Television this week begins its midseason cycle of replacement series, and if you can't handle reality programming, you might as well turn off the tube.
Networks and cable channels will feature the debuts of some two dozen new reality series in the next four months -- five this week alone. Combined with series already on the air, like MTV's The Osbournes, and those returning for a second season, like NBC's Meet the Folks, it might seem like too much reality to bear.
But in the mix this week with such debased notions of reality as WB's The Surreal Life -- which places faded celebrities in singer Glen Campbell's former mansion to see how strange things can get -- is a profound PBS documentary that offers desperately needed context to the whole cultural megillah that reality television has become.
The film Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family (tomorrow night at 9 on WETA, Channel 26) is not about reality television per se. It is a chronicle of the life and last days of Lance Loud, who died at age 50 in December 2001 of hepatitis C at an AIDS hospice in California.
But Loud was part of a California family that allowed cameras into its home for seven months in 1971 to record what was perhaps the first show of the type, a 12-part, landmark PBS documentary called An American Family. The film aired in 1973 and caused a cultural firestorm, with the family and the film attacked in Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, to name two of the more prominent and ill-informed venues.
An 'evil flower'
In addition to witnessing the upper-middle-class marriage of William and Pat Loud going bust, viewers of An American Family also met prime time's first gay teen-ager, Lance, with his black lipstick and dreams of singing in an underground band. In telling the story of Lance, one of reality television's first "stars," Lance Loud! illuminates the genre and the ways it can create celebrity and affect lives like nothing else onscreen.
Lance Loud! opens with some quick history about An American Family and the media's reaction to it, particularly in terms of Lance. The film cites a New York Times Magazine article written in 1973 by novelist Anne Roiphe that calls Lance an "evil flower," an "electric eel" and a "Goyaesque emotional dwarf," while referring to his "leechlike homosexuality."
