Review: “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV” by Emily Nussbaum

It worked perfectly – the cast members giggled, the model cried – and behind the scenes it almost backfired. The cast and crew were imbued with Generation X’s intolerance of inauthenticity and revolted, a scene described by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Emily Nussbaum in “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV,” her new, stirring coming-of-age story of the eternally maligned television genre. Production was shut down and An angry meeting ensued, during which the cast was apparently ready to leave the room.

Had they succeeded, America’s reality TV reckoning – our current reassessment of the ethics, compensation and legal obligations of reality shows, possibly through unions – might have happened much sooner. Instead, the gentle provocation seems almost old-fashioned compared to the subsequent two decades Nussbaum chronicles, during which the genre she describes as “cinéma vérité films laced like a street drug with commercial contaminants to drive down the price and amplify the effect” reached its highest highs and lowest lows.

Or maybe they haven’t realized it yet. A common thread running through Nussbaum’s reporting is the number of times critics have declared reality TV dead, statements that usually come after it has repeated a new form of “Cops,” “Big Brother,” “Joe Millionaire.” Critics praise at your own risk: Reality TV has survived every attempt to write its obituary and will surely outlive those of us who write it.

Nussbaum’s title is a reference to The Truman Show, the 1998 Peter Weir film in which Jim Carrey plays the unwitting, lifelong star of a reality show that bears his name. When Truman tries to escape in the middle of the night, the show’s creator, played by Ed Harris, instructs his producers to activate the sun, a moment that reveals Truman peeled away the layers of artificiality that had surrounded him his entire life.

This category of celebrity goes back further than most people realize. The origins of our reality shows, Nussbaum writes, lie in radio call-in shows where people poured their hearts out to strangers over the airwaves. She examines the surviving cast and crew of the proto-reality documentary series “An American Family” (1973) and the aftershocks that haunted the participants throughout their lives. And she takes us through a particularly ugly period of nihilistic shows like “Alien Autopsy,” “Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape” and the never-aired “World’s Biggest Bitches,” a show so vicious it seems like a parody.

From “The Gong Show” to “American Idol,” or from “American Idol” to the Kardashians, two interdependent forces have shaped reality TV: naivety and sadism. The things that make the best television are the most exploitative, and the best subjects are the ones that surprise us and themselves because they don’t yet know how to play the game. Likewise, the more ethical a show is — often because the cast knows what they’re getting into after several seasons — the less electrifying the takes. For so many shows, that’s why the first season is the best. Think of the strange shock of watching a man suddenly propose to a woman he’s only spoken to through a wall in “Love Is Blind,” when the series debuted on Netflix in 2020. The pleasure lies entirely in the paradoxical unreality, the charming silliness of people who have no idea what they are doing, seriously groping their way through circumstances they do not yet understand.

And yet, every species in the reality ecosystem—showrunners, preachers, contestants, and (sometimes especially) viewers who delight in the misery of people stupid enough to go on TV—can almost inevitably and almost always be characterized by sadism from the start. Stanley Milgram, the psychologist who conducted the infamous “obedience” experiment using fake electric shocks in the 1960s, wrote a 1979 essay praising the show Candid Camera. But he was perhaps even more fascinated by what came afterward: When a contestant on “Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish prequel to “Survivor,” committed suicide after being voted first off the island, host Jeff Probst admitted in a documentary that he became “much more interested in the show than I was at first,” according to Nussbaum. During a test run for the show that would become “Big Brother,” a producer took delight in provoking a cast member into tears after less than three hours of filming.

As Americans began to understand the concept of reality stardom and pursue it as a career path in the 2000s, lost some of the innocence that’s what made characters like Lance Loud from “An American Family” — one of the first gay men to come out on television — so compelling. Big celebrities were able to capture some of that on shows like “Newlyweds” and “The Osbournes,” in an interesting inversion: Reality was a genre that could turn real people into celebrities and celebrities into real people. What the performers lost in innocence, they gained in power and influence: The contestants learned to mold themselves in the producers’ image, aiming for a “good edit” — or at least a “bad edit” that they could parlay into further opportunities. One of them made it all the way to the White House.

Nussbaum’s extensive book occasionally gets caught up in the turmoil of the network’s executive suites. Far more interesting are the sections that take us to the sets. What was it like, for example, to be locked in the “Big Brother” house on September 11, 2001, and have no idea that America was under attack? Or to be a crew member on “Survivor” and endure some of the same hardships as the cast? – almost starved, heat exhaustion, aggressive lizards – but without fame and honor?

Or what was it like to marry a man you just met on live television? Nussbaum’s exploration of Mike Fleiss’ reality empire (you know him best for creating The story (which was based on the show’s history of The Bachelor and his departure from the marriage following a discrimination investigation) is narrated in part in the voice of Darva Conger, winner of the 2000 special Who’s Going to Marry a Multimillionaire? That marriage, of course, fell apart when it was revealed that star Rick Rockwell was actually a millionaire and a former fiancée had also obtained a restraining order against him.

Conger told Nussbaum that she was shocked when she read from the teleprompter and that she later feared being left alone with Rockwell. But given the twisted gender politics of the time, she too was publicly vilified for doing the show for fun—a refrain that later solidified into a maxim. about the “Bachelor” candidates who are “here for the wrong reasons” – and then she posed for Playboy to make money after losing her job as a nurse.

After the “multimillionaires” scandal, Nussbaum said, Fox introduced a new policy at a company meeting that was met with much applause: There would be no more reality shows. You can look at the network’s current schedule to see how well that policy has held up.

But when everyone is addicted to the profits, no one wants to be left with the costs. “Cops” creator John Langley, widely considered one of the godfathers of the genre, told Nussbaum, “I am not responsible for the bastards that followed.”

So many have followed Conger’s path: Bachelors and bachelorettes, the pod people of “Love Is Blind,” the seducers and seductresses of “Temptation Island,” the fiancés of the sprawling “90 Day Fiance” multiverse. There are shows that could have existed, and endings that never would have happened, if producers had manipulated less—or more.

The book touches only briefly, toward the end, on recent efforts to confront reality TV, led by figures such as Bethenny Frankel, one of the “Real Housewives of New York City” who has suggested that reality shows should unionize, and cast members of “Love Is Blind” who have sued over abuse allegations and founded a foundation to support reality show contestants. Although Nussbaum doesn’t seem particularly supportive of their actions—”They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say let them crash”—her reporting makes a good argument for why these actions are necessary.

Today’s smart actors aren’t hicks, that’s true – they’re more like collaborators who know what level of drama and antagonism is required for good television, and who willingly provide it. So they should be compensated accordingly, by the production, not just by brand deals offered to them after they become stars. If you throw enough pebbles into the pond – to use the metaphor of The Real World’s co-creator – you can inadvertently raise the water level.

Maura Judkis is a reporter at Style. She and Jacob Brogan, who edited this review, previously recapped “The Bachelor” for The Washington Post.

The invention of reality TV

Random House. 440 pages. $30.