Artificial Intelligence Concept Collage (2024)| KitohodkA / Shutterstock
Emily Nussbaum is a highly celebrated intellectual and writer. She has written for the New Yorker for several years, first as a television critic, then as a staff writer. She’s the author of I Like to Watch, a collection of essays about her television hot takes; she’s also a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic. Her newest book, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV (Random House, 2024), was published this June to great fanfare.
I didn’t know any of that when I came to Cue the Sun!, though. I just learned about Nussbaum’s new book by searching “history of reality TV” on Google.
I’ll admit it, I am less of a worldly, New Yorker–subscribing type and more of a depraved reality television freak. My particular brand of lowbrow entertainment is a combo of reality show binging and intense internet research, a habit that started with idle curiosity—did those ill-matched idiots actually stay together?—and quickly snowballed into a delicious ritual of typing long strings of words like “love is blind Trevor Instagram where is he now single” into the search bar and letting my thumb hover over the return key until the moment the credits of the show begin to roll.
I’m salivating for a deeper truth than an edited show can portray—a realer reality, if you will. And I’m glad it led me to Nussbaum, because the same desire seems to motivate Cue the Sun!, which chronicles the behind-the-scenes of groundbreaking reality television shows with the attention to detail of a true voyeur.
In her new book, Nussbaum defines reality television as “dirty documentary,” where unscripted scenes are filmed in a tightly controlled environment, one that encourages—nay, requires—participants to access deep, “authentic” emotions. Several of her interviewees declared that it was their original intention to make cinéma vérité, or observational cinema without voice-overs, but Nussbaum thinks of reality TV as something separate, a cinéma vérité “cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect.”
This definition contains shows that we traditionally think of as reality, like soap opera–style shows (think the Real Housewives franchise), house-based shows (The Real World), and game-based shows (Survivor), along with more fringe formats, like clip shows (America’s Funniest Home Videos) and con shows (Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?). While not all their concepts are brilliant, these shows are made universally feasible by their budgets—unscripted shows featuring unprofessional, non-unionized actors are exponentially cheaper to produce, it turns out. Who would have thought?
Reality may be cheaper to make, but it’s certainly not easier. After defining the parameters of a reality genre, Cue the Sun! walks us through its melodramatic history. Nussbaum begins by pointing to 1940s-era Candid Microphone, the original (and much less catchily titled) version of the prank show Candid Camera, as the true beginning of a manipulated cinéma vérité style; she explains that creator Allen Funt “preferred to think of himself as a student of human behavior—not a voyeur but an observer, and even a kind of healer and educator, putting a mirror up to human nature.” According to Nussbaum, Funt was the first to realize that a documentarian’s manipulation could result in something more interesting for an audience—so, in the name of studying human nature, he became a radically disruptive reality TV prankster.
From there, Cue the Sun! narrates the creation of shows from The Newlywed Game to Jackass, focusing on exactly how each show is made—whose idea the format was and how they got that format to be produced—along with the ethical concerns of people involved in production, and the public’s response (usually consisting of disgust, hand-wringing, renewed claims that this marks the definitive end of culture, et cetera). Along the way, Nussbaum’s authoritative voice and comfortable humor moves us easily through eras of innovation. (Take this typical transition: “If the ’70s had given off the funk of a stained shag carpet after a basement orgy, the ’80s were more like a plastic slipcovered sofa in the living room, ready for company.”)
Nussbaum’s goal is not to pass judgment on the ethics of the shows she highlights; rather, she argues that “the discomfort that has always radiated around these shows—their nosiness, their brutality—isn’t an argument for looking away from them. It’s a reason to look closer.”
And look closer she did. Over the course of her research for the book, Nussbaum interviewed over 300 people, ranging from former stars, to show creators, to “preditors,” the (disturbingly-named) role for crew members straddling the line between producer and editor. A few voices stand out as Nussbaum’s favorites, like glamorous Pat Loud, the original desperate housewife star of 1973’s An American Family, and emotional Danielle Faraldo, a 26-year-old production coordinator on The Real World, who got so involved with the young stars she managed that she started “unraveling” when the higher-ups began purposefully pushing their buttons to try to generate conflict.
That’s where the voyeuristic joy of Cue the Sun! comes in—the moments when it peels back the layers of reality artifice to reveal actual real people, grappling with ethical dilemmas.
Often, historical reality television subjects have not known what they were signing up for. Nussbaum writes that prior to agreeing to be filmed, the Loud family had been told that they would be one of several families featured on An American Family, so viewers could compare and contrast Californian and Midwestern culture. As Pat’s son Grant explained to Nussbaum, “When [creator] Craig [Gilbert] sold the idea to us—I know it sounds crazy and like the ’60s, but he said, ‘This isn’t going to be about you; when people watch this, they’re going to be thinking about themselves. The successes they have, the troubles they have!’”
Instead, the narrative focused just on the Louds, and cameras ended up exposing the dissolution of Pat and husband Bill’s marriage to the judgment of the public.
Of course, producers aren’t the only ones with reason to deceive. When casting for Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, Mike Fleiss, eventual creator of The Bachelor, recalled having issues finding an appropriately rich hunk to lead the show. Ricky Rockwell, Fleiss remembered, “had a net worth of about $1.3 million. I said, ‘Does that really count as a multimillionaire?’ And Mikey [Mike Darnell] said, ‘Well, 0.3 is a multiple …’ So we rolled the dice.”
In the media storm that followed, reporters revealed Rockwell’s true finances, which were even less impressive than Fleiss and Darnell previously thought—along with a restraining order from an ex-fiancée.
Such choices are typical in Nussbaum’s history, painting the larger picture of a genre that only runs on insufficient consent, like the signing of a contract without understanding what you’re agreeing to.
Perhaps because the ethics of this history are so shady, Nussbaum does not aim to report it without bias. Rather, she leans into her own perspective and politics, confiding in the reader that she was among the first nerds gathering at their computers to live-stream the first American season of Big Brother. Throughout the book, she focuses on unionizing and the voices of the marginalized whenever possible. She also writes with real anger about how The Apprentice lent credibility to Trump, whom she calls a “crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show.”
These personal admissions feel almost juicy, just like the thrill I get from my lurid, post-show stalker-browsing. Add them to the raunchy stories and murky ethics that pervade the book, and Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun! becomes another method of digging beyond the glossy surface of reality television—uncovering something realer than real. And just as Nussbaum describes the allure of many of those train-wreck-in-motion-esque early reality shows, she also manages to deliver a product that makes it hard to look away.
