In May 2020, the vlogger parents Myka and James Stauffer tearfully revealed to their nearly 1 million followers that the son they adopted from China just three years before had been “rehomed”. The child, Huxley, who was only five at the time and lived with autism, had been the star in 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 that he had been phased out, old videos featuring Huxley had been removed and comments from followers inquiring as to his whereabouts promptly deleted while Myka continued posting homemaking 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 to gain clicks and views, packaging his trauma as an adoptee into content, before deciding they were ultimately ill-equipped to meet his needs (“I apologize for being so naive,” a statement from Myka read). However, the internet’s response, much of it furiously leaning into not just critical commentary but also wild conspiracy theory geared for even more clicks and views, became knock-on content perhaps as craven and predatory as the inciting behaviour.
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 affords, while trying to avoid the opportunism behind some of the backlash. “I did not want to be doing the same exact thing as everyone else,” the director Rachel Mason says over 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 LA home, 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 on that documentary at the moment. Though I wonder if it’s on her mind when we’re discussing responsible film-making, as far as telling the Stauffer’s story is concerned. “I have other projects where I just constantly have to question, ‘Hey, is this crossing into exploiting the thing I don’t want to exploit,’” says Mason. “It’s really central to the ethical check-in that I think is required when you make documentary film.”
Mason refers to productive arguments she has weathered while making An Update on Our Family, trying to stay clear of the “salacious” and “outrageous” storytelling the media and internet would often succumb to when “cannibalizing” human tragedy. That’s a monumental challenge when her own series is built up from the algorithm-induced wreckage. The series platforms the unsettling material uploaded by the Stauffers and those who flocked to their orbit, and is 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 absolute heartbreaking story, which involves children,” says Mason, “and children that don’t deserve ever to be brought into a public spotlight. When there’s a horrible, horrible tragedy – whatever it is – and there’s controversy, please, let’s try to shield the children; not just the one child that everyone is concerned about, Huxley, but the other children as well.”
Children are for the most part blurred out when they appear in An Update on Our Family, which offers a panoramic view not just of the Stauffers saga but the whole family vlogging landscape that is implicated in their tragedy. The series features powerfully emotional voices who have experience as adopters and adoptees and faced struggles shared with both the Stauffers and Huxley, whose tragedy was terribly compounded because so much of it played out on public channels.
“I wanted those people who felt like they could be direct portals to this experience,” says Mason. She points to one of her subjects, Hannah Cho, an influencer who was herself 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 let-down, of falling in love with the Stauffers, and also looking at their adoption story in a positive way.”
Cho, along with fellow vloggers and influencers, appears in the series narrating how we got to this point, where the technological advances in home video intersect with the latest evolution in reality TV (from Candid Camera to The Kardashians), fostering a lucrative cottage industry for manicured-to-be-wholesome and intimate content that comes directly from otherwise average people’s kitchens and laundries.
“Are the people that turn their families into 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 great participants said in the series, people are fascinated with families, they always have been.”
Among the talking heads in her series, Mason tapped the YouTube expert Sean Cannell to measure the demand for family vlogging and bring real analytics to the Myka Stauffer story, which seems to have begun innocently enough. She was a single and seemingly genuine mom sharing her life online. Then she got married, started having more kids, and would have probably noticed, as Cannell has, the huge spikes in views and subscribers every time there was an addition to her family. Many online surmised that the boosts in online metrics provided the impetus for adopting Huxley, a cynical but not unwarranted take that can also be dismissive of the other myriad and complicated emotions that An Update on Our Family wades through.
There’s something in the Stauffer story that implicates all of us who have shared our children’s photos online. Perhaps we’re only a few hundred thousand more likes and followers away from rewiring our parenting brains, from serving our kids to feeding audience engagement. “I would be implicated too,” says Mason. “I have a son. I think the word ‘implicated’ is funny, because I also think it’s a human condition. We want to share our kids. And it’s not bad, inherently.”
She then asks: “Is there a distinction to be made with people who lean into the content and then suddenly have an audience to feed? These are not bad people at all. These are people who have similarly stumbled into something. You’re stumbling into a thing. And suddenly, ‘Wow, hey, the business took off and we’re catching up.’ A lot of people have stumbled into it and are catching up. And as they catch up you, there’s moments you may have to pause.”
What gives Mason pause is that family vlogging has turned into an industry that rivals reality TV as far as viewership goes, but without much by way of regulations and protections that shows made by networks usually afford. “There’s a team of story producers,” she says, referring to reality TV. “There’s other producers. There’s editors. There’s a whole chunk of stuff that can happen before it airs. YouTubers are producing content with a very similar audience base. Some of these people have fanbases that are equally if not more [large] than The Kardashians. And you’re not protected by a network or a production company. You’re really vulnerable.”
There are more upsetting stories that surfaced from so-called “family channels” since the Stauffers. They range from the likes of Jordan Cheyenne coaching her son’s very real tears over their sick dog to be thumbnail-ready, as seen in an accidentally posted YouTube clip, to Ruby Franke, a popular mommy vlogger convicted for child abuse. Franke’s eldest daughter Shari is currently speaking out about her horrifying experience, while promoting her memoir, House of My Mother, their story being an extreme outcome from the family channel industry.
Mason had hoped to include other voices in An Update on Our Family who grew up as stars in 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 wrapped, 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 are living in an unknown space.”
One voice you’ll be relieved not to hear from is Huxley, who, in the last update to the public, was left in the care of a family more 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’s videos, which are repurposed here, not with the blur applied to other children to protect his privacy but as a void filled in with rotoscoping animation, using spare, sketch-like brush strokes 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’s still obscured. But you can feel the presence of a real person, a real character going through a journey.”
An Update on Our Family starts on 15 January on HBO and will be available to stream on Max with a UK date to be announced
