Print List Price: | $30.00 |
Kindle Price: | $13.99 Save $16.01 (53%) |
Sold by: | Random House LLC Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample
Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV Kindle Edition
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
“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)
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateJune 25, 2024
- File size3607 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“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.”—NPR
“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
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.”
Product details
- ASIN : B0CP92DQG4
- Publisher : Random House (June 25, 2024)
- Publication date : June 25, 2024
- Language : English
- File size : 3607 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 446 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0525508996
- Best Sellers Rank: #75,277 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Television History & Criticism
- #28 in Popular Culture
- #29 in TV History & Criticism
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
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.
I actually found talking about some of them. (Did you know there were reality shows before there was television. Or that the first Bachelorette is still happily married.)
Perfect book for a trivia lover or anyone who just likes to know more about things.
Spoiler; The last chapter about Donald Trump really has nothing good to say about him, so some might want to skip that chapter.
(Thanks to GoodReads for my copy of this book.)
In Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum, we are walked through the history of reality television, from the Newlywed Game all the way to The Real Housewives of whatever city is currently on.
Throughout the book, Nussbaum dives into some of our most iconic reality shows chronologically to demonstrate not only how the genre came to be, but how each show shaped the future of television. (All while being the black sheep of the TV world.)
For myself, someone who has loved reality tv their whole life while also complaining about it (keeping up the kardashians irks me) this book is everything. Not only is Cue the Sun! packed with information, it’s told like a tell all full of industry gossip. Not only did I gobble this up, I found myself down memory lane watching old favorites like The Real World and Big Brother. Say what you will about reality tv, but it’s definitely a cultural time capsule that is readily available to everyone everywhere. It deserves its time in the sun, and luckily for us, Emily Nussbaum shined a light on it for us!