One of our wisest philosophers (Homer Simpson) described television as “teacher, mother, secret lover.” Reality television belongs to that final classification, a mistress we can’t quite quit yet also will never introduce to our parents. It is ubiquitous as dirt and as dirty as, well, dirt. Critics have mostly treated it like dirt, too.
Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV By Emily Nussbaum; Random House; 464 pp., $30.00
If New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum doesn’t come to praise reality TV, she doesn’t come to bury it either. Her new tome Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV is a comprehensive yet fair recounting of the genre, starting back before television itself and finishing with the apocalypse — which, like most New Yorkers, she believes was marked by The Apprentice host Donald Trump’s election.
Cue the Sun takes a mostly chronological look at the history of reality TV, which means the reader sometimes gets a sandwich of the genre’s highs and lows. Thus you find the story of a true television innovation like PBS’s An American Family between the likes of The Newlywed Game and Cops. Much like reality TV itself, this alternating draws in our inquisitive side while appeasing the voyeuristic little gremlin in all of us. I brought the book to read on a beach in San Diego, but forgot both sunglasses and a pen. I improvised by dog-earing the page every time I read something interesting, so as to return later and properly underline. In what amounts to the highest praise, I squinted down a few hours later to find I had made an accordion.
One of Nussbaum’s funniest running gags is how reality television is but one entirely or …