TV Family

Synopsis

In 1960, NBC aired what some consider to be the first "reality television" show in American broadcast history. Hosted by Jane Wyatt of Father Knows Best fame, and billing itself as a "new kind of visual reporting," it was called Story of a Family, and it purported to document the day-to-day lives of the 10-member Robertson family of Amarillo, Texas. While the show has since faded from public memory, media scholars and television historians now recognize its significance as a precursor to the unscripted television programming that dominates American television today. In TV Family, filmmaker Ethan Thompson draws on the recollections of several of the children featured in the show to offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the making of Story of a Family. Weaving personal anecdotes from the Robertsons with commentary from TV historians and cultural critics, Thompson tells the story of how the show's producers carefully choreographed the way they wanted the family to appear to the American public -- all in the name of authenticity. The result is an eye-opening look at one of the television industry's earliest attempts to shape the "reality" of family life in commercially viable ways. Ideal for courses that look at media culture, commercial television, communication, documentary, and television history.

Release Date:2015

Duration:56 min

ISBN:1-932869-97-2

Subtitles:English

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Filmmaker Biographies

Ethan Thompson

Producer, writer, and director

Ethan Thompson is the producer, writer, and director of TV Family. He is Associate Professor of Communication & Media at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. He is the co-editor of the book How to Watch Television and the author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture, amongst other things.

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Praise

"Informative and engaging. TV Family presents a really insightful blend of archival material of Story of a Family, first person reflections by the family members who were involved in the show, and critical analysis, by media scholars but also by some of the family members who offer very thoughtful and reflective analyses. It provides audiences with an important piece of TV history, one from which my own students, who think reality TV is a recent phenomenon, will benefit. The documentary successfully provides a social, cultural and historical context for the original show, locating it not just in TV history but also as a product of its own specific cultural moment."

Susan Scheibler
Associate Professor of Film and TV Studies at Loyola Marymount University

"Emotionally moving and insightful, this film exposes television's ideological whitewashing of representations of family and domestic life."

William Yousman
Director of the Media Literacy and Digital Culture Graduate Program at Sacred Heart University

"A valuable, reflective account of an overlooked forerunner of reality TV that underlines how many of this genre's ingredients were in place from its inception: the mix of the real and the staged, the interchange of opportunity and exploitation, and the selling of ordinariness and authenticity. This multifaceted video reveals much about 1960s American culture and about the medium that was beginning to define its reality."

June Deery
Associate Professor of Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

"Fascinating. If you're an educator looking at the rise of unscripted programming, representations of the family in mass media, or how myths of the American Dream have always been caught up with dominant ideas about gender, class, and race, this is the film for you and your classes!"

Michael Morgan
Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst

"TV Family recovers the history of a long forgotten television special, Story of a Family. In so doing, it not only reimagines the origins of reality TV by skillfully demonstrating how the thematic preoccupations, story construction, and presentation of the family on contemporary shows were anticipated by this 1960 documentary; it also remarkably reconstructs what this special meant for the family at its center and illuminates how the show itself reveals the limits of how American families -- even 'real' American families -- could be portrayed at this moment in the medium's development. It is an absorbing, fascinating text that provides important insights into both television history and contemporary television practices."

Allison Perlman
Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Media Studies at the University of California - Irvine

"A marvelous slice of television history. Ethan Thompson has brilliantly examined the making of a fascinating, forgotten 1960 NBC documentary on family life. Thompson's insightful interviews with family members and media experts peel back layers of meaning, exploring tensions of the era surrounding documentary production, representation and American ideology. Will be required viewing for everyone interested in the history of television, gender studies and American Culture."

Kathy Fuller-Seeley
William P. Hobby Professor of Communication, Graduate Advisor and GSC chair at the University of Texas at Austin

"This is a fascinating exploration of a long-overlooked program that forecasts our current reality TV craze while harking back to the old March of Time factual recreations. The Robertson family of Amarillo, Texas were the Loud family of their day. This heartfelt and moving documentary cuts between past and present to give us a glimpse not only of what one 1960 American family was like, but what early television was like, and how its version of American family life contrasted in striking ways with the reality."

Michele Hilmes
Professor Emerita
Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin Madison

"A thoughtful and fascinating account of television's construction of family at the dawn of the 1960s, and an engaging revisiting of the medium's first reality show subjects from several decades before reality shows."

Jonathan Gray
Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison