Jeffrey Ruoff's An American Family: A Televised Life: Reviewing the Roots of Reality Television

Landrum & Carmichael | Jeffrey Rouffs An American Family: A Televised Life, Reviewing the Roots of Reality Television Jeffrey RuofPs An American Family: A Televised Life Reviewing the Roots of Reality Television Jason Landrum Deborah Carmichael Oklahoma State University "I feel very strongly that the television documentary, ifit is to have any future it must go in this direction . It must be in a series form—repetition and involvement with characters is what holds viewers—and it must be concerned with the events in the daily lives of ordinary citizens." —Craig Gilbert "Reflections on An American Family" The recent publication of filmhistorian Jeffrey Ruoff's An American Family: A Televised Life (University of Minnesota Press) brings renewed and well-deserved attention to the The Loud's of Santa Barbara groundbreaking, 1973 PBS documentary series produced by Craig Gilbert. Ruoffcarefully examines the creation and production of this series, placing it within the documentary film tradition, while demonstrating its hybridity, and provides a detailed analysis of the critical response received by An American Family, positioning this series as a forerunner of television shows such as Cops (Fox, 1989-present) and The Real World (MTV 1992-present). As Richard B . Woodward notes in an April 2002 New York Times article, "Unavailable on video, An American Family has not received the attention it deserves from a younger generation."1 Jeffery Ruoff's thoughtful work offers both a thorough study ofAnAmerican Family and a bridge to ongoing discussions on reality television. The origins and future ofreality television as a media genre have become much-debated issues. As recently as the March 29, 2002 edition of USA Today, the deathofthe genre was pronounced in an article entitled "Reality TV cools itsjets." The author, Gary Levin, explains that Survivor winner Richard Hatch has become a distant memory, and shows likeMaking the Band, Chains ofLove, and Boot Camp have come and gone without even the faintest scratch on the television landscape. Within a two-year period, twenty-five shows dedicated to the lives of ordinary people vanished from the airwaves, leaving CBS's Survivor and MTV's The Real World as the only consistent ratings-draw. The tremendous glut and variety in the genre taught television networks some lessons about what types ofreality television shows are most successful . According to Levin, two distinct styles ofshows emerged from CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox network productions: self-contained game shows that crown a winner in each edition, and serialized shows that aim for well-developed real-life characters who can draw viewers in week after week (E2). The second format, the serialized shows, has a long history in American television, but Levin's article, and others that discuss the genre, fail to recognize this rich tradition and fascination with watching real people on television. Indeed, the lessons learned by television executives are not new, as Jeffrey Ruoff indicates in the historical overview he provides in An American Family: A Televised Life. To understand the vogue of reality television, one need not explore further than Gilbert's PBS series An American Family (1973). In 1971, Gilbert and his production team, led by Alan and Susan Raymond, descended upon Santa Barbara, California to film the family of Bill and Patricia Loud. Drawing upon the tenets of cinema verite, Gilbert and the Raymonds recorded the everyday lives of an upper-middle class family, hoping to develop a portrait of a family that captured "the breakdown offixed distinctions between public and private, reality and spectacle , serial narrative and nonfiction, documentary and fiction, [and] film and television" (Ruoff xii). Moreover, the series demonstrated the uneasy meeting ground between the demands of cinema verite and television. Jeffrey Ruoff's insightful new study, An American Family: A Televised Life, charts the long process of making the series and contends that it "transformed the repre66 1 Film & History Jason Landrum & Deborah Carmichael | Special In-Depth Section sentation of family life on American TV" and "is worth revisiting. . .because it opened doors to a variety of new nonfiction forms, not only reality programming but also confessional talk shows" (xii). AnAmerican Family's influence as a forerunner to today's boom in reality programming is primarily due to the series' structure and...