The Great American Column

...It is far less interesting that the Louds are real than that we react to them as if they were not...

...At a time when questions concerning censorship are being put so ardently in various journals of opinion, it is interesting how smoothly the Louds pass by...

...Even when An American Family appears on the Dick Cavett Show to defend itself against its own series, the event merely adds another episode...

...If they were on radio, they would bring to mind One Man's Family...

...Their intimacies, where they occur, are merely verbal, thus evidently more tolerable, despite the fact that once a week we all sit down to watch an organization of human beings deliberately set out to murder each other...

...On television, they become reincarnations of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, a notable American family of another age, whose appeal, like the Louds', derives from their being the same family off-stage and on...

...Ricky was a rock 'n roll star, just as Grant and Kevin hope to be, just as Delilah wants to become a tap dancer...

...Every radio and television show, movie, and c6mic strip built on the family format has required of us the same superficial discriminations...

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...On the other hand, public criticism of An American Family has been couched almost entire in personal terms...

...They are an event themselves, the Louds, unable to extricate themselves from the event they are, unable, too, to perceive the impossibility...

...Because they come to us on a regular schedule each week, the same cast, the same settings, because they engage in a new and complete adventure every episode, edited largely in the same patterns, and because our appreciation and apprehension of them increases according to the continuum of the performances, we reasonably take the Louds to be fictitious...

...Of course, murder is a form of intimacy we tend to regard as sterile...

...Ozzie was a good guy, just like Bill...

...Ozzie did something for a living - it was never clear what - but his family, like the Louds, never wanted...

...The questions of propriety raised by An American Family are no different in kind from those raised by the Bunker family, which has been hailed and defiled solely because of its proximity to reality...

...Like the Louds, Ozzie and Harriet had teenage children, and a nice house, and confusions and misunderstandings...

...This is a procedure with which we are quite familiar, and it is accomplished almost by reflex...

...People who debate the inspirational elements of Deep Throat and Last Tango in Paris do not include An American Family in their conception of debilitating and tasteless influences...

...The reason may be that the Louds are not naked in these episodes, not naked in the sense of performing without clothing...

...The quality of excitement it bears suggests no likelihood of reproduction, so despite the accuracies achieved by television vertte, we view most aspects of the Louds' behavior as the antics of an American family of another country...

...By playing themselves in a theatrical situation, the Louds have automatically fulfilled that consistency of behavior we have always demanded of our actors, a demand which reaches for a mutual antagonism with which we are ultimately most comfortable...

...It may be argued that An American Family is real life drama, and ought not to be yoked with The Brady Bunch, but theoretically a semblance of reality is the aspiration of The Brady Bunch, and of the other shows as well...

...Roger Rosenblatt The Great American Column An American Family Meets Ozzie and Harriet The life and times of the William C. Loud family have become an important part of the popular culture, have in fact satisfied one of our fondest expectations...

...Even now, as the Louds are asserting their presence in their medium, they are in direct competition with The Brady Bunch, All in the Family, Family Affair, My Three Sons, The Partridge Family, -and more...

...One judges the success of each episode, and the whole series, by deciding whether one likes the Louds, not the program or the idea of it, a decision which hinges on our surface identifications with, and correspondences to, the family, and eventually becomes refined to the point where we judge some Louds better than other Louds - healthier, more honest, more entertaining - until finally we begin to root for our favorite Loud...