Download or read book An American Family written by Jeffrey Ruoff and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before 1973, the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, lived in the privacy of their own home. With the airing of the documentary An American Family, that "privacy" extended to every American home with a television. This book is the first to offer a close look at An American Family -- the documentary that blurred conventions, stirred passions, revised impressions of family life and definitions of private and public, and began the breakdown of distinctions between reality and spectacle that culminated in cultural phenomena from The Oprah Winfrey Show to Survivor.