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.

Well-written, entertaining, and dark, "Cue the Sun" is a must-read for fans of reality television. It is a nesting doll of behind the scenes tattles and tales. Highly recommended for fans. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

#CueTheSun
#NetGalley

I love reality tv. And I love Emily Nussbaum’s writing. Really enjoyed this. Felt like I learned something but was also thoroughly entertained.

Emily Nussbaum’s meticulous research in Cue the Sun makes it difficult to find fault with the book. For readers who are reality television fanatics, Nussbaum covers every corner imaginable here. Prior to reading this, one may wonder if the book will merely cover the reality television giants, but Nussbaum even covers reality television shows that had a short three-episode run with little notoriety. Of course, Nussbaum goes deep inside the big shows—even a Survivor super fan should learn some new details. The book should appeal to those who aren’t specifically interested in reality television but in general pop culture. Nussbaum is a Pulitzer-winning writer for The New Yorker, so she touches on the bigger cultural impacts resulting from the surge in reality television.

Cue the Sun is a bit longer than a typical pop culture book, but it also feels more substantive. Nussbaum covers a huge swath of history. Reality television hit a critical mass with Survivor in the early 2000s, but there were many, many reality television predecessors, including Cops and America’s Funniest Home Videos and all the way back to radio shows near the WWII era (Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds was thought to be real news at the time). This leads to a great discussion about what qualifies as “reality” in television because people staging embarrassing mishaps on poor quality home recorders isn’t truly reality. Her coverage feels more than fair, too. Nussbaum covers the subject exhaustively like the best journalist but isn’t afraid to wield her critic’s background to offer a bit more than just recitation of fact. Her takes are witty and unafraid of being critical when warranted but not dismissively so. She offers praise when it is deserved. Overall, an entertaining and informative read that is sure to teach readers something new about the history of reality television and think about how it has affected our culture at-large. Recommended.

This was a bit of a slog in a good way. The writing was excellent, the subject matter is something I really was interested in. The problem for me was it was too long. I lost interest in many chapters because they were over an hour. The information at times was lost in the weeds. There were also chapters that were of no interest to me.
The premise is the inception of reality tv. Just way too many people to keep track of, I just think it could have been edited down a bit.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for a honest opinion.
3⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced reader copy of Cue the Sun. I love reality tv, I love readig about tv. This book was a match made in heaven for my inerests! I learned so much, I had no idea the Real World wasn't the first reality tv show. The writing was so interesting and succinct while being incredibly entertaining.

Whether you love reality TV or don't care for it, you'll undoubtedly be intrigued by this book! CUE THE SUN! is an entertaining exploration of the genre and its evolution over the decades, starting from radio shows in the 1940s, all the way to today, where both cable channels and streaming services alike are home to so many of these hit shows. Emily Nussbaum has clearly done her research—I found this book so interesting, despite not being super familiar with some of the earlier shows she mentions, and she goes into extensive detail from start to finish, while also keeping the narrative fun and engaging throughout. She also does a great job of grounding each reality TV "era" in the social, historical, and cultural context it took place in, showing how the media landscape has changed over time. I've always been fascinated by reality TV .in general, looking it both with a critical eye and from a less serious viewer's perspective, someone who just wants entertainment, drama, and mess galore! As such, I feel like Nussbaum establishes a good balance between these two types of voices, too, embodying both viewpoints and also catering to readers who might identify with one over the other (or both).

Despite this being a longer read (over 400 pages), I still found myself wanting more from some areas of the book. Maybe I'm just showing my personal tastes here, as someone who never misses an episode of Love Island and has been tuning in to the Bachelor franchise for years, but I wished Nussbaum had focused a little bit more on the "guilty pleasure" type of shows, that may be considered "mindless," but have still had a significant impact on reality TV overall. The chapter comparing and contrasting Joe Millionaire and The Bachelor was so fascinating, and I would have liked to see more discussion like that, for example! However, I understand that there's so much to focus on with this sort of topic (someone could probably write an entire book about the reality dating show phenomenon alone!), and CUE THE SUN! is already so comprehensive and truly has something for every fan. If you love nonfiction reads, particularly in the pop culture realm, you won't want to miss this one! Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC.

Love it or hate it, reality television is hard to ignore. Some version of it exists on most traditional channels and the streaming platforms are getting deeper into it. Most of us have a favorite show (“Survivor” fan here) and although we call it a guilty pleasure, maybe it’s just more of a pleasure at this point since no one feels that guilty about it anymore. Emily Nussbaum is our finest writer/critic chronicling television, combining genuine enthusiasm with deep research. She has elevated television criticism to high art, winning a Pulitzer prize for her work in the New Yorker along the way. Her book Cue The Sun! is a both a fun read and a scholarly look at the history of reality television.

Nussbaum starts at the very beginning with radio and takes readers through the campy shows of the 1970s, including the stylings of television jester Chuck Barris. The book is mostly chronological, taking us through the rise of Fox during the 1980s, MTV’s pivot into the reality world, and the rise of home video shows before turning to our current landscape of offerings, many of which have their roots in earlier ideas. Not every show was a hit and some of the fun of this book is hearing about shows that you had forgotten about or maybe never saw in the first place.

Throughout the book, one theme is the question of how real the reality is. From faked home videos to re-shot and re-staged reality moments, what we call reality television is always manufactured to some extent. Sometimes, that is fairly benign; sometimes, it involves a lot of manipulation.

Fair warning, this book may change how you think about some of your favorite shows. As she shines a light on the producers and the ways the participants are coerced into giving the camera what it needs, there’s a fair amount of uncomfortable knowledge that as the audience, the responsibility also lies with us. Perhaps no more so in the final chapters when Nussbaum tackles “The Apprentice” and its impact on the global stage. The book, it turns out, is a love letter wrapped in caution tape.

Cue The Sun- As someone who is obsessed with reality TV, I knew I had to read this. I loved Nussbaum’s exploration and information that she imparted in this book. It added a layer to the shows that I was really excited for.

Ever since I read Emily Nussbaum's collection I Like to Watch, I've had the feeling she had a book like this in her: not a complete history of TV (though I now have a feeling she'll indeed get around to that) but a deep dive into one show, genre or era. Cue the Sun!'s systematic approach to exploring the high- and low-water marks of reality TV, and her grappling with why so many viewers can't get enough of it, continually leads to fascinating peeks behind the curtain. Reality TV has never really been <i>real</i>, but as Nussbaum demonstrates, it matters, for better or (more often) worse.

Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the review copy.

This is where I admit my (apparent) overwhelming existing knowledge of reality TV. I had no idea. CUE THE SUN was immediately interesting to me because reality TV has often seemed just…what?…a complete black box to me. The more I watched, the less I understood. I would ‘check in’ on each new iteration of it, expecting to have some glimmer of understanding, but no, that didn’t arrive. Emily Nussbaum’s explanation of the origin and growth of the industry does explain how it developed and to what purpose. I learned more about the peculiarities of the background players than I perhaps needed to know. But, this is an interesting deep dive into a topic on which most people hide their knowledge or their viewing habits. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

I wanted to LOVE this book as much as I do reality TV. I did really like it, but some of the early stuff - pre-Real World - moved a little slow for me. That said - once I got to the 1990s and forward it really kept my attention. Four stars.