An Update on Our Family review – these influencers’ murky tale makes you long to end the internet | Television & radio

Those of you who already feel that the world is too much would be best advised to stay well away from all three parts of the documentary An Update on Our Family. The family in question are the Stauffers – married couple Myka and James and their children – who were, until very recently, colossally successful family vloggers.

Director Rachel Mason’s series starts slowly, spending most of the first hour introducing the uninitiated to the world of YouTubers who specialise in filling their channels with videos of their gorgeous homes, gorgeous children and perfect lives, and to the fans who glom on to these affectless yet somehow intimate and generally wildly aspirational portraits of domestic bliss. “I was literally a part of their life every day,” says former devotee Hannah Cho. She and around 700,000 subscribers to The Stauffer Life channel watched as Myka revealed positive pregnancy tests, had babies, a miscarriage, gave house cleaning tips, appraisals of her post-partum body and altogether so much desirable content that she began to accumulate sponsorship deals and the family’s videos became the family’s (very) lucrative business.

This set-up could and should have been whipped through in half the time. The real meat of the documentary is what happens when you need to keep feeding the beast you have created. When your income depends on monetising your family, where does that lead? And can it possibly be anywhere good?

Engagement with their channel goes through the roof when the Stauffers decide to adopt a three-year-old boy with special needs from China, whom they call Huxley. Myka has the name picked before she meets him, though no one around her seems to note that renaming a three-year-old child, and especially one with special needs, from a different culture, who is about to be yanked from it, is an extraordinary thing to do. But on they went, exhaustively documenting the process, including the first disastrous meeting with Huxley. Or “Huxley”. It dawns on a tearful James that the boy “had a full-blown mom” in his foster carer. “Poor kid,” he whispers.

The determinedly cheerful journey back to America is filmed and packaged for their waiting, avaricious online audience. The demand for updates thereafter is insatiable, and for a couple of years they keep coming, including ones about the behavioural issues caused by Huxley’s autism and at least one from Myka noting that “he grieved so hard” and that she was “unprepared for what trauma truly looked like”. Then Huxley disappears from the family videos. Then previous videos containing him are deleted. Subscribers bombard the channel with questions. In 2020, the Stauffers posted a tearful video entitled An Update on Our Family explaining that though they love him with all their hearts, Huxley has had to be placed with a different “forever family” better able to cope with his needs, the extent of which they had not fully understood at the time he was adopted.

Their subscribers, and then – when the story went viral – the rest of the internet, took this news about as well as you would expect. A small amount of compassion was swamped by horror and disgust, by insults, anger, vitriol (directed mostly at Myka as a foul perversion of the maternal instinct), then death threats, then raging conspiracy theories that the Stauffers had sold him, killed him and God knows what else.

Mason’s film raises questions about just about every compelling issue of the internet age. It looks at the ethics of parents filming children who cannot give consent and who would in any professional, paid context be subject to myriad safeguarding regulations. It looks at the parasocial relationships that develop between content creators and followers, and the dangers of “betraying” those attachments. It poses questions about the purity of creators’ motives, and when a line is crossed between the natural human impulse to share, even show off, the good things in one’s life and the need to curate an impossible perfection, especially once it becomes sponsored by rich brands. It looks at the optimism, arrogance and entitlement that can play a part in transnational adoptions. And it looks at those who jump on to an emotional bandwagon not because they were invested in the original story but because they are malevolent trolls dedicated to spitting into open wounds wherever they find them.

The Stauffers refused to be involved with the film and their family channel has been offline since the backlash became uncontainable. So we will probably never know how many of their actions were driven by the greed for clicks, or whether it was simple benevolence throughout. But it is hard not to be reminded at every turn that the internet is the greatest unregulated experiment ever performed on humankind. And even harder not to conclude that, if it were possible, now might be a good time to end it.