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Emily Nussbaum

Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV Kindle Edition

by Emily Nussbaum (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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The rollicking saga of reality television, a “sweeping” (The Washington Post) cultural history of America’s most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker writer—“a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture” (NPR)

“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)

In development as a docuseries from the studio behind Spencer and Spotlight

ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe

FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION

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.

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June 25 2024
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Early reality production was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to: That was the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.
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As Marshall McLuhan once put it, art is anything you can get away with.
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It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow—to confuse or infuriate them, to throw them off-balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion.
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From the Publisher

A dishy and deeply reported cultural history of the world’s most divisive entertainment genre

David Grann says shows that behind the lens of reality TV lies the most fascinating reality of all

cbs mornings,beach read,reality tv,pop culure,tv writing,reality tv gifts,popular culture

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Review

“Nussbaum serves as a helpful guide to reality TV’s past and present, peppering Cue the Sun! with well-researched details, lively anecdotes, and primary-source accounts of the genre’s checkered development across decades. . . .”—Los Angeles Review of Books
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“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.”—N�ʸ�

“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

Emily Nussbaum is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she’s worked since 2011, originally as the magazine’s television critic. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Previously, she was the culture editor for New York, where she created the Approval Matrix.�� She is the author of��I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, which was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.��She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Clive Thompson, and their two children.

1

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.”

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CP92DQG4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 25 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3.0 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 446 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525509004
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
�鶹�� Rank: #132,080 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #17 in Television History & Criticism (Books)
- #25 in Television History & Criticism (Kindle Store)
- #64 in 21st Century U.S. History
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Emily Nussbaum

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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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Goldilox
Interesting and discussion-worthy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 18, 2025
Verified Purchase

I bought this book for my daughter. Although she doesn’t watch reality TV, she’s fascinated by it as a phenomenon.

She said this book was very informative and engaging, and she’s enjoyed sharing many details of what she learnt from it with me, leading to some very interesting discussions. The book was extensively researched, and it not only gives the history of reality TV, but it shows the far-reaching impact reality TV has had, not only on television programming but also on our psyches, society and of course the political world.

She said she would thoroughly recommend it. It is an entertaining read, and it provides a lot of insight into the modern world. (It also makes you wonder about unseen consequences and accountability and how different things could have been.)

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Brian Lewis
Fake It Till You Make It
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2024
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This book is a remarkable deep dive into a topic that might at first glance not to seem not worth it. But, with our democracy dying in the klieg lights of television, it could not be more timely or important.

Author Emily Nussbaum covers a 70 year span in this book, beginning in the 50s, with Queen for a Day; then into the 60s with Candid Camera, the 70s with the Gong Show, which she shows were wildly influential in developing reality TV even before the term existed. Reading this book is more like reading a collection of short stories than a novel. (Not a criticism, just an observation.)

I was surprised at how much of the material covered seemed quite familiar to me, as honestly, I don't watch a lot of it. My idea of reality TV is sports and game shows. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was probably the only show discussed that I actually followed. Nussbaum makes the point that Queer Eye was more about empowerment than humiliation; maybe that was the appeal to me.

But the blockbusters, Survivor, American Idol, The Apprentice, The Amazing Race, were all so heavily advertised that I felt I knew what was going on. One chapter on the PBS show, American Family, honestly did drag a bit, getting bogged down in shot for shot detail of the show, but the rest of the book moves along with the swift pace of an epic.

Highly recommended. I think I have found an author I will be reading again.

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T. Engle
Awesome middle, long start, rushed finish
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2025
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Rushed at the end. Very entertaining but a whole lot of detail on the early days, then after Big Brother, everything is rushed with almost no attention to Drag Race, not even much on the Kardashians or Real Housewives. After all that stuff about Candid Camera, the modern era doesn’t get much attention…. Still a great read though… the Survivor chapter is amazing! I learned stuff and I’m a huge Survivor fan who has watched since the beginning and listens to a lot of podcasts, and I still learned new info.

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docklandser
The best book about tv I’ve read for a long time.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 29, 2024
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Emily Neubaum is a great writer, I’ve followed her thru the New Yorker years and speaking as a man who worked in development for many of the companies mentioned and documented in this book, she’s totally accurate yet tells the bizarre story of reality tv in a unique and mesmerising way.

The stuff I was there for - and there’s a lot - she’s accurate on. Her research is second to none. The stuff I wasn’t I can totally believe. It’s hard to think that we’re just about to see election number two of a
Politician in the normal sense verses a reality tv construction. I think any sane person will be hoping for an outcome that acknowledges the latter being the most damaging person in the history of the US presidency. Still I’m British, I have no say - rightly - and hope and pray the fine people of the USA make a choice they can be proud of.

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DCThunder
Interesting History of Realty TV, then Succumbs to TDS
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2024
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I have long been interested in "reality TV" and this book provides a very good overview of the early days of the genre, tracing it all the way back to its origins on radio in the late 1940s. All of this was very interesting, and I learned a lot. I have memories of watching "Queen for a Day" when home from school sick and I was a big "The Gong Show" fan during its hey-day. The background on "An American Family" and "The Real World" was also fascinating. I'm a huge "Survivor" fan and reading again about the Borneo season was like a return to Summer 2000. Even the takedowns of the Bravo! shows and the "Bachelor/Bachelorette" were well done.

But all through the early parts of the book, there was foreshadowing about the last chapter on "The Apprentice" and Donald Trump. And Ms. Nussbaum certainly lived up to the foreshadowing with that chapter. The TDS showed as brightly as the "cued Sun" of her title. But reading her Wiki bio, it couldn't have been anything else.

While a chapter on "The Apprentice" and Mr. Trump is appropriate for a book of this type, I felt it diminished the overall product to be as much of a polemic as it was.

I read the entire book before I realized that the author was the TV critic for "The New Yorker" although I did say to myself at several points that the book read like it was a LOOOONG New Yorker article. So I'm happy to see that my belief was justified.

I'd have like to read more about other reality TV genres such as the entire HGTV empire or shows such as "Trading Spaces". A chapter on such shows as "Deadliest Catch" or the entire set of Discovery Network shows set in Alaska would have been appreciated. But perhaps shows set in Waco, TX or Dutch Harbor, AK is too far afield for the bicoastal elite audience of the author.

If you're interested in how Reality TV became what it is, then read this book, but beware the biases of the author.

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