In 1973, An American Family Gave Viewers Their First Taste of Reality TV. Decades Later, the Mom Said Show Cost Them Their ‘Dignity’

Before The Osbournes or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, there was the Loud family.

The family of seven became the subject of the 1973 PBS docuseries, An American Family. The docuseries, regarded as the first reality show in American television history, was the brainchild of Craig Gilbert.

Gilbert had two decades of experience in the television industry under his belt before pursuing the idea of following an American family through a period in their lives amid a palpable societal and generational shift across the country. Gilbert himself pursued the project after his divorce changed his perception of what family life would look like.

“The idea for the series was something out of my own life,” Gilbert told The Washington Post in 1973. “My marriage, my parents, television and really something about the country.”

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Gilbert set out to document shifting family dynamics, looking different than the families seen on scripted television at the time, from The Brady Bunch to The Waltons. In doing so, he met with over 20 families to find the right subjects.

The Loud family was made up of Bill and Pat Loud and their five children — Lance Loud, Kevin Robert Loud, Grant Loud, Delilah Ann Loud and Michele Loud. The kids, ages 14 to 20, were going through the changes that come with transitioning from adolescence to early adulthood in an upper-middle-class family living in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Filming for the series began in the spring of 1971 and continued for seven months, through the end of the year. The crew captured over 300 hours of film, which were edited to 12 hour-long episodes.

“The Louds are neither average nor typical. No family is. They are not ‘the’ American family. They are simply ‘an’ American family,” Gilbert would narrate in the show’s first episode.

The action would prove just that. Bill and Pat’s fragile marriage moved toward divorce, and Lance came out as gay, making him one of the earliest openly gay people to share their story on television. The show even followed Lance and Pat’s trip to New York City, where they went to a drag show as the mom tried to understand her son’s life.

Unlike much of today’s reality TV, there were no confessionals. There was minimal discussion of what was unfolding, letting the footage speak for itself. Around 10 million viewers tuned in to see what was happening with the Loud family, proving that real families could be as compelling as the fictional ones presented in the two decades since television programming became a mainstay in American households.

The show didn’t just illustrate changes facing American families on a societal level, but an economic one as well. The family panicked as a wildfire threatened their home. Bill struggled financially as the mining industry, in which he owned a business, was on the decline.

Families on reality TV aren’t always thrilled at how they are depicted. The Loud family was split in their feelings on the resulting series, which aired from Jan. to March 1973. In a letter Bill wrote to Gilbert following the show’s airing, he wrote, “I think you’ve handled the film with as much kindness as is possible and still remained honest. I am, in short, simply astounded, enormously pleased and very proud.”

Pat would eventually have a change of heart, sharing in an appearance on The Dick Cavet Show that she felt the series “makes us look like a bunch of freaks and monsters . . . We’ve lost dignity, been humiliated, and our honor is in question.”

The series wasn’t the last the American public saw of the Loud family. In 2001, cameras were invited to revisit the family for Lance Loud!: A Death in an American Family, as the family came together around Lance, who was dying of a hepatitis C and HIV co-infection. All the family members except Grant agreed to participate as Lance told his story of 20 years of crystal meth addiction, and a career that saw him go from music to journalism.

“Make no mistake. This is not to emphasize the sadness of my demise, but rather to emphasize the love of my family and friends. When my time comes up, I want to be filmed because life this past year has taught me so much. I also stand as a role model as to what not to do in one’s life,” Lance wrote of his life, per The Los Angeles Times. He died in Dec. 2001.

The special, billed as the final episode of the series, aired in 2003. It showed that the remaining family members kept a tight bond, with Pat and Bill moving back in together as one of Lance’s final wishes. Bill died in July 2018, while Pat died in Jan. 2021. The series was most recently revisited by PBS in 2023 in An American Family at 50.