Craig Gilbert, who created what is widely considered to have been the first reality television show, “An American Family,” in 1973 and then all but disappeared from public view amid a storm of criticism and lasting, bitter disputes among its participants, died on Friday at his home in Lower Manhattan. He was 94.

John Mulholland, a longtime friend and co-worker, confirmed the death.

Mr. Gilbert spent most of his final decades living alone in a small apartment on Jane Street, relying on money he had inherited from his parents. “An American Family” was the last film he made.

But in the early 1970s he was the envy of many documentarians, having produced well-received films about the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the disabled Irish writer Christy Brown.

He was a producer at WNET, the New York public television outlet, when he came up with an even more ambitious idea, at a time when narrative journalism was on the rise: to follow a real American family for months, capturing moments mundane and emotional in an unvarnished, unrehearsed style known as cinéma vérité.