An American Family, filmed in 1971, was an innovative, twelve-part documentary created when PBS was at the height of its countercultural ambitions. For seven months, the producers followed the fairly typical upper-middle-class family of Pat and Bill Loud, who lived in Santa Barbara, California, with their five children. Intending to capture the intergenerational friction of the time, the creator Craig Gilbert opened the show with these words: “The Louds are neither average nor typical, no family is. They are not the American Family, they are simply an American Family.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 824