These days, reality television may be considered by some to be a blight on our cultural landscape, but there was a time when it offered a more honest counterpoint to the idealized families being portrayed on American sitcoms. Back in the early '70s, filmmaker Craig Gilbert conceived of a documentary series about a California household as…
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Long before The Real World, Survivor or Jersey Shore, producer Craig Gilbert created An American Family. The PBS documentary special that aired in 1973 was unlike anything ever put on television. It chronicled the real life, daily struggles of the Louds, a seemingly perfect California family who were not only catapulted to fame by the…
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Reality stars are a dime a dozen these days, but HBO Films' Cinema Verite takes us back to a time when that wasn't the case. The film dramatizes the behind-the-scenes action surrounding PBS' 1973 documentary series An American Family, which HBO's marketing team is referring to the first reality show. The series followed a Santa…
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What is it with HBO and dramatic recreations of classic documentaries? Last year there was Grey Gardens, and now the network is lining up Cinema Verite, which will be a dramatized behind the scenes take on the 1973 PBS doc An American Family. The original series was a big deal; it frankly portrayed family troubles…
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