Getting Real About Reality TV in ‘Cue the Sun!’

CUE THE SUN! The Invention of Reality TV, by Emily Nussbaum

There are times when Emily Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story, “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV,” feels like something of a Trojan horse.

Her expansive analysis begins with a simple proposition: an argument for why a genre that includes series like “The Dating Game” and “Alien Autopsy” deserves a book-length history in the first place.

For Nussbaum, industry terms like “unscripted series” don’t quite encompass all the pop culture ground these shows negotiate. Instead, she settles on the phrase “dirty documentary” to cover a wide swath, describing a history that kicks off with the pioneering prank show “Candid Camera” in the 1940s, progresses to irreverent TV series like “The Gong Show” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and eventually explodes into modern TV megahits like “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and “The Bachelor.”

With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, Nussbaum, a staff writer for The New Yorker, outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent concoction, ranging from “celebreality” soap opera to grand social experiments that explore romance, competition and ethics. Their secret sauce: placing people in contrived situations to spark entertaining, telegenic, revelatory behavior — often through conflict or embarrassment.

“It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect,” Nussbaum writes. The result is “a powerful glimpse of human vulnerability, breaking taboos about what you were allowed to say or see.”

The book culminates in one of America’s most persistent rule breakers, Donald Trump, documenting how the creator and executive producer Mark Burnett built NBC’s “The Apprentice” into a success that burnished the reputation of the playboy tycoon, resulting in “the most sinister outcome.”

“Taking a failed tycoon who was heavily in hock and too risky for almost any bank to lend to,” Nussbaum writes, “a crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show, then finding a way to make him look attractive enough to elect as president of the United States? That was a coup, even if no one could brag about it.”

But “Cue the Sun!” does more than challenge pearl-clutching critics, who are too often caught between behaving like humorless scolds and unfairly dismissing the genre’s significance. Bolstered by more than 300 interviews, Nussbaum describes reality TV through the eyes of the people who made it happen, offering cleareyed accounts of how exploitative and dangerous such shows could be — from calling out “bone deep sexism” on “The Bachelor” to noting how one producer on “Survivor” feared they had accidentally fed the cast deadly parasites during a grub-eating contest.

The most attention-getting story likely comes from Bill Pruitt, a former producer on “The Apprentice,” who says Trump used a racial slur in referring to Kwame Jackson, a Black man among the two finalists in the show’s first season. (Pruitt recently wrote about the incident for Slate.) A Trump spokesman has denied the story, and the book quotes others saying they never heard the slur. Bill Rancic, a white Chicagoan, was eventually chosen as winner.

We also meet such influential behind-the-scenes impresarios as the married filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond — whose devotion to cinéma vérité techniques fueled the groundbreaking 1973 PBS series “An American Family” — and the gleefully driven producer Mike Darnell, who oversaw the rise of reality TV at the Fox network with programs that included “World’s Scariest Police Chases,” “American Idol” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” (not to mention its quasi-parody follow-up “Joe Millionaire”).

Working for years, Nussbaum snagged interviews with seminal figures who have since died, like John Langley, the co-creator of “Cops,” and Pat Loud, the wife and mother featured in “An American Family.” She also reels in pivotal people who don’t often give in-depth interviews, like the “Bachelor” creator Mike Fleiss, who sees Trump’s post-“Apprentice” rise as a stain on the genre.

“All that talk about the decline of Western civilization and the sign of the apocalypse?” Fleiss says. “It turned out to be true.”

But Nussbaum reveals how ruthless choices and the growing demand to provide buzzworthy moments increasingly shaped what ended up airing. The “Bachelor” team exploited fragile contestants’ mental health issues. (“Unstable and pretty? That’s gold,” crows one casting director.) Harvey Weinstein used “Project Runway” as a “hunting ground” for harassment victims. Three of the original “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” experts were not quite publicly out to their families before the show debuted.

One area in which Nussbaum treads lightly is reality TV’s fitful relationship with race. She mentions the issues nonwhite cast members faced on several shows, including “Survivor” and “The Real World,” but there is rarely much detail, which is disappointing. And by essentially concluding with Trump’s time on “The Apprentice,” which ended after his 2015 presidential campaign announcement, the book elides Chris Harrison’s 2021 departure as the host of “The Bachelor,” as well as specifics about Fleiss’s move to step down from the franchise two years later, after an internal investigation into “allegations of racial discrimination.”

In 2016, Nussbaum won a Pulitzer Prize as The New Yorker’s TV critic; here she knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well, though remains reluctant to draw final conclusions on the ultimate impact of the genre.

As someone who has covered reality TV since the late 1990s, I appreciate how difficult it can be to balance respect for its popularity with much-needed truth-telling about its toxic impact on media, politics and society. Nussbaum walks that line deftly, crafting a book that may be best at reaching those who love reality TV and could be turned off by a more relentlessly critical tome.

In one passage, she notes that plenty of fans have long ago accepted that what they see on these shows may be fake. “For these viewers, there was no controversy — any qualms about the medium had faded, long ago,” she concludes. “The most successful reality show had it all: a titillating flash of the authentic, framed by the dark glitter of the fake, like a dash of salt in dark chocolate. No taste was harder to resist.”

The book’s title is cribbed from “The Truman Show,” a 1998 film starring Jim Carrey as a man unwittingly living in a TV program; the show’s creator shouts “cue the sun” to turn up the lights in his manufactured world. Nussbaum’s book expertly charts how the real-life versions of Truman’s show have affected the course of television and society. In the process, we have all been forced to face both the allure and the long shadows cast by their blinding light.

CUE THE SUN!: The Invention of Reality TV | By Emily Nussbaum | Random House | 464 pp. | $30