NEW YORK -- The Loud family, that appropriately named Southern California clan whose real-life crises and clashes were heardby millions of PBS viewers 10 years ago, is revisited this week on Home Box Office.
HBO's 'An American Family Revisited' is produced by Alan and Susan Raymond, the same couple who moved into the Louds' Santa Barbara home a decade ago and spent 300 hours filming them for the original 12-hour PBS series.
The hourlong HBO program will air Tuesday at noon and 12:50 a.m. EDT and have its prime time debut Thursday at 8 p.m.
The original series on the Louds -- Pat and Bill and their five teenagers, Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah and Michele -- started out as a look at the lifestyle of a family that apparently was living the American dream.
Besides a rambling home with a swimming pool, the Louds had four cars, three dogs, two cats and a horse. The girls dabbled in ballet, the boys in rock bands.
Then it was revealed that Bill dabbled in extra-marital affairs.
Then Lance moved to New York to live openly as a homosexual.
And finally, cameras rolling and with no prior warning, Pat handed Bill her lawyer's card and announced she wanted to end their 21-year marriage.
The HBO production notes that through it all, the family was reviewed, judged and analyzed. The Louds were on the cover of Newsweek and Esquire magazine gave them one of its annual Dubious Distinction awards along with the Watergate burglars.
The HBO program visits the family members in their current homes and gets some surprisingly open answers from the same people who -- as Mrs. Loud puts it -- were so angered by the reaction to 'An American Family' that they went on all the TV talk shows to fight back.
Mrs. Loud now is single and living in New York City. She thinks of herself as walking proof that there 'is life after divorce for middle-age women.'
'I'm having a great time and part of it is because of the series,' said Mrs. Loud, who works as a literary agent. 'I know people I never would have known if it hadn't been for that.'
Loud, now 62, has married a younger looking blonde woman from Norfolk, Va., who did not appear on the program but was shown with him in several snapshots. He still has the same job, is doing 'much better than when the series ended,' and lives in Santa Barbara.
He said he got married after five years of being single because 'being married is a much more pleasant way of living.'
Loud, who in one segment of the original series tells Pat that the sooner his children get out of the house the better, still sees them, especially Delilah, 26, who now lives in Los Angeles, works for an advertising firm and dates a man who works for Loud.
Of Lance, Loud says in 'Revisited,' 'I detest his way of life. I have no sympathy for that way of life. But he's my son and you have to do the best you can.'
None of the Loud children has married -- for reasons they readily disclose.
Lance, 31, lived next to Michele for several years in New York, working as a rock musician. He recently has returned to the West Coast. Michele, 25, is in fashion.
Kevin, 30, lives in Houston and works for an oil trading company. Grant, 29, has cut his long hair and now sings songs popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
None of the children seems bitter about the series, although Grant comments, 'They're constant reminders of how helpless we are.'
Lance claims that when the series was being made, the cameras were 'like a toy that followed your around.' They weren't noticed. 'We were celebrities just for living our lives.'
Looking back on the divorce scene, Loud tells the Raymonds: '5 to 10 percent, I knew the cameras were on. Ninety percent was normal reaction.
'But who's to say what might have happened if you hadn't been there?'
