Entertainment

Cavett on ‘Family’

“Certainly no other American family has been through this,” said Dick Cavett when he had the entire Loud family on his talk show in 1971, after the run of “An American Family.”

In the interview, matriarch Pat Loud said the family had “lost dignity” and “been humiliated.” Lance cracked up the audience by saying, “When I saw myself billed as Homo of the Year, 1971, I was really despondent for a while.”

Cavett counters by telling the family, “You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way,” but Pat has the final word. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being naive.”

Forty years later, Cavett talked about the impact of “An American Family” and what it was like having reality-TV’s first family on his show. “If that show can be called responsible for the birth of reality shows, it has a lot to answer for,” he says. “When I saw it, at first I thought, ‘Don’t tell me people can forget that there are cameras,’ ” he says. “But the fact is that you can quickly forget. People thought, ‘They’re acting this.’ ”

But once the Louds were seated in the studio, Cavett says, “The studio audience was rapt, People loved or hated Lance. Families could identify with the wife. They seemed quite happy to do it and saw it as an opportunity to get things said. It got an enormous rating.”