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“An American Family” was a hit, and Lance Loud, the oldest son, became a celebrity, perhaps the world’s first openly gay TV star. “Bill and Pat Loud and their five children are neither actors nor public figures,” Mead wrote rather, they were the people they portrayed on television, “members of a real family.” Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and Pat’s marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead’s view, “a new kind of art form”-an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel.”
#Reality principle series
Mead’s subject was a new Public Broadcasting System series called “An American Family,” about the Louds, a middle-class California household. Her contribution, which wasn’t mentioned on the cover, appeared in the back of the magazine, after the listings, tucked between an advertisement for Virginia Slims and a profile of Shelley Winters. On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a startling little essay in TV Guide. Unlike its 1973 antecedent, today’s reality TV has acquired the rotten reputation that once attached to the medium itself.