Film on An American Family to Air on PBS

ARLINGTON: An American Family: Anniversary Edition, a two-hour film on the 1973 TV show widely considered to be the first reality series ever produced, is to premiere July 7 at 8 p.m. on PBS.

An American Family originally ran for three months in 12 parts. The show explored relationships between members of the Loud family—Pat and Bill Loud and their five children—of Santa Barbara, California.

Filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond, who worked on the original show, adapted the two-hour anniversary special to feature the show’s most memorable moments.

Fans of the PBS Facebook page will be able to watch the full film on June 27 and the filmmakers will discuss the film in a live online chat on July 7 at 2 p.m.

When it first aired, the show drew in a record 10-million viewers in one week, and in 2002, TV Guide ranked it as one of the Top 50 Greatest Television Shows of All Time. In April 2011, HBO aired Cinema Verite, a drama about the making of the TV show, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini—the directors of American Splendor—starring Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, James Gandolfini and Patrick Fugit.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead speculated that An American Family could be the beginning of a new way to explore the complexities of contemporary reality, “maybe as important for our time as were the invention of drama and the novel for earlier generations.”