In May 2020, vlogger parents Myka and James Stauffer tearfully revealed to their nearly 1 million followers that the son they had adopted from China just three years earlier had been “relocated.” The child, Huxley, who was just five years old at the time and living with autism, was the star of so many YouTube videos highlighting the Stauffer family’s joys, struggles, and brand partnerships. But in the month leading up to the May 2020 upload, titled “An Update on Our Family,” followers noticed he had been removed from the program, old videos featuring Huxley had been removed, and comments from followers inquiring about his whereabouts , while Myka was promptly deleted I continued to post videos about housekeeping.

Once the Stauffers came clean, it (predictably) quickly and unforgivingly escalated into the family, which includes four other biological children, exploiting Huxley to gain clicks and views, and packaging his trauma as an adoptee into content before they decided that they were ultimately ill-equipped to meet his needs (“I apologize for my naivety,” reads a statement from Myka). However, the Internet’s response, much of which resulted not only in critical comments but also in wild conspiracy theories aimed at getting even more clicks and views, turned into follow-up content that was perhaps just as cowardly and predatory as the inciting behavior.

“An Update on Our Family,” a three-part documentary series airing on HBO, revisits the saga of the Stauffer family, but with more nuance, empathy and insight than the Internet typically provides, while also attempting opportunism to avoid some of the backlash behind it. “I didn’t want to do exactly the same thing as everyone else,” 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 calling from her home in LA, where she returned after having to briefly evacuate due to the recent wildfires. The director is currently working on a documentary about her close friend, the late Halyna Hutchins. The cameraman was accidentally and tragically killed during the filming of the film Rust by a bullet accidentally left in a prop gun fired by Alec Baldwin. Mason says she cannot reveal details about this documentary at this time. However, I wonder if that’s what she thinks about when we talk about responsible filmmaking when it comes to telling the Stauffer story. “I have other projects where I constantly have to ask myself, ‘Hey, is this crossing over into exploiting things I don’t want to exploit,'” Mason says. “It’s really central to the ethical review that I think is required when making a documentary.”

Mason refers to productive struggles she endured while working on “An Update on Our Family,” trying to stay away from the “salacious” and “outrageous” storytelling that the media and the Internet would often succumb to , when it comes to the “cannibalization” of human tragedy. That’s a daunting challenge when building your own series from the wreckage created by algorithms. The series showcases the disturbing material uploaded by the Stauffers and those who have flowed into their orbit, while also tasking itself with captivating audiences with the investigative flourishes and cliffhangers that true crime doesn’t fail to deliver would be in place.

“At the heart of it all is an absolutely heartbreaking story that’s about children,” says Mason, “and children who don’t deserve to ever be in the public spotlight.” When there’s a terrible, terrible tragedy – whatever it is – and there is controversy, please try to protect the children; Not just the one child everyone is worried about, Huxley, but the other children too.”

Children are mostly a blur when they appear in “An Update on Our Family,” which offers a panoramic look at not just the Stauffers saga but the entire family vlogging landscape caught up in their tragedy. The series features very emotional voices who have experience as adoptees and adoptees and who have dealt with the struggles of both the Stauffers and the Huxleys, whose tragedy was made even worse because so much of it took place on public channels.

“I wanted people who felt like they could be direct portals into that experience,” Mason says. She calls one of her subjects, Hannah Cho, an influencer who was adopted herself, the ideal anchor to tell this story. “She could help find out what it feels like to know what it’s like when the fans want something. She could talk about the feeling of disappointment, the feeling of falling in love with the Stauffers, and also a positive view of their adoption story.”

Joining other vloggers and influencers, Cho appears on the series to share how we’ve gotten to this point where technological advances in home video intersect with the latest developments in reality TV (from Candid Camera to The Kardashians) and a fostering a lucrative cottage industry of curated, wholesome, and intimate content that comes straight from the kitchens and laundries of otherwise average people.

“Are the people who turn their families into TV shows bad people?” asks Mason, looking back at an industry that took shape in the 1970s with the PBS series An American Family. “I realized that, as one of our amazing contestants on the show said, people are fascinated by families, and always have been.”

Among the speakers in her series, Mason enlisted YouTube expert Sean Cannell to gauge the demand for family vlogging and bring real analysis to Myka Stauffer’s story, which seemingly began innocently enough. She was a single and seemingly real mother who shared her life online. Then she got married, had more children, and, like Cannell, probably would have noticed the huge increase in views and subscribers each time her family grew. Many online users suspected that the rise in online metrics provided the impetus for the introduction of Huxley, a cynical but not unjustified stance that may also devalue the other myriad and complicated emotions that An Update on Our Family experiences .

There is something in the Stauffer story that affects all of us who have shared our children’s photos online. We may be just a few hundred thousand more likes and followers away from rewiring our parenting brains, from caring for our children to encouraging audience engagement. “I would be involved too,” Mason says. “I have a son. I find the word “implied” funny because I also think it’s a human condition. We want to share our children. And it’s generally not bad.”

She then asks, “Do you need to make a distinction between people who focus on the content and then suddenly have an audience to cater to?” They’re not bad people at all. These are people who have stumbled upon something in a similar way. You stumble over something. And suddenly, “Wow, hey, business has picked up and we’re catching up.” A lot of people have stumbled in and are catching up. And when they catch up with you, there may be moments when you have to stop.”

What worries Mason is that family vlogging has become an industry that rivals reality TV in terms of viewership, but without much of the regulation and protections that network-produced shows typically provide. “There is a team of story producers,” she says, referring to reality TV. “There are other producers. There are editors. A lot of things can happen before it airs. YouTubers produce content with a very similar audience. Some of these people have a fan base as big or even bigger than the Kardashians. And you are not protected by any network or production company. You’re really vulnerable.”

Since the Stauffers, even more harrowing stories have surfaced on so-called “family channels.” They range from people like Jordan Cheyenne, who trains her son’s very real tears over his sick dog to prepare them for thumbnails, as seen in an accidentally posted YouTube clip, to Ruby Franke, a popular mom vlogger , who was convicted of child abuse. Franke’s eldest daughter Shari is currently speaking out about her horrific experiences while promoting her memoir “House of My Mother,” whose story is an extreme product of the family broadcasting industry.

Mason had hoped to include other voices in “An Update on Our Family” who grew up as stars on their parents’ YouTube channels and could speak about that experience. “But you know what,” she says. “They weren’t old enough.” She adds that since filming wrapped, others, like Shari, have grown up and started telling their stories. “The key is to learn from these people,” Mason says. “We live in an unknown space.”

One voice you’ll be relieved not to hear from is Huxley, who in the latest update to the public was left in the care of a family more suited to his needs. Mason makes it the structuring absence in “An Update on Our Family.” He appears in so many of Myka and James’ videos, used here for other purposes, not with the blur applied to other children to protect his privacy, but as a gap filled with rotoscopic animation, using sparse, sketch-like brushstrokes to give him a sense of his humanity.

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