One of our wisest philosophers (Homer Simpson) described television as “teacher, mother, secret lover.” Reality television belongs to that final classification, a mistress we can’t quite quit yet also will never introduce to our parents. It is ubiquitous as dirt and as dirty as, well, dirt. Critics have mostly treated it like dirt, too.
If New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum doesn’t come to praise reality TV, she doesn’t come to bury it either. Her new tome Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV is a comprehensive yet fair recounting of the genre, starting back before television itself and finishing with the apocalypse — which, like most New Yorkers, she believes was marked by The Apprentice host Donald Trump’s election.
Cue the Sun takes a mostly chronological look at the history of reality TV, which means the reader sometimes gets a sandwich of the genre’s highs and lows. Thus you find the story of a true television innovation like PBS’s An American Family between the likes of The Newlywed Game and Cops. Much like reality TV itself, this alternating draws in our inquisitive side while appeasing the voyeuristic little gremlin in all of us. I brought the book to read on a beach in San Diego, but forgot both sunglasses and a pen. I improvised by dog-earing the page every time I read something interesting, so as to return later and properly underline. In what amounts to the highest praise, I squinted down a few hours later to find I had made an accordion.
One of Nussbaum’s funniest running gags is how reality television is but one entirely original idea stolen ad nauseam. Every reality television producer interviewed alludes if not outright claims to have invented the genre as we know it, and the fans of their shows tend to agree. Much like sex, reality TV is continually invented around the time you start paying attention. Nearly every reality television concept, even something as contemporary as The Bachelor, had already been tested on early radio. It follows that every criticism was tested as well, and there’s real delight in reading snippets of critics decrying such voyeurism and predicting its imminent collapse, ironically dispatched from long-shuttered papers like the Poughkeepsie World Tribune.
Those critics and their successors kept mistaking quality for survivability. Reality television may very well have coarsened the soul of a nation, but it has also always been too cheap to fail. There’s a reason the airwaves get saturated with reality TV every writer’s strike; what is more affordable than dialogue written by America’s only renewable resource, mouthy blondes? In one illuminating chestnut, Nussbaum describes the process by which the now-multibillion-dollar franchise Survivor was first greenlit: CBS CEO Les Moonves was initially skeptical, but upon hearing just how little money was needed to give it a go, he let it start despite not believing in it. Thus the juggernaut began with a shrug.
In a history of a notoriously sleazy genre, there will of course be tales of wrongdoing. For all the stories of serial killer contestants and grub dinners in Cue the Sun, what’s most shocking is how your sympathies reverse the deeper into Nussbaum’s history (that is, the closer to the present) you get. After all, it’s hard to build pretense when you’re hocking the likes of The Gong Show or When Good Pets Go Bad! In one passage, we learn that Fox’s Mike Darnell ushered the infamous Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? through production, then repudiated it three years later with World’s Greatest Hoaxes, both produced by the same team. Each did gangbusters in the ratings, which for Darnell is where the ethical debate ended.
On the other hand, if I can forgive self-denial, most repugnant is repentance. Former Bachelor producer Sarah Gertrude Shapiro confesses a litany of sins with exhibitionist abandon, then describes how she atoned for her role by creating the scripted drama Unreal about the behind-the-scenes horrors. This is like collecting interest on an indulgence you sold to yourself. One The Real World creator Jonathan Murray waxes on about is how innovative his show was, then admits in the next sentence that “the bedroom cameras were not the best idea.” A pig with a bib is still in the sty.
It’s old news to rage against the unreality of reality TV. Cue the Sun is skilled at bringing specificity to that sin, showing artificiality even in “elevated” reality shows that would astound even the Realest of Housewives. Nussbaum digs into a nasty little trick called “frankenbites,” where editors take fragments of dialogue and create new sentences whole cloth. On The Bachelorette, contestants were edited into love triangles with other contestants they barely interacted with.
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Nussbaum is expansive but not comprehensive. She glides over the Kardashians, perhaps recognizing their empire doesn’t help her argument that reality TV can be marginally conducive to human flourishing. Former host of Fear Factor Joe Rogan also escapes her attention, but perhaps the journey he took from feeding coeds Madagascar hissing cockroaches to kingmaker deserves 400 pages on its own. Her greatest omission is reality TV’s influence on Generation Z. All TikToks are shot in aesthetic imitation of the reality TV confessional, third-person perspective with the user crying to the camera.
The book ends on that mouthiest of blondes, Donald Trump, and the treatment is not as harsh as one might think. For all her disgust, Nussbaum can’t help but admit Trump as the perfect reality TV star, even the form’s avatar. He straddles that taut line between id and self-awareness, where we feel like we’re seeing too much yet not nearly enough. His spontaneity, cattiness, even his, yes, messiness were all forged in the hellfires of reality TV. He is definitely not here to make friends. Even after an assassination attempt, find him shrugging off Secret Service agents to pump his fist to the crowd and the still rolling cameras. Here is a man who understands the core ethos of reality TV producing: that life is not nearly as important as what this moment will look like on screen.
Joe Joyce is a writer. Follow him on X at @bf_crane.