program’s educational aspirations were sabotaged by the network’s demands to guarantee an audience and, of course, ratings.

Once used to the dynamics of living with a film crew after them, the Louds proved to be a gold mine: the show captured the moment when Pat, the family’s mother, asked her husband Bill for a divorce, as well as the coming out of Lance, the elder son, who he would become the first openly gay “character” on television and an icon of the LGBT community in the United States. The controversies generated by the program and the mistreatment the Louds suffered at the hands of public opinion were such that they were forced to go on an interview tour to give their point of view on what had happened on the show. As a social experiment, An American Family was a failure that would be replicated time an again by the genre of reality television. As a source of ratings it was a complete success.