HBO has released the first teaser for its upcoming original movie Cinema Verite, and to describe it requires some thorny meta untangling: It’s a fiction film about one of the earliest reality series ever, the 1973 PBS docu-series An American Family, which chronicled the painful dissolution of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, California. The Louds are a subject that obviously interests HBO — in 1983, the network broadcast its own follow-up, An American Family Revisited: The Louds 10 Years Later — and now with actors like Diane Lane and Tim Robbins cast as the Loud parents and James Gandolfini as the hard-charging producer chronicling them, HBO can use a fictionalized narrative to peel back the layers of reality TV. From the trailer, it looks like a classy enterprise (with the additional bonuses of beautiful Santa Barbara locations and Lane rocking epically oversize seventies sunglasses) that’s got just a whiff of condescension about our addiction to televised reality, which should be great coming from the network that brought us Cathouse and Real Sex.
