Emily Nussbaum's reality TV book explores the history of the genre

Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson were still “newlyweds” grappling with the chicken or tuna conundrum when television critic Emily Nussbaum first came up with the idea of ​​writing a book about reality TV.

“I waited 20 years until reality TV became an established industry and I had a career writing about television,” Nussbaum says of the impetus for “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV,” which she conceived in 2003 during a conversation . with friends and colleagues amid the explosion of the genre with the shows “The Bachelorette,” “America's Next Top Model” and “Joe Millionaire.”

Dissuaded by these detractors, who dismissed the genre as a passing thing (insert laugh here), Nussbaum carved out a career in criticism as cultural editor of New York Magazine and current editor of the New Yorker, covering such prestige. shows like “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” in essays that were collected in his first book, 2019’s “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution.”

That was part of a two-book deal with Random House, so for the second, Nussbaum thought she'd revisit that two-decade-old idea, not from a critical point of view but from an informed one. Using more than 300 interviews with the people who invented the genre, Nussbaum crafts the origin story of reality television from 1947 to 2009.

But wait: Television was a new medium in 1947, let alone reality TV. That's the first clue that “Cue the Sun,” which opens Tuesday, is not your average story of the genre, which Nussbaum calls a “dirty documentary.”

Although slightly linear, “Cue the Sun!” groups shows by thematic similarities: game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows. These include the prank show “Candid Camera” and its roots in the radio show “The Candid Microphone,” hence the 1947 date, as well as clip shows like “America's Funniest Home Videos” and “Cops,” to which which Nussbaum devotes much of the first part of the book to.

“Each of them requires cinema verité, which people consider a high discipline in which you hold the camera and capture the truth very patiently, and then you mix in commercial additives that give it a format: speed it up, serialize it. , make it economical, put pressure on people. That's how I think [reality TV],” she says.

Her initial stages of reporting in early 2020 unintentionally foreshadowed the following year: Nussbaum tested positive for COVID-19 and developed long COVID after one of her first reporting trips for the book, which included interviewing “Cops” creator, the “ charming pirate” John Langley, who looms over “Cue the Sun!” In June 2020, the clip show was taken off the air after 33 seasons in response to the resurgence of Black Lives Matter that summer. (The show has since resumed.)

“There's a touchingly naïve claim that someone was making, that the problem with 'Cops' is not that it would document [police brutality] but that [police] I would act better on camera. [while still committing abuses of power off camera]. And of course, that's not an argument that holds up because at this point, everyone is a reality show producer because everyone has a camera in their hand,” Nussbaum says, evoking images of police brutality of civilians captured on social media.

Nussbaum disagrees with Langley's stance on “Cops,” detailed in “Cue the Sun!”, that the show captured raw material and presented it in a neutral way. However, he acknowledges that it is “just one program in this book that has significant ethical problems.”

One such series that Nussbaum (and, indeed, many others) enjoys is “Project Runway.”

“Here is a show that celebrates creativity, that is pro-gay… it has a fantastic host. [in Tim Gunn] who modeled positivity and warmth, [and] is an offshoot of the 'fancy' 'Project Greenlight,' and then I looked into its origins and thought, 'Oh yeah, 'Project Runway.' [was developed] because Harvey Weinstein wanted to have a show about models,'” Nussbaum says with her trademark dry wit. (Miriam Haley, former production assistant on the show, testified at the 2020 Weinstein trial in New York that the disgraced Hollywood mogul sexually assaulted her in his apartment in 2006).

While shows like “Project Runway,” “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” have been praised for their contributions to the genre and culture at large, Nussbaum says it's actually reality TV stars who are producers of their own “soft scripts.” ” shows, like the much-maligned Kardashians, that they experience the least problematic conditions.

“The more fake a program is, the more ethical it is,” he says. “People who agreed to be reality stars and 'play' themselves, those shows may have their own ethical issues, but they're not 'real' in the same way.”

“Bona fide amateurs,” a category of reality TV performers that exists somewhere in the gray area between scripted performers, hosts and documentary subjects that Nussbaum discovered while reporting for her recent New Yorker. article in “Love Is Blind,” they are unprotected.

“When I wrote this book, no one was doing anything to try to protect the cast members,” like former “Real Housewives of New York City” star Bethenny Frankel, who advocated for Reality TV stars to unionize amid last year's strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. (Nussbaum interviewed the producer Andy Cohen for “Cue the Sun!” before the presentation of several trials against the other Housewives Bravo franchise.) “This genre is a strikebreaker” that arose from the 1988 strike by members of the Writers Guild of America that spawned “Cops,” Nussbaum says. “It is a budget mechanism. “It’s a way of not paying writers or actors.”

While it may be difficult for some to sympathize with reality TV stars who have made millions from their exposure in the genre, Nussbaum offers this: “[Just] because [some people] find reality stars ridiculous or disgusting or are villains on the show, which is an edited version of themselves, [doesn’t mean that they don’t] They deserve labor rights or compensation. The whole idea of ​​gender as a guilty pleasure prevents people from seeing it as other things, one of which is a workplace.”