Bill Loud
Flawed patriarch of the reality TV series An American Family
BILL LOUD, who has died aged 97, was the father in An American Family, one of the first reality television programmes, which depicted the sometimes troubled life of a wellto-do liberal family in Santa Barbara, California. It directly inspired the 1974 British series The Family, which followed the Wilkinses of Reading.
Edited down from 300 hours of footage,
An American Family was broadcast over 12 hour-long episodes on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) from January to March 1973. Time magazine called it “the ultimate soap opera,” while Newsweek put the Louds on their cover with the headline “The Broken Family”.
The series provided plenty of suitably dramatic fare: the family home almost burned down in a wildfire; Bill Loud’s infidelities caused the unravelling of his marriage to Pat; and one of the couple’s sons, Lance, made his name as the first openly homosexual person on American television, shown living among the gay community in New York.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead said the series “may be as important for our time as were the invention of drama and the novel for earlier generations: a new way to help people understand themselves”.
William Carberry Loud was born on January 22 1921 in Eugene, Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon and served in the US Navy during the Second World War as a PT boat commander. Stationed in Britain, he took part in the Normandy landings, and was later decorated for his services in the Korean War.
In 1950 he married Patricia Russell, whom he had known when they were children in Eugene. They had five children between 1951 and 1957, and in 1962 the family moved from Oregon to Santa Barbara, where Bill established a company selling equipment to the mining industry.
A friend of Pat’s was the style editor of The Santa Barbara News-press. She met a television producer who was planning a flyon-the-wall series but had been unable to find the right family. She introduced him to the Louds, and the series was shot over seven months, from May to December 1971.
Halfway through the series, Pat, unhappy with her husband’s philandering, confronted him. “I’ve spoken to a lawyer, and this is his card … And I’d like to have you move out,” she told him. He asked her which of their three cars he could have. “Take the Jag,” she told him. She later claimed that she had been coerced into doing the scene, which took place in a restaurant, saying: “I was probably drunk.” By the time the episode was aired, the Louds had divorced.
Bill Loud felt somewhat traduced by the programme but was not regretful. “We spent 20 years building a family, and they selected only the negative, bizarre and sensational stuff,” he told an interviewer shortly after the series had ended. “But … it was a very gratifying experience.”
Bill Loud moved to Texas, where he worked in property. He was married and divorced again, then when Lance died in 2001 of complications arising from HIV and hepatitis, he and Pat, who had been caring for him, were reunited at Lance’s request and set up home once more, though they did not remarry.
The series was immediately influential: apart from The Family there were two American follow-ups, An American Family Revisited: The Louds, 10 Years Later in 1983, and Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family (2003).
HBO made the TV film Cinema Verite in 2011, a fictionalised version of the original American Family, with Tim Robbins and Diane Lane as the Louds and James Gandolfini as the series producer, Craig Gilbert. The Louds complained about what they said were the film’s inaccuracies.
Bill Loud is survived by Pat and their two daughters and two other sons.
Bill Loud, born January 22 1921, died July 26 2018