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Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV Hardcover – June 25, 2024
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“Passionate, exquisitely told . . . With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail . . . [Nussbaum] knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
Who invented reality television, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can’t we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary”—from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump—Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.
In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium. She introduces the genre’s trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World—along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor. We learn about the tools of the trade—like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and ugly tales of exploitation. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality’s peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script.
What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds—and why won’t they speak to the couple who filmed them? Which serial killer won on The Dating Game? Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more. A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJune 25, 2024
- Dimensions6.32 x 1.43 x 9.51 inches
- ISBN-100525508996
- ISBN-13978-0525508991
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Sweeping . . . Nussbaum shines a light on the people who have made some of television’s most beloved and most controversial reality shows.”—The Washington Post
“Passionate, exquisitely told . . . with muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail . . . [Nussbaum] knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well.”—The New York Times
“Nussbaum, as always, makes her case for the seriousness of her subject simply by taking it seriously. . . . drawing on hundreds of interviews with producers, filmmakers, and on-screen talent.”—The New Republic
“Cue the Sun! . . .combines the appeal of a page-turning thriller and the heft of serious scholarship. Juicy and thoughtful, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture.”—NPR
“The finest kind of pop-cultural narrative history: inquisitive, discerning, surprising, thoughtful, informative, and lively; underpinned but not weighed down by its serious intent; and written with a storyteller’s verve, a journalist’s skepticism, a critic’s astuteness, and a fan’s loving eye.”—Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
“As the first history of a phenomenon too few take seriously, Cue the Sun! is a blast to read whether you’re a fan of the reality genre or not.”—Ann Powers, author of Traveling
“Revelatory, insightful, precise, dark, and wildly entertaining, Emily Nussbaum’s examination of reality television—starting before the term even existed—is also a radical reframing of the entire history of TV. This is essential cultural analysis.”—Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution
“One of our greatest critics delivers the definitive history of reality TV with insight, passion, and wit. Cue the Sun! ingeniously makes the creators and producers even more fascinating than the onscreen stars.”—Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road
“It’s rare for a book to feel alive, but this one does. It brims with wonder and wit, with backstage drama and genuine pathos. Nussbaum shows that behind the lens of reality TV lies the most fascinating reality of all.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon
“Only Emily Nussbaum could get me to read, and love, a book about reality TV rather than just watching it. Cue the Sun! somehow manages to be incredibly fun while taking its subject seriously.”—Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You
“In this boisterous chronicle, Nussbaum charts unscripted television’s evolution. . . . It’s a rowdy and unsettling look at how reality conquered television.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Reality television may be ubiquitous, but it’s not new, as the New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Nussbaum illustrates in this fine book . . .”—Booklist
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Reveal
Queen for a Day and Candid Camera
Dirty documentary set off its first moral panic in 1947, just after World War II. Radio still ruled the roost back then, as it had since the 1920s, broadcasting opera, jazz and news, comedy and Shakespeare, all of it live—a cozy console the whole family could huddle around. Now and then, there was a prestige blockbuster like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds—a scripted sci-fi drama so realistic, listeners freaked out, convinced that aliens were invading the Earth, for real. If you were a radio writer or actor, you could make a nice living. If you were a star, you could make a killing.
Still, even in the early days, ordinary people sometimes stumbled onto the airwaves—and around the 1930s, disc jockeys began taking phone calls from listeners. These unknowns did something the pros had never done: They confessed their secrets to the world, liberated by the sensation of strangers listening in. It was the beginning of talk radio—the first strand of the “audience participation” trend, a fad that would jump to television in the late 1940s, like a tapped cigarette ash starting a forest fire. Pundits hated the audience participation shows from the start, a response that was saturated with class revulsion: These were vulgar programs, created by vulgar people, for vulgar people, about vulgar people. Worst of all, they were insanely popular.
One of the earliest of these DJ-pioneers was Lester Kroll, a former cab driver from New York City and the son of an immigrant lacemaker. In 1929, Kroll went through an ugly divorce, and then, after he refused to pay child support, got tossed into “alimony jail.” His months in the clink appear to have radicalized Kroll: He became an anti-alimony activist—and then a self-appointed expert on marriage itself. According to It Sounds Impossible, a dishy 1963 history of early radio written by former CBS executives Sam J. Slate and Joe Cook, the self-promoting Kroll, a wannabe playwright and an amateur lecturer on the Times Square “flea-circus belt,” found his way into radio through the Depression-era WPA, then shrewdly rebranded. By 1932, he was no longer a high school dropout: Instead, he was thought leader “John J. Anthony,” the highly educated founder of a “Marital Relations Institute.” He offered advice on the tiny Long Island station WMRJ, and soon, across the nation. “Never was a program concept uglier—or a show more fun to listen to than The Original Good Will Hour,” wrote Slate and Cook.
Each week, Anthony invited fifteen to twenty guests, chosen based on their letters, to come to his studio, then “eat their hearts out over who did what to whom at home.” The radio host’s visitors confessed to everything under the sun, from cheating to (on at least one occasion) murder. Critics sometimes suspected Anthony of using actors, but no fakery was required, according to Slate and Cook: A cadre of viewers stepped up right away, eager to “broadcast [their] troubles, anonymously or otherwise.” The show became a smash hit, particularly with women, who ate up the host’s confident, supremely smarmy advice, which often boiled down to “stop nagging.” By 1939, the show was airing on more than seven hundred stations and Anthony had become a tycoon, the Dr. Phil of his era—and also a juicy target for satirists, who mocked him as a maudlin phony.
The Good Will Hour got canceled, then re-upped, a few times, but by the time it ended in 1953, it had plenty of company on the dial, as radio producers encouraged regular people to step in front of the mic, for cash or kicks—and, often, for both. Some of these programs were traditional quiz shows, like Dr. I.Q. or Name That Tune, a tradition that went back to the 1923 man-on-the-street program Brooklyn Eagle Quiz on Current Events. But more anarchic formats bubbled up as well, relying less on skill than on their guests’ willingness to uncork and let loose. On People Are Funny, contestants took wacky dares, like checking a seal in to The Knickerbocker Hotel. On Welcome Travelers, train passengers spooled out personal stories. On Bride and Groom, couples got married, live, decades before The Bachelor was a dark gleam in reality producer Mike Fleiss’s eye. On Kiss and Make Up, Milton Berle judged marital fights, while on Rebuttal, media victims gave their side of the story. The most sadistic show of the bunch, Truth or Consequences, featured a buzzer and humiliating punishments for the losers.
For the ordinary Americans who agreed to appear on them, these programs were a lark—a quick, bracing splash of attention, with little downside. On the radio, you might become briefly famous, but it was stardom of an appealingly low-stakes type: When no one could see your face, you could be a celebrity to your neighbors while remaining anonymous in the larger world.
By the late 1940s, the audience participation formats had evolved into a robust genre, so ubiquitous that they were a threat to scripted shows and high-budget star performances. In 1948, the dryly scathing radio critic John Crosby, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, joked that there were so many audience participation shows on the air, they’d soon outnumber the fans who enjoyed them: “Eventually ALL the people will be tearing around from one radio studio to another, answering the questions and carting home the iceboxes. Nobody will have time to listen to the darn thing.”
Crosby, a Yale dropout who, like Lester Kroll, had originally intended to write plays, became, instead, the shrewdest observer of the audience participation era, which exploded just as he rejoined the Herald Tribune, in 1946, after a stint in the military. (A crime reporter when he first got the assignment, he didn’t even own a radio.) A genial literary assassin who once joked that his job was to be “literate about the illiterate, witty about the witless, and coherent about the incoherent,” Crosby devoted dozens of droll columns to these protoreality shows, taking potshots at their absurdity, their frivolity, and their commercialism. He was genuinely disturbed by one trend, however—the “misery shows,” in the tradition of Mr. Anthony’s call-in advice show, the kind of programming that was fueled by, and also designed to produce, tears and trauma.
In 1946, Crosby wrote a scorching pan of The Good Will Hour, repelled by Anthony’s “sanctimonious and infinitely complacent” schtick. Then, one month later, Crosby launched a full-scale attack on the audience participation genre, in a column titled “The Modern Thumb Screw.” It had a banger of a lede:
About two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor used to pitch winsome young Christian girls into his eel pond and watch with great enjoyment while they were devoured by the eels. This served two purposes. It fattened the eels for the table and it amused the emperor.
This practice has been illegal for some time but the enjoyment of human suffering, otherwise known as sadism, is still buried not too deeply in all of us. Since radio is always eager to gratify our instincts, particularly our baser instincts, it has devised its own eel pond, the human misery program.
Crosby described, in furious detail, a short-lived radio show, A. L. Alexander’s Goodwill Court, in which legal disputes were adjudicated, live, by a mediation board—a sort of great-grandfather to the 1980s small-claims court TV series The People’s Court. In one episode of Goodwill Court, wrote Crosby, a birth mother and a foster mother had sobbed as they fought over custody of a child, rattled by what the critic described as “mike fright,” the terror of speaking into the live microphone. The program amounted to “a peep show of the worst sort,” he wrote, comparing it to superior art forms. Fiction writers had the moral bandwidth to handle this depth of human suffering, he argued; nonfiction radio shows merely exploited it. “From Mr. Alexander’s program we get life in the raw without poetry, without art. The tabloid newspapers show us the undraped leg. The human misery program offers us the undraped heart—listen to it fizz.”
Other observers were more amused than outraged. The same year Crosby wrote “The Modern Thumb Screw,” Associated Press writer Jean Meegan published a more playful account of the new fad, with the heading “Critics Scream, Actors Howl, but Audience Participation Shows Go On and On and On.” Like Crosby, Meegan took a few shots at the new genre, quoting a psychologist who decried the hollow lives of guests, in a sniffy description that might condemn many modern podcasters: “Being 35 years old and living in Brooklyn isn’t much of an achievement, but on the radio it sounds meritorious.”
Product details
- Publisher : Random House (June 25, 2024)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525508996
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525508991
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.32 x 1.43 x 9.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in TV Shows
- #2 in TV History & Criticism
- #4 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
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About the author
![Emily Nussbaum](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/01Kv-W2ysOL._SY600_.png)
Emily Nussbaum is the television critic for The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She previously worked as a writer and editor at New York Magazine, where she created the notorious charticle The Approval Matrix. She's also written for the New York Times, Slate and Lingua Franca, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Clive Thompson and her two kids. She hates Top Ten lists.
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Nussbaum recycles some well-known trivia, such as Barris’s claim that he worked as an assassin for the CIA, but she also unearths a plethora of new gossip from the hosts, the producers, the employees, and the cast members themselves. She also places the reality shows in the context of the biggest news stories of the time. “An American Family,” the first real-life soap opera, filmed during the chaos wrought by Vietnam, the Manson murders drugs, sex and radical politics, chronicled the foibles of an affluent California family of seven with an openly gay son. Nussbaum describes how Nora Ephron panned the show in “New York” magazine, expressing particular revulsion for the matriarch Pat Loud for “letting it-all-hang out candor” about her husband’s affairs and their impending divorce. Ironically, Ephron would later marry Carl Bernstein who cheated on her while she was pregnant, and Ephron would write “Heartburn,” a score-settling best seller. “‘Heartburn’ would be attacked by critics for the same crime she’d dunned Pat for — sprinting her public divorce into a personal brand.”
No respectable book about reality television would be complete without an analysis of “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” and “The Bachelor.” With respect to the latter, Nussbaum reveals how contestants imbibed on alcohol because it was readily available and “there was nothing else for them to do: no books, no magazines, no TV.” Female contestants who were unstable and pretty were “gold.” Producers would befriend the contestants, and deploy the private information that they had gleaned (eating disorders) to create emotional scenes and, if they were unsuccessful in generating drama, skillful editing would make a contestant look deranged.
Because Nussbaum drew on hundred of interviews with sources, her book has the gravitas of serious scholarship although she is investigating a guilty pleasure. It is a juicy (and unsettling) read for fans of reality television and popular culture. Thank you Random House and Net Galley for this enlightening read.
It really picked up for me when she started talking about Survivor - I’ll never forget watching that with my family and friends, and being fascinated by an entirely new kind of show. I appreciated the behind the scenes look Emily Nussbaum provides in this book.
In Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum, we are walked through the history of reality television, from the Newlywed Game all the way to The Real Housewives of whatever city is currently on.
Throughout the book, Nussbaum dives into some of our most iconic reality shows chronologically to demonstrate not only how the genre came to be, but how each show shaped the future of television. (All while being the black sheep of the TV world.)
For myself, someone who has loved reality tv their whole life while also complaining about it (keeping up the kardashians irks me) this book is everything. Not only is Cue the Sun! packed with information, it’s told like a tell all full of industry gossip. Not only did I gobble this up, I found myself down memory lane watching old favorites like The Real World and Big Brother. Say what you will about reality tv, but it’s definitely a cultural time capsule that is readily available to everyone everywhere. It deserves its time in the sun, and luckily for us, Emily Nussbaum shined a light on it for us!
Nussbaum is able to pull off an amazing feat - she provides the long history of Reality Tv, including the lore we have heard, the facts that we have not and all of the experimentation that lead to what millions watch today.
Nussbaum covers the heroes of the genre including Allen Funt and Chuck Barris, John Langley as well as more well known Mike Fleiss,Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim. She also discusses the early stories including An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor - all which are the elders of what we watch today! She is always bracingly honest but treats the genre with the seriousness it deserves - we all know plenty of people who love to watch. This is a honest and enjoyable history of my favorite genre and what is has wrought on our society (see The Apprentice). Highly Recommended!