Jeffrey Ruoff
A new generation of television viewers has been exposed to what some call one of the first reality television shows this spring through Cinema Verite, HBO’s fictional take on a PBS documentary from the 1970s.
But it’s been a part of Jeffrey Ruoff’s, RTF ’89M, life since his time at Temple’s School of Communications and Theater.
He first saw An American Family in an anthropology course. The 12-part series sent cameras into the Santa Barbara, Calif., lives of Bill and Pat Loud and their five teenagers.
“An American Family was a breakthrough series because it confronted the issue of divorce directly and featured an openly gay young man, both new topics for American TV in the 1970s,” says Ruoff.
Through his graduate studies at Temple and, later, at the University of Iowa, he discovered, “very little had been written about the series and that it had been mostly forgotten, despite having made a tremendous splash in the year of its broadcast, so it seemed like an interesting topic for a dissertation.”
Ruoff was able to interview many of the people involved with the series during his research, which eventually led to his book, “An American Family: A Televised Life,” published in 2002.
He still uses the series when teaching courses in documentary film history and ethnographic film at Dartmouth.
“Together with other innovative programs, An American Family recast the representation of family life on American television in the 1970s,” he writes in his book. “Like All in the Family (1971-83), it explored the family as a site of conflict among couples and generations.”
A portrait of the Loud family.
He calls An American Family a series that “accelerated and validated…new tendencies in non-fiction film style and subject matter.”
Ruoff disagrees that it should be dubbed reality television, though. “Although it is clearly the perspective of Cinema Verite, I don’t believe that An American Family was one of the first reality TV shows. An American Family was a serious documentary.”
Click here to read a New York Times article on Cinema Verite.
