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Arts & Entertainment

How we became ‘The Truman Show’: Emily Nussbaum’s ‘Cue the Sun!’ tackles reality TV

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, appearing Friday at Texas Theatre, talks about the invention of a genre that threatens to swallow us whole.

Few movies have predicted the future like The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s classic 1998 satire in which Jim Carrey plays a man blissfully unaware he’s living in a televised experiment. As Truman tries to escape his fate, a show runner named Christof, played by Ed Harris, flexes his power. “Cue the sun!” he says, a line that’s now the title of a brilliant book about reality TV by New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum.

Nussbaum is my favorite kind of critic: Wise and observant, but also funny and eager to engage with what we might call “lowbrow culture.” (Back in her days at New York magazine, she created the “Approval Matrix.”) In 2016, her TV writing at the New Yorker won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, making her the fanciest person to ever let me use her Wi-Fi during a New York power outage back when I lived there.

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV is for those of us who love the much-derided genre, but also those who despise it. The book is a deeply reported, stylishly written feast of a cultural history that lets us meet the creators, editors, field producers and cast members behind a form of entertainment that threatens to swallow the 21st century.

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'Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV' is written by Emily Nussbaum
'Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV' is written by Emily Nussbaum(Courtesy)
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On Friday, June 28, Nussbaum will be in Dallas for a screening of The Truman Show at Texas Theatre, where she’ll also sign books and take part in a Q&A moderated by longtime film/TV writer Matt Zoller Seitz. He also happens to be my favorite kind of critic (we worked together at Salon), and the idea of this power duo discussing the double-edged sword of reality TV in my hometown is an evening I only thought was possible in dreams.

I called Nussbaum earlier this week, shortly after a radio appearance where Judd Winick from Real World: San Francisco called in (she also interviewed him for the book). We talked about the art and manipulation of reality TV, when Survivor shook the world, and how we all came to live in The Truman Show.

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Emily Nussbaum, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of "Cue the Sun!: The Invention of...
Emily Nussbaum, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of "Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV"(courtesy of the author)

You won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Why does a classy writer like you sully yourself with the genre of reality TV?

Oh, my gosh. First of all, I’m not a classy writer. I’ve historically been a television critic, and TV is something people consider trashy. I’ve always been interested in status anxieties about pop culture. The goal of this book is to look at reality TV in a clear-eyed way, because there’s a set of people who think it’s insidious. I see their point. But some of those people want to act like it doesn’t exist, and it shapes so much of culture. Trump was elected because of The Apprentice, but it’s also shaped the way people have relationships, present themselves online, think about their identities. For people who love reality TV, and there’s a lot of them, I wanted them to know how those shows are made. And some of those ways are troubling.

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This book introduces us to many architects of the genre, and I’m wondering whose faces would be on the Mount Rushmore of reality TV.

[laughs] This is very disturbing image. I guess you put Allen Funt, who created Candid Microphone and then Candid Camera. I’m imagining Chuck Barris (The Gong Show, The Newlywed Game) up there. These are the P.T. Barnums of the world, and they’re almost all guys. Women come later, but the early creators were very white and very male. Who else belongs there? Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray (The Real World). Mike Fleiss (The Bachelor) or Mike Darnell (American Idol). But, like, do you put John Langley up there for making Cops?

Hard to say. As a reality TV defender, I’ve struggled over the years with the question of whether the form is real or not. You coined a great phrase to describe this in-between: “dirty documentary.” Can you explain what you mean?

People think of documentary, particularly cinematic documentary, as an elevated discipline where you take a camera, you’re patient, you watch, and eventually truth emerges. The dirty documentary is when you take those methods and dirty them up with game shows, soap operas, prank shows, and you’re able to do it over and over again to create serialized television. I was trying to get at both the excitement of the genre but also the moral compromise, which was embedded from the beginning. I wrote about audience participation radio, putting people onto shows in order to spill the beans. And critics then reacted the same way they did later on; they were unsettled by the sight of ordinary people put under that kind of pressure.

Richard Hatch, the anti-hero and winner of "Survivor's" first season in 2000.
Richard Hatch, the anti-hero and winner of "Survivor's" first season in 2000.(CBS)

It’s riveting TV. I remember where I was sitting when I watched Richard Hatch win Survivor in 2000. Like other generations might remember the moon landing.

That season of Survivor just shook the earth. I talked to as many of the cast members from that season as I could, and the shock you describe was something people felt [on-site] in Borneo. They’d never seen anything like that before. The bad guy won.

That show was controversial for good reason. People were like, they’re eating bugs on the air! This show is apocalyptic! And a lot of people still agree with that. But it’s an indelible moment in pop culture history.

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The book title comes from The Truman Show, which I want to mention because your Q&A takes place after a screening of that film at the Texas Theatre.

I love that movie. It took ideas about the reality TV of the time and put them in a beautiful story that’s also a meditation on God and man. The line “Cue the sun!” captured one of the central themes of the book, which is the incredibly fraught relationship between cast and crew on these shows. What people see on reality TV is essentially the residue of that relationship. People who are in charge of these shows have massive power over the people who are in these shows for a variety of reasons, including legal reasons and labor reasons. That movie captures the darkness and intimacy of that relationship.

Emily Nussbaum will be at the Texas Theatre Friday for a Q&A with Matt Zoller Seitz and a book signing after a screening of The Truman Show at 7 p.m. Tickets are $14.