Show Business: Sample of One?

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Strangers stop them in restaurants and write them letters, favorable and unfavorable. Reporters hound them for interviews, and they are already being lined up by the talk shows. A publisher has asked them to write their joint autobiography. Pat and Bill Loud, in short, are discovering what it feels like to be TV stars. An American Family, the public broadcasting series in which they are featured, is no Ozzie-and-Harriet confection, but the story of their lives and the lives of their five children—with real laughs, real tears and a real breakup that resulted in their divorce.

The Louds sit in fascination to watch the series unfold each Thursday night. It shows an attractive, upper-middle-income family with five children —three boys and two girls—in Santa Barbara, Calif. Many scenes in the six episodes shown so far have reflected mundane aspects of domestic life, but some have been unusual. Pat has visited Son Lance, 20, who has taken up a homosexual life in New York City; a brushfire has nearly destroyed the family's four-bedroom home; the antagonism between Pat and Bill has become obvious. Bill comes across as a charming gladhander, while Pat seems more withdrawn and unhappy. The children are all different. Lance, for example, looks and acts effeminate, while Kevin, 18, is a typical high school politician.

The Louds are not happy with what they see. "I'm mortally ashamed of some of the things I did in the picture, such as getting drunk in the restaurant," confesses Pat. She and Bill are also angry at Producer Craig Gilbert over the way in which the original 300 hours of film were edited down to twelve one-hour segments. "We let Gilbert and his crew into our house to do a documentary, and they produced a second-rate soap opera," says Bill. "If they filmed 25 normal scenes and five bizarre scenes a day, they picked the five bizarre scenes and only one of the normal ones for the finished piece."

Producer Gilbert vehemently denies this, and he has been so shaken by the furor over the show that last week he went back into psychoanalysis. "It is understandable that the family is confused and hurt," he says, "but it comes partly as the inevitable result of other people seeing them differently than they see themselves. Like all of us, they should be proud of their lives and take responsibility for the good and the bad. They did what they did. There's nothing to be ashamed of." Unlike many of the TV critics who have written about the show, Gilbert sees no failure of communication between the Louds. "They communicate. But they don't communicate about the bad stuff. That's the way we are as a country, and that's what the series is about. We can't ever admit that we have made a mistake."