The book: Cue the Sun! is a definitive history of reality television, beginning with “man on the street” radio shows and ending with The Apprentice in the early aughts. Most chapters are devoted to a single show or creator who was revolutionary within the genre, like Cops, Survivor, The Real World, or Chuck Barris’s 70’s game shows. In addition to high level overviews of the development and reception of these shows and trends within reality TV, Emily Nussbaum also interviewed cast and crew members from countless reality productions.
Why I read it: I love TV. I am one of those people who would rather binge watch 3 episodes of a show than watch a single movie. I also find television development and production fascinating, and I’ve always enjoyed certain kinds of reality shows. When I was in middle school, MTV would run 24 hour marathons of early Real World seasons, and I was obsessed. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before (to me, that feeling is one of the best parts of experiencing new media). Reality TV is such a strange phenomenon. We take “real” people and put them into artificial situations and then see what they do. What is that? Why do we want to watch that? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that when the world is a dumpster fire, a new episode of The Traitors is incredibly soothing.
What I thought of it: This is a well-done, well-researched book. The chapter on the PBS series An American Family is a standout, as it explores the experience of making the show, watching the show, and the fallout for the cast and crew. I also really enjoyed the chapter on The Real World. Some chapters are harder to read than others. The one about all the terrible one-off reality shows from the late 90s and early 00s (like Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?) was a bit stomach-churning, and the Big Brother and Cops chapters are both disturbing. But none of them made me as viscerally uncomfortable as the last chapter: The Apprentice. The behind-the-scenes recollections from various crew members are what you might expect if you have paid attention to American politics since 2016. It was upsetting.
The best chapters are the ones like the An American Family chapter or Apprentice chapter where Nussbaum is able to take a broader view of how reality television influenced American culture and vice versa, but I found myself interested in every chapter, even the ones about shows I’d never seen before (which was most of these shows, because reality TV didn’t actually start in the 90s like I’d always assumed). While this is a pretty lengthy read, it’s also one that you could easily dip in and out of, only reading the chapters that interest you. I was interested to learn about how long reality programming has been around (it predates television with radio shows!), and how critics have attacked it as society-destroying since the beginning. Some of these criticisms are valid, but reality TV isn’t all bad or all good. I think reality fans and reality haters alike would enjoy this book.
