Adam is a normal guy.  A single, good looking, successful entrepreneur who is one of the biggest names in his field.  Having turned to an Internet dating site in the search for love, he meets a woman for lunch that he met on the Web.  He has been dating girls through work, he tells her, and now he wants to broaden his horizons.  “So you don’t work at one of those places that discourages that kind of thing,” she says.  Adam cannot hide the look on his face, and it does not escape her, so he finally has to come out with it.  “I am a producer, director, distributor, and sometime performer in adult films,” he says.  To say she loses interest would be an understatement.  It is as if she has been waiting for someone to mention porn so she can let them know how wrong she thinks it is.  She gives Adam a piece of her mind, and the date ends.

Adam’s mother, Lila, has a similar experience.  She meets her new neighbor for lunch, and the two women get to talking about work.  “I work with my son,” Lila says, and the neighbor is charmed by the idea of a family business – until she finds out what the business is.  The neighbor asks Lila about it with morbid curiosity, but when lunch is over, there is no indication that the two will be spending much time together, not that this bothers Lila.

Which is a shame because Adam, Lila, and Cousin Stevie are all perfectly nice people, the last people one would ever expect to be in the triple-x trade.  The great thing about Family Business is the air of normalcy it brings to the porn industry.  Adam is a perfectionist, a fact to which he and others attest, and he directs his films with precision, which is all the more interesting considering the gonzo style of his work.  He lays out sex scenes with all the clinical straight-forwardness with which one might describe a surgical procedure, or how to fix a car.  He is creative and has fun, but business comes first.

Without dwelling on it too much, the show gives some interesting insights into the world of adult entertainment.  The widespread use of Viagra, for instance, which for most actors is an occupational necessity; performers like the legendary Herschel Savage are rarities.  The Adult Entertainment Expo, held every year in Las Vegas, is, nudity aside, not unlike any other trade show.  We see the production process from casting to shooting to editing to distribution.  We see some of the odd requests that come Adam’s way as a result of his notoriety.  In the episode “Seymore’s Other ASSets,” a young couple asks Adam to film them having sex.  They have been making their own videos, and now they want something professional.  They set up the shoot, but the poor guy cannot get it up, and the project is a failure.  Adam consoles him, telling him that it happens all the time, and that it is for just that reason that the same guys show up in movie after movie.  Porn is merely a backdrop here, as the real core of the show is a tightly knit family unit, who if one saw them at the mall or at an amusement park, one would think they were in the insurance business, or something equally banal.  Adam is Seymore Butts, but he is also mother’s little boy, and Cousin Stevie, for all his grouchiness, is really quite loveable.  The season-ending nude roller-skating party that Adam and Lila throw for Stevie’s 60th birthday has a lot of heart, and the look on Stevie’s face is priceless.

In an industry where it is particularly easy to be taken advantage of, Adam takes great care with the women who show an interest in stepping before the camera.  When his assistant, Myrna, tells him that she wants to be in his movies, he is reluctant at first, and agrees only when it becomes a choice between helping her or losing her.  Myrna becomes Mari Possa, he guides her slowly from photo shoots to films.  Another girl, Lily French, a family friend from Canada, arrives in town to check out the scene, hoping to break into porn.  It quickly becomes obvious that Lily is smitten with an image of the industry that is not real, and Adam, Stevie, and Herschel Savage all try to talk her out of it.  Adam does his best to impress upon her that while it may seem glamorous, the world of XXX can be anything but.  In the end he puts Lily on a plane back to Canada, where she belongs.

If anyone knows the pains of the industry, it is Adam.  Named in a 2001 obscenity case, he got into a bit of trouble over his film Tampa Tushy Fest, trouble that only went away, in part, because he agreed to make cuts to the film.  So much for freedom of speech.  Fans, of course, have been clamoring for the uncut version, but the film is on moratorium for now.  I guess we’ll just have to make do with Gluteus to the Maximus, Tushy Tahitian Style, and whatever other free-wheeling ideas spring from the mind of Seymore Butts.  To say there is something obscene about porn is to say that there is something wrong with the people who spend billions of dollars a year on it.

But politics is absent from Family Business, as it should be.  What we have is a fun look at an industry that does not take itself too seriously, and at a family of enviable closeness.  Everyone is having a good time, and it all seems very normal.  The show is a mix of reality show and sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm meets The Real World.  This is also the show’s biggest flaw.  Some of the bits seem staged, too staged to be real, yet too real to be staged, a mixture that is sometimes awkward.  Overall, though, this is an endearing show that can be enjoyed by anyone from the most diehard Butts fan to someone who knows nothing about adult films.

Family Business is presented in the original fullscreen format.  The video quality leaves much to be desired, some of the episodes looking like they were taken from copies of copies of the original media.  While the overall quality does not make this hard to watch, one does wish they had done more with it.

This DVD set is presented in English Dolby 5.1, with an optional Spanish Dolby 2.0 track.  The presentation is solid, with good dispersal.  The audio is not as vital here as it would be in other shows, but the soundtrack is presented sharply, without major flaws.

The Jay and Tony Show Commentary: On the episode “Seymore’s Other ASSets,” Jay and Tony, two guys who work on the show, doing camerawork and interviews, talk about what was going on behind the scenes.  This is a track that is well worth listening to, on one of the season’s more eventful episodes.  Jay and Tony are funny and informative.

Mother Knows Best: In another interesting featurette, Lila talks about having a son who is one of the biggest names in the adult film industry.  She seems more surprised by the fact that Adam ever picked up a camera than by the fact that he got into porn.

Deleted Scenes: Five deleted and extended scenes, all worth watching, cut most likely because they just did not fit in anywhere.

Theme Song: The show’s theme song, uncut, set to a montage of clips from the season.

Butt Stevie?: Cousin Stevie at his vulgar best.  This is a montage of his cursing, which Jay and Tony admit having to coax out of him at times.

Behind the Butts: A closer look at what Stevie and Lila do and how they came to work for Adam.  Stevie used to be in the computer business, and Lila came in after Adam had some bad experiences with other bookkeepers.  An interesting piece.

Season 2 Preview: A three minute look at what is to come.

Family Interviews: Adam talks about his introduction to sex, and his youthful experiences, which were not exactly the norm.  Cousin Stevie talks about going from the computer business to the world of adult film, and how above board their company is.