CUE THE SUN! - EMILY NUSSBAUM

This was a pretty buzzy book from last year that I had been meaning to get around to and finally saw it in the library. I do love me some reality TV. I'm almost exactly the right age for it. Survivor and the Apprentice and the classic Real World run and the really extreme throw anything at the wall to see what sticks era (where there was a Flavor Flav dating show) all started or were going on while I was in high school and it still scratches a very particular itch for me. Sadly, this book was a bit of a disappointment. Nussbaum is a critic, so I’d hoped she’d take a handful of shows and trends in the genre and trace them and share some ideas and theories about them. But, I didn’t really pay attention to the subtitle, which is “the invention of reality tv” which turned out to be more accurate. A large portion of the book is about the proto-reality TV of an earlier era. There is a lot of time spent of An American Family, a show that does presage so much reality TV that took place in the Seventies. The problem is that most people have not seen that show, and despite predicting reality TV in form, it does not seem to be a direct inspiration for anything. She’s clearly very interested in it and interviews almost everyone involved, but I would rather time had been spent on true reality TV shows. She actually does the same thing with the show COPS which is also a sort of proto-reality TV show she spends a lot of time on but I would argue isn’t really a reality show in the modern sense. Paradoxically, it’s not really a reality show because it’s too real; reality shows in the modern sense are artificial in a very specific, interesting, and slippery way. She ends up following a bunch of different threads but not really committing enough to any one of them. For example, the behind the scenes stuff about writers’ strikes and trying to unionize reality stars was really fascinating but it could have been it’s own book. The discussion of how reality start fame works, ie you are really famous but you don’t get any money so these stars build their own ecosystem outside of the shows themselves (doing things like club appearances, and now podcasts) to capitalize, and how it changed over time as stars began to be cognizant of how the shows worked and how editing worked and changed their behavior to maximize their ability to make money after the show was over, is fascinating and really new and really presages the social media era where everyone is like this to some extent. But, again, this could have been its own book. She deep dives on a couple of shows, interviewing all the people involved and gives us a pretty complete behind-the-scenes. Survivor, the Bachelor, Queer Eye, Big Brother and the Housewife shows get this treatment. All of this stuff is fascinating but it’s more interesting for a show that I watched and cared about. She also goes deep on the Apprentice for obvious reasons and this too could have easily been a separate book, given the insane way that show has changed all of our lives. She reports that Trump repeatedly pitched a Blacks vs. YTs season which, sadly, they never let happen. Reality TV really is the rosetta stone for so much of our culture now and it deserves a close look and critical scrutiny beyond a simple turned up nose. This book does a good job adding some historical context but there is so much more there that I wish she’d have dived into.