With Cue The Sun!, Nussbaum Avoids Reality Shows’ Wreckage
living in the world reality television built, without a writer to guide us
Cue The Sun! is like a Clif bar. Clif bars are utilitarian, a way to smash calories into your face between work meetings. It suffices for its purpose, but it’s not satisfying. The experience of reading Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, the new book by New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum, is much the same.
Like the wrapper of a Clif bar, which promises “sweet peanut butter perfection,” and instead delivers a flavorless cardboard slurry of oats and puffed rice, Cue The Sun! has the allure of something great, which only sets you up for greater disappointment when the book doesn’t deliver.
Nussbaum seems to have forgotten one of the main lessons of reality television: A show’s trappings — survival challenges, weekly elimination votes — aren’t what hooks viewers. They’re mere catalysts for the shows’ real appeal: intense interpersonal drama. Whether it’s pampered socialites backstabbing each other on Real Housewives or the tangled alliances on Big Brother, people love to watch human relationships form and fall apart.
Yet, most of Cue The Sun! focuses on the staid corporate machinations that birthed reality franchises. Don’t expect cutthroat boardroom dramatics à la Succession, just pitch meetings that go more or less to plan. You’ll get breathless pages about the development process behind Survivor, whose first season fills an entire chapter. There’s a long sequence about The Real World: New York and how creators Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray bickered about how much to engineer the proceedings. Though, most of The Real World coverage focuses on the interplay between cast and crew, which was largely congenial, except for a short affair between a contestant and a cameraman.
The most affecting and interesting behind-the-scenes drama comes early in the book, during a chapter about An American Family, a proto-reality show that was supposed to be a simple PBS documentary about a normal suburban family. However, during filming the family was consumed by affairs, alcohol abuse, divorce, and blow-out fights, not to mention the-then controversial homosexuality of son Lance Loud. The chaos led to ethical quandaries that creator Craig Gilbert and cinematographers (and established documentarians) Alan and Susan Raymond had to resolve on the fly.
One would assume that in a book this long – almost 500 pages – about reality TV, there’d be extended meditations on the genre’s ethics, cultural impact, and recent unionization efforts. Alas, with the exception of her coverage of An American Family and a few other early forerunners, this isn’t true. Nussbaum gestures to the refusal of contestants on the first American season of Big Brother to turn on each other as a proto-unionization movement, but she never gets into current organizing efforts beyond a couple off-hand comments. Nor does she take a position on reality TV’s ethics, either to condemn or defend. Instead, she relies on quotes from other people, most of whom are industry insiders who feel no qualms. She notes without comment that The Bachelor creator Mark Fleiss spent two hours coaxing a reluctant contestant into a hot tub.
Why did audiences embrace reality TV? How did these shows affect the wider culture? Why, after decades of false starts, did reality shows take off at the turn of the millennium? None of this will be revealed in Cue The Sun!
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