‘Absolutely heartbreaking’: the dark side of family vlogging | Documentary

IIn May 2020, vlogger parents Myka and James Stauffer tearfully revealed to their nearly 1 million followers that the son they adopted from China just three years earlier had been “rehomed.” The child, Huxley, who was just five at the time and living with autism, had been the star of so many YouTube videos sharing the Stauffer family’s joys, struggles and brand partnerships. But in the month leading up to that May 2020 upload, titled “an update on our family”, followers noticed he had been phased out, old videos featuring Huxley had been removed and comments from followers asking about his whereabouts were immediately deleted, while Myka continued to post homemade videos.

After the Stauffers came clean, the backlash was (predictably) swift and unforgiving, calling out the family, which includes four other biological children, for exploiting Huxley for clicks and views, packaging his trauma as an adoptee into content before deciding , that they were ultimately ill-equipped to meet his needs (“I apologize for being so naive,” read a statement from Myka). The internet’s reaction, much of it furiously leaning not only on critical commentary but also wild conspiracy theory geared for even more clicks and views, turned into an infectious content, perhaps as crazy and predatory as the inciting behavior.

An Update on Our Family, a three-part documentary series airing on HBO, revisits the Stauffer family saga, but with more nuance, empathy and insight than the internet typically provides, while trying to avoid the opportunism behind some of the backlash. “I didn’t want to do exactly the same thing as everyone else,” director Rachel Mason says of Zoom. “And yet here we are, kind of doing the same thing as everyone else. We’re talking about this story.”

Mason is on the call from her home in LA, which she has returned to after briefly evacuating due to the recent wildfires. The director is currently in production on a documentary about her close friend, the late Halyna Hutchins. The cinematographer was accidentally and tragically killed while filming the movie Rust by a bullet accidentally left in a prop gun fired by Alec Baldwin. Mason says she can’t share any details about that documentary at this time. Although I wonder if those are her thoughts when we discuss responsible filmmaking in terms of telling Stauffer’s story. “I have other projects where I just constantly have to question, ‘Hey, is this going to exploit what I don’t want to exploit,'” Mason says. “It’s really central to the ethical check-in that I think is required when making documentaries.”

Mason refers to prolific arguments she weathered while doing an update on our family, trying to stay away from the “vicious” and “outrageous” storytelling the media and internet would often succumb to when they “cannibalize ” human tragedy. It’s a monumental challenge when her own series is built from the algorithm-induced wreckage. The series platforms the disturbing material uploaded by the Stauffers and those flocking to their orbit, meanwhile tasked with keeping audiences hooked with the investigative flourishes and cliffhangers that wouldn’t be out of place in true crime.

“At the center of it all is an absolutely heartbreaking story involving children,” Mason says, “and children who don’t deserve to ever be brought into the public spotlight. When there’s a terrible, terrible tragedy—whatever it is—and there’s controversy, so let’s try to shield the kids; not just the one kid everyone’s worried about, Huxley, but the other kids too.”

Children are mostly obscured when they appear in An Update on Our Family, which provides a panoramic view not only of the Stauffers saga, but the entire family vlogging landscape implicated in their tragedy. The series features deeply emotional voices experienced as adopters and adoptees and faced struggles shared with both the Stauffers and Huxley, whose tragedy was terribly exacerbated because so much of it played out on public channels.

“I wanted the people who felt like they could be direct portals to this experience,” Mason says. She points to one of her subjects, Hannah Choan influencer who himself was adopted as the ideal anchor to tell this story. “She could help identify what it feels like to know what it’s like when your fans want something. She could talk about the feeling of failure, falling in love with the Stauffers and also looking at their adoption story in a positive light manner.”

Cho joins other vloggers and influencers in the series, which explains how we got to this point, where technological advances in home video intersect with recent developments in reality TV (from Candid Camera to The Kardashians), fostering a lucrative cottage industry. for manicured-to-be-healthy and intimate content that comes straight from otherwise average people’s kitchens and laundries.

“Are the people who make their families TV bad people?” Mason asks, looking back at an industry that took shape in the ’70s with the PBS series An American Family. “What I started to recognize is, as one of our amazing contestants said on the show, people are fascinated by families, they always have been.”

Among the talking heads in her series, Mason tapped YouTube expert Sean Cannell to gauge the demand for family vlogging and bring real analysis to the Myka Stauffer story, which seems to have started innocently enough. She was a single and seemingly real mother who shared her life online. Then she got married, started having more children, and would probably have noticed, as Cannell has, the huge increases in views and subscribers every time there was an addition to her family. Many online surmised that the increases in online metrics provided the impetus to adopt Huxley, a cynical but not unwarranted stance that may also dismiss the other myriad and complicated emotions that An Update on Our Family goes through.

There is something in the Stauffer story that implicates all of us who have shared our children’s photos online. Maybe we’re just a few hundred thousand more likes and followers away from rewiring our parenting brains, from serving our kids to nurturing audience engagement. “I wanted to be involved, too,” says Mason. “I have a son. I think the word ‘implied’ is funny because I think it’s a human condition too. We want to share our children. And that’s not inherently bad.”

She then asks: “Is there a difference to distinguish between people who lean into the content and then suddenly have an audience to feed? They are not bad people at all. These are people who have run into something in the same way. You fall into one thing. And suddenly, ‘Wow, hey, business took off and we’re catching up.’ Many people have stumbled upon it and are catching up. And as they catch up to you, there are moments when you might have to pause.”

What gives Mason pause is that family vlogging has become an industry that rivals reality TV in terms of ratings, but without much of the regulation and protections that network-made shows usually afford. “There’s a team of story producers,” she says, referring to reality TV. “There are other producers. There are editors. There are a lot of things that can happen before it goes live. YouTubers produce content with a very similar audience. Some of these people have fan bases that are just as if not more ( big) than The Kardashians. And you’re not protected by a network or a production company. You’re really vulnerable.”

There are more harrowing stories that emerged from so-called “family channels” since the Stauffers. They range from people like Jordan Cheyenne, who trains her son’s very real tears over their sick dog to be ready for thumbnails, as seen in an accidentally uploaded YouTube clip, to Ruby Franke, a popular mom vlogger convicted of child abuse. Franke’s eldest daughter Shari is currently speaking out about her horrific experience while promoting her memoir, House of My Mother, in which their story is an extreme outgrowth of the family channel industry.

Mason had hoped to include other voices in An Update on Our Family who grew up as stars of their parents’ YouTube channels and could speak to that experience. “But guess what,” she says. “They weren’t old enough.” She adds that since filming ended, others, like Shari, have come of age and are starting to share their stories. “The critical thing is to learn from these people,” says Mason. “We live in an unknown space.”

One voice you will be relieved not to hear from is Huxley, who in the last update to the public was left with a family better suited to meet his needs. Mason makes him the structuring absence in An Update on Our Family. He appears in so many of Myka and James’ videos, which are recycled here, not with the blur applied to other children to protect his privacy, but as a void filled with rotoscoped animation, using extra, sketch-like brushstrokes to add a sense of his humanity.

“With Huxley, he had a story that needed to be told,” says Mason. “It was important to give him an anthropomorphic character … When he appears, it’s like a ghostly presence. He is still hidden. But you can feel the presence of a real person, a real character going through a journey.”