Cue the Sun! was a really interesting read on reality television. I thought the author was very thorough but still kept me engaged with the writing.

An utterly absorbing look at the history of reality television, Emily Nussbaum peels back the curtain on what we, as television viewers, see to reveal a juicy world of behind-the-scenes drama, badly behaving producers, and oft-mistreated stars. I was interested in, and looking forward to reading, this book, but I was quickly hooked (far beyond my expectations). Nussbaum's talented reporting is balanced by her trademark wit and prose, and she has gifted us with the definitive tell-all I never realized this genre needed.

Cue the Sun is a book that is an entertaining and enlightening read. I loved the discussions about how early reality television started and the concept that since media was created, people just enjoyed stories about other people even if they were sensationalized. I think it shows that while reality television can be decisive, it is something that helps people feel like they are part of a community. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will be recommending it to others.

Emily Nussbaum's "Cue the Sun!" really is the most comprehensive history of reality television that I have ever read and that may be on shelves today. Nussbaum takes the reader back decades to the mid-twentieth century and explains how the nascent period of reality programming set the stage for a cultural shift from modest to anything goes. She discusses the beginnings of major tv studios investing large amounts of money to document the lives of those who are both the same and more outrageous than us, especially if it exposes people at their low points. The book ends with how the Mark Burnett empire gave the unfortunate rise to a maniacal, washed-up businessman who has shifted the political landscape. It is clear that tons of research went into this book, but despite how much cultural history is presented here, the book felt really long at times. Still, I'm glad I read "Cue the Sun!" and recommend it.

A lot of well-trodden territory here, but nothing that I didn’t mind revisiting again. A few surprises but I found myself skimming a bit too if it was a show I didn’t care about.

Well researched, gripping, and thought provoking. Through Nussbaum's lens, it's easy to see how reality TV formed and continued to morph into the giant that it is today, which she manages to represent as both insidious and innovative at the same time. She describes a genre that is influenced by both corporate entities and bottom lines and by artists on the margin, whose work wasn't accessible to the mainstream. Thank you for letting me read this!

Entertaining, well researched investigation on entertaining subject (despite itself), At times it slogged a bit, taking its time, but that is just further evidence of how deeply Nussbaum went into her subject.

Reality TV is a way of life and has been since before many of us can remember. Taking a look at the origins of reality TV to the end of the Apprentice on NBC, Emily Nussbaum offers a glimpse into how this genre has changed the landscape of television. From its origins in radio shows its interesting that we've also started to shift to podcasts for some reality show elements. Whether you love it or hate it, Emily shows reality television is here to stay.

I wish there would have been at look at the boom of reality shows on streaming networks as I think that has changed the landscape of television too. I do understand why she stopped the story where she did. I found my reading experience to be eventful and full of information I didn't know about. It even has led me down a rabbit hole of Survivor, which I haven't watched since its first couple season over 20 years ago. I can see how much research and the number of years Emily spent working on this book.

It's the perfect book for everyone because love it or hate it, you'll definitely learn something about the most popular (current) genre of television.

Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for a copy in exchange for review consideration.

Happy to include this title in “Dive In,” a recent round-up highlighting a variety of summer reads, in the Books section of Canadian national culture and lifestyle magazine Zoomer. (see column and mini-review at link)

Another fabulous book by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Nussbaum. Even if you don't watch the shows she profiled, you'll be mesmerized.

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
If you, like myself, grew up in the 90s and early aughts, reality tv has been playing in the background on that chunky box of a television our entire lives. It’s the tv genre everyone loves to hate and hates to love.

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!

This is one of those books that makes me wonder how it's a financially feasible endeavor. The research is so deep and well-documented, the storytelling is so rich, and the scope is so broad that it's a marvel of a thing. I think even the most die-hard TV buffs will find things to learn here. I applaud the author for doing her best to keep things out of the memory hole, like the 70s show An American Family that I had never heard of. Sometimes the level of detail could bog me down, especially for shows that have never particularly interested me, but I'm still hugely impressed with this book as an undertaking.

This smart and incredibly detailed account of the history of reality TV is fascinating. There is a perception of the genre as being new, but Nussbaum traces its roots back as far as radio, and finds myriad ways it has really always been an influential part of our culture (for better or worse). The author interviewed many people for this, and there are a ton of interesting bits included along the way. While I think fans of reality TV will be more likely to pick this up (and they will gain from it), naysayers should give it a chance as well as it has a lot to say.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of this title.

I adored this, because it did exactly what it set out to do in its intro for me. We generally think reality TV started with the rise of Survivor, and while that did kick off a new wave of shows and formats for the millennium, there's plenty of shows that came before it, dating all the way back to the start of television as a medium when things were being adapted from radio formats. We've always been concerned about showing real people on TV, and it's come in many flavors.

I feel like it's the highest compliment to say that this book made me want to search out each of the early waves of reality shows on Youtube - the chapter on the format of Fox's various specials in the 90s hit a particular sense memory and I paused reading to go watch a bunch of the original "masked magician reveals all" specials I remember from the late 90s. Nussbaum does a great job of tracing this all to our current moment and (please picture me making the biggest air quotes) "what it all means" in a way that's satisfying and readable.

If you like reality TV you absolutely need to read this book. I learned so much about how it all started, and the behind the scenes scandals.

In “Cue the Sun,” a title derived from a line in Peter Weir’s darkly prescient 1998 film “The Truman Show,” Emily Nussbaum, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for her work as The New Yorker’s TV critic television critic, takes a deep dive into the genesis and maturation of reality television. Nussbaum posits that reality programming and the moral outrage that it engenders began more than seven decades ago in the age of radio when disc jockeys began taking phone calls from listeners. The talk radio fad would jump to television in the late 1940s, with shows such as “Queen for a Day,” launching the game show, and “Candid Camera,” the prank show. Chuck Barris followed with “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game,” and “The Gong Show.”

Nussbaum recycles some well-known trivia, such as Barris’s claim that he worked as an assassin for the CIA, but she also unearths a plethora of new gossip from the hosts, the producers, the employees, and the cast members themselves. She also places the reality shows in the context of the biggest news stories of the time. “An American Family,” the first real-life soap opera, filmed during the chaos wrought by Vietnam, the Manson murders drugs, sex and radical politics, chronicled the foibles of an affluent California family of seven with an openly gay son. Nussbaum describes how Nora Ephron panned the show in “New York” magazine, expressing particular revulsion for the matriarch Pat Loud for “letting it-all-hang out candor” about her husband’s affairs and their impending divorce. Ironically, Ephron would later marry Carl Bernstein who cheated on her while she was pregnant, and Ephron would write “Heartburn,” a score-settling best seller. “‘Heartburn’ would be attacked by critics for the same crime she’d dunned Pat for — sprinting her public divorce into a personal brand.”

No respectable book about reality television would be complete without an analysis of “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” and “The Bachelor.” With respect to the latter, Nussbaum reveals how contestants imbibed on alcohol because it was readily available and “there was nothing else for them to do: no books, no magazines, no TV.” Female contestants who were unstable and pretty were “gold.” Producers would befriend the contestants, and deploy the private information that they had gleaned (eating disorders) to create emotional scenes and, if they were unsuccessful in generating drama, skillful editing would make a contestant look deranged.

Because Nussbaum drew on hundred of interviews with sources, her book has the gravitas of serious scholarship although she is investigating a guilty pleasure. It is a juicy (and unsettling) read for fans of reality television and popular culture. Thank you Random House and Net Galley for this enlightening read.

New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum’s newest non-fiction book is an encyclopedic account of the invention of reality TV, from An American Family in the 1970s up until the present. Far from the fad viewers expected it to be, it grew from cinema verité to heavily manipulated programming. While there are some gossipy tidbits and it does discuss some early reality TV stars, this book is more of a fact-based look at behind-the-camera players.

I greatly enjoy reality TV and I love Emily Nussbaum’s writing, but this book was too exhaustive for my taste. It is extremely informative and she does a wonderful job showing how each iteration of reality TV built on the previous one, but I did not end up wanting to read 464 pages of information on this subject. Definitely my fault though for not checking the page count before embarking on this electronic copy! I would recommend this to extreme reality TV fans and/or those who really enjoy getting into all the details of a subject.

This book is an easy to read history of Reality television, starting with early tv and including staples like “the Real World”, “Survivor” and “the Apprentice.” Each show is examined in one lengthy chapter with much behind the scenes gossip. I’m honestly not a huge Reality TV consumer but even I found this entertaining and readable. The author is a talented storyteller and did a great job creating a narrative of how Reality TV has developed. I received a digital ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I really enjoyed Nussbaum's last book and had high hopes for this. It did not disappoint! Even though I don't think of myself as a reality TV fan, I've seen my fair share of the series discussed in this book. But this is more of a historiography of the genre than I was expecting, and the easy prose and delicious details made it incredibly absorbing. I couldn't wait to read more, and to get to the time periods I remembered personally. Five full stars for this incredible work of nonfiction about the fiction of "reality" tv! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for this unbiased review.

A fascinating look at the grime and glory of the creation of reality TV. I learned a ton about the genre's inception and the behind-the-scenes of specific shows. This is a fantastic nonfiction read: It both challenges the ethics of the creation and enjoyment of reality TV and highlights the difficult work of the people who make it and the struggles of those who star in it. It's complicated!! And all the more interesting for its complexity.