An American Family is an American television documentary filmed from May 30 through December 31, 1971 and first aired in the United States on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in early 1973. After being edited down from about 300 hours of raw footage, the series ran one season of 12 episodes on Thursday nights at 9:00 p.m.
Originally intended to be a chronicle of the daily life of the Louds, an upper-middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California, the groundbreaking program documented the break-up of the family via the separation and subsequent divorce of parents Bill and Pat Loud. The documentary inspired the MTV reality television series The Real World as well as spoofs such as the Albert Brooks feature film Real Life.
A year after this programme was broadcast, the BBC in 1974 filmed its own similar 12-episode programme, called The Family, focusing on the working-class Wilkins family, of Reading, Berkshire, England.
Read more about An American Family: The Series, Synopsis, Legacy and Influence, Present, Cinema Verite, Credits
Famous quotes containing the word american:
“Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on earth they think they’re doing.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)