Laughing out Loud: The First Ever Reality TV Show

M liked the HBO film "Cinema Verite" more than I did, though I found it mildly interesting. I was quite interested in the topic - the first ever reality show, American Family, 10 episodes on PBS about the Loud family of Santa Barbara, which truly captured national interest and attention back in the early 70s. I wondered how it would look by today's standards - whether it would seem more (or less) stagy that contemporary reality TV, which I find totally dull, whether it would look today like a real documentary or whether we'd see all the flaws and the seams. Movie doesn't answer those questions; does use some clips from the original, which I found more interesting than the movie itself. Diane Lane and Tim Robbins play the Loud parents; Gandolfini plays the filmmaker. Movie totally takes the POV of Patti Loud as the victimized wife, and so she is - but my memory was that she's no prize herself. The kids, particularly Lance, are made far more extreme and unconventional than I recall back in the day. Movie touches on a number of themes, most particularly the difficulty in defining the "threshold" of privacy: when the crew should leave the Louds alone, when the Louds are using the filmmakers for their own purposes. Also touches lightly on whether the series itself caused the breakup of marriage or merely captured on film what was going to happen anyway. Seems to suggest that the series made reality rather than captured it - and therefore was not the anthropological study that the filmmakers hoped - it's impossible to observe people without affecting them. Good topics for discussion, but they never came fully alive as a drama for me during this movie.