There’s a trope on sitcoms where characters think they’re being filmed for a reality television show, when in fact what they’re experiencing is real life. (Real life within the fictional sitcom universe, that is.) A young saleswoman on a 1992 episode of Waiting for God finds it bizarre that a retiree has applied to work at her teen-gear boutique, and then suddenly relaxes once she realizes (incorrectly) she’s on a prank show.
Same deal on a 2011 episode of Benidorm, wherein a family discovers that a villa purchased by Madge, their newly-rich relative, now belongs to singer Cilla Black. They’re relieved once they realize (incorrectly) they’re secretly being filmed for a TV show, only to learn that no, Cilla Black really did buy the house off the no-longer-rich, newly-widowed Madge.
The ‘it’s all been a reality show prank’ interlude is a modern twist on ‘it’s all just been a bad dream.’ And the upshot is that this is real life. But “Am I on Candid Camera?” is a meme in off-screen life as well, shorthand for, am I being pranked? It’s reality television’s world, we’re all just living in it.
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Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun! is a reclamation of a lowbrow topic: reality television. If you’re a Pulitzer Prize-winner, as well as a staff writer at The New Yorker—Nussbaum’s previous book, I Like to Watch, also got attention in this publication’s past newspaper pages—you are not some rando holding forth about which Kardashian would be your frenemy if you knew them in real life. It’s a history of a genre, not the musings of someone who watched too much The Hills in 2008, too much The Only Way is Essex in 2012, when they could have been doing literally anything else. (Who amongst us…) The title is a reference not to reality TV itself, but to a cinematic representation of the same, in 1998’s The Truman Show.
It is tempting to question whether the audience for a doorstop-length deep dive is the same as that of reality TV itself, but practically everyone knows some of these shows, and a subset of everyone reads books. If the classic boomer dad gift was a Second World War history, perhaps here we have the equivalent for millennial moms. (Note: I am one.) If you’d ever wondered the origin of “the modern reality genre’s unofficial motto,” namely, “I’m not here to make friends,” this is the book for you. (It wasn’t the one I thought!)
Reality television is more guilty pleasure than problematic fave. It’s elitist to ostentatiously hate it (‘What’s a Kardashian?’ like you don’t know), not to enjoy it. The book works because it is neither an indictment of the form nor a love letter to it. Nussbaum grants that reality TV is bad because exploitative, but worthy because it “made visible the sort of people that [television] had historically ignored, from the working-class single moms on Queen for a Day to Cuban American activist Petro Zamora, a young gay man with AIDS who turned into a national star on The Real World.” (The latter I remember watching as a kid, when it originally aired.) It’s both iffy for labour reasons (an easy out from having to hire actors and screenwriters) and artistically innovative. She points out that scripted television, from The Office to Modern Family, borrows motifs from reality.
In a footnote, Nussbaum cites critic Vincent Canby, who described one proto-reality effort (of the real-family soap-opera variety) as resulting in “some kind of meta-truth that is neither fact nor fiction.” What does it mean to turn real people into characters, for public consumption? What do audiences get from that, but also, what’s lost?
And then there’s the elephant in the room, the one my friend and Feminine Chaos co-host Kat Rosenfield referred to, in the Boston Globe, as the “perverse anti-muse” of recent artistic production. Donald Trump, reality star turned star of reality, had not yet won his second U.S. presidential election when Cue the Sun! came out back in June, but… here he is again. Had the election gone otherwise, this would now read as a very different book.
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The final chapter of Cue the Sun!, “The Job,” is an assessment of The Apprentice, from the vantage point of an author and subjects who knew of his first term in office. Once you get to it, it starts to become clear that the book is at once a history of reality programming and a how-did-we-get-here of Donald Trump.
Two questions—one specific, one big-picture—dominate “The Job.” The first is the almost quaint-seeming question of whether Trump really used the n-word during a meeting. Quaint because, given all the offensive things he has said, where it’s not disputed, why would this alone cross the line enough for sustained analysis? Either he said it, in which case, on-brand, checks out, or he didn’t, in which case, what, his reputation as a committed antiracist who’s careful with his words falls apart? But when you consider the book’s production timeline—all the interviews conducted remotely, during lockdowns—it becomes clear why this would have seemed paramount.
The bigger question is whether reality TV itself is morally responsible for Trump the Politician. Did the on-screen rounding up of a mediocre-at-best tycoon to the ultimate boss-man in the eyes of the American masses set the stage for his second act? Did reality television create a monster? Yes and no.
While reality television itself isn’t fully culpable, it does seem to me that modern communications more generally facilitated his unique blend of old-school populist rabble-rousing with politically incorrect (in all senses) rhetoric and life choices. His entertaining, volatile presence on what was then called Twitter—prior to getting kicked off the platform in 2021—may not have reached the audiences of his other performances, but it played a role.
A book about old TV shows risks going too far down one of two roads: either a they-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to nostalgia, or a scolding insistence that all pre-2018 cultural production was problematic. Nussbaum avoids these principally by having too much else to say. It’s a deep history of the production and results, though heavier on the former. This is not a book philosophising on the idea of linear progress. It’s cleverly-written enough that some of the best parts are about shows the reader is unlikely to have seen. Nussbaum describes a 1985 show, OceanQuest, as “a five-episode spree of aquatic lunacy that might be seen as a precursor to The Amazing Race, if you cut a few corners and added a cameo by Fidel Castro.”
You don’t need to have seen the shows to find Cue the Sun! worthwhile, but it doesn’t hurt if you know some of them. Maybe that much more so if you knew them in the past but had forgotten about them. I found myself transported to my childhood living room, Proust-and-madeleine-style, by descriptions of Cops and the early seasons of The Real World.
Conversely, as apparently the only person alive who’s never seen any of the 47-and-counting seasons of Survivor, I wondered about the necessity of both a chapter on the making of Survivor as well as one about the same show’s pre-history. I’d have been thrilled with one on Say Yes to the Dress, a show that first aired in 2007 and is evidently still being produced, but Nussbaum pays relatively little to the consumerist, low-drama, low-stakes world of dress- or house-hunting shows, or the ones where people compete over who can make the best cake.
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Nussbaum’s encyclopedic knowledge of television means that a chapter on 1990s shows, an era culminated in Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? (which aired six weeks into the 2000s), includes an aside about a 1950s program, Bride and Groom, that “had aired live ceremonies, including one with a rabbi.”
A rabbi?? Is this a Jewish book? (Jewish Book Month—along with our own venue—prompts the question.) Jew-ish, I guess. It can be if you want it to be one. Say too much about the place of Jews in a book about the entertainment industry and it risks becoming an identity book of niche interest or giving fodder to ‘Jews-and-Hollywood’-fixated antisemites. Too little and it feels evasive. Nussbaum sensibly mentions when someone’s Jewish without overstating the extent to which reality television, specifically, is a Jewish field. At any rate, Where visibility’s concerned, the main demographic reality television seems to have helped is gay men. (In the interests of intersectionality I will state the obvious: some gay men are Jewish. Most notably, for these purposes, Andy Cohen.)
Gay men have played a big role in reality TV since the early days—there’s a lot about Lance Loud, of 1970s An American Family, and into the 1990s, through to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the present day: “At First They Hid Their Love, Then a Reality Show Gave Them Courage,” reads a recent New York Times wedding announcement headline about two Black men who came out on Judge Mathis. “A striking proportion of early reality producers,” writes Nussbaum, “were gay men,” something she attributes to the possibility that “gay men were more attuned to the tensions between behavior and performance, “or “more willing to innovate as outsiders.”
While reality shows, Nussbaum explains, have often intentionally selected for “swishy,” stereotypical gay men for “comic relief,” they also introduced mass audiences to just… quite a lot of gay men, who otherwise might not have known (or known they knew) any, or who were young and in small towns and thought they were the only ones. This matters because if you’re going to look at reality’s political impact, it hasn’t been all leftward or all rightward. Acceptance of gay men was a gateway of sorts into a broader—if contested—social liberalism.
Nussbaum traces the origin of reality television, or what she calls “dirty documentary,” to 1947, and the advent of audience-participation radio shows, some quite gossipy. From quiz shows it’s onto prank shows—the latter invented by a Brooklyn Jew named Allen Funt. Funt’s innovations—Candid Camera, but also, more specifically, “‘Smile! You’re on Candid Camera’”—anticipated the ethical conundrums of reality TV. Is it OK to watch if the participants consented? And did they know what they were getting into? There’s then a jaunt through 1970s raunch and innuendo, via, among others, The Dating Game. The genre evolved alongside participants’ and viewers’ awareness of it.
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Cue the Sun! made me reconsider—but not reject—my preference for fiction over ‘reality’ where entertainment’s concerned. Because I don’t think it’s snobbery. I happily rewatch Benidorm, a scripted sitcom rife with the vulgarity of early-aughts reality-TV aesthetics, but all the reality shows I’ve seen—people with lots of lip filler yelling at one another, or the more staid ones where ordinary-looking people look for modestly-priced homes in the British countryside, or the baking shows—and they’ve rarely been more than background noise.
Some of it is about the ethical considerations of offering real people up for public judgment. Of An American Family, Nussbaum writes, “critics were reviewing not the show but the family.” Some, too, is the fact that scripted shows are (sometimes) well-written. But it’s also that there’s some mechanism according to which a work being classified as fiction allows the viewer—or reader—to tap into universal human truths. Maybe it’s about not being distracted by questions of authenticity. You know the person onscreen is a character, so you aren’t concerning yourself with whether they’re similar offscreen. Of course they’re putting on an act. They’re acting! That’s the point.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
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