An American Family

A well-meaning, cheerful, hardworking businessman struggles to confront the fact that he has surrounded himself with ungrateful vultures all of whom possess odious personalities. At the time this was filmed, I was under one year old: watching it 55 years later, it seems like a document demonstrating how quickly the nuclear family descended from a fairly stable, sometimes repressive kinship unit (whose members mostly believed in the strength and necessity of its virtues) into utter derangement. - Full Review

It could have received a higher score, but that would just have been scoring it for the dad.

* I watched both the full 12-hr version and the truncated 2-hr version* Margaret Mead: “…an extraordinary series…nothing like it has ever been done…as new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel.” She’s not wrong. This is an impressively powerful message about the good of the nuclear family - which since the 1970s has become demonised - that also necessarily involves the sort of demise of this particular nuclear family. I really do like the Louds, all of them. Essential viewing.