Review: Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum -

The first season of “The Real World” almost ended in mutiny. MTV’s cameras were supposed to capture what happens when seven strangers picked to live in a loft “stop being polite and start getting real” — but it turned out that cast’s “real” was a little too polite and didn’t make for terribly exciting television. So creators Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim inserted a little drama — Bunim called it “throwing pebbles in the pond” — by planting a coffee-table book, in which one of the housemates had modeled nude, in the house for the others to find.

It worked perfectly — the castmates tittered, the model cried — and behind the scenes, it almost backfired. Imbued with a Gen X intolerance for inauthenticity, the cast and crew revolted, a scene that Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Emily Nussbaum describes in “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV,” her sweeping new history of the coming-of-age of the forever-maligned television genre. The production was shut down and an angry meeting ensued, with the cast seemingly ready to walk out.

Had they succeeded, perhaps America’s reality TV reckoning — our current reevaluation of the ethics, compensation and legal obligations of reality shows, potentially through organized labor — would have taken place much sooner. Instead, the gentle provocation seems almost quaint compared with the subsequent two decades Nussbaum chronicles, in which the genre, which she describes as “cinema verité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect,” reaches its highest highs and lowest lows.

Or maybe it hasn’t hit them yet. One thread that winds through Nussbaum’s reporting is the number of times naysayers have declared reality TV dead, statements that tend to come after it iterates a new form: “Cops,” “Big Brother,” “Joe Millionaire.” Critics eulogize at their peril: Reality television has outlasted every attempt to write its obituary and will surely outlast those of us who compose them, too.

Nussbaum’s title is a reference to “The Truman Show,” the 1998 Peter Weir film starring Jim Carrey as the unwitting, lifelong star of a reality show that bears his name. When Truman tries to escape in the middle of the night, the show’s creator, played by Ed Harris, instructs his producers to cue the sun, a moment that reveals to Truman the layers of artifice that have shrouded him his whole life.

Nussbaum shines a light on the people who have made some of television’s most beloved and most controversial reality shows, from the executives who greenlighted (and turned down) “Survivor” to the field producers and editors — a role the industry calls, fittingly, a “prediter” when it also involves shaping the cast’s actions — who questioned and defended the ethics of their jobs. And, of course, the cast members who participated in these psychological experiments, who reflect on what their lives have been like after leaving the fishbowl of fame.

That category of celebrity dates back further than most people think. The origins of our reality shows, Nussbaum writes, lie in radio call-in shows on which people would spill their guts over the airwaves to strangers. She probes the surviving cast and crew members of the proto-reality documentary series “An American Family” (1973) and the aftershocks that followed its participants throughout their lives. And she guides us through a particularly nasty phase of nihilistic shows like “Alien Autopsy,” “Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape” and the never-aired “World’s Biggest Bitches,” a show so vicious it seems like a parody.

From “The Gong Show” to “American Idol,” or “An American Family” to the Kardashians, two interdependent forces have shaped reality TV: naiveté and sadism. The things that make the best TV are the most exploitative, and the best subjects are the ones who surprise us, and themselves, because they don’t yet know how to play the game. Likewise, the more ethical a show is — often because, after multiple seasons, cast members know what they’re getting themselves into — the less electric the footage is. For so many shows, that’s why the first season is the best. Think of the weird shock of watching a man suddenly propose to a woman he’s only spoken to through a wall on “Love Is Blind” when it debuted on Netflix in 2020. The pleasure is found entirely in the paradoxical unreality, the charming silliness of people who have no idea what they’re doing fumbling earnestly through circumstances they don’t yet understand.

And yet, every species in the reality ecosystem — showrunners, prediters, contestants and (sometimes especially) viewers, who love to revel in the misery of people foolish enough to go on TV — can be characterized, almost inevitably and almost always from the start, by sadism. Stanley Milgram, the psychologist who conducted the notorious fake-electroshock “obedience” experiment in the 1960s, wrote a 1979 essay praising the show “Candid Camera.” But he might have been even more fascinated by what came after: When a contestant on “Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish precursor to “Survivor,” killed himself after being voted off the island first, Nussbaum reports, host Jeff Probst admitted in a documentary that hearing about the suicide made him “much more interested than I was initially” in the show. In a trial run for the show that would become “Big Brother,” a producer was delighted to provoke a cast member’s teary meltdown less than three hours into filming.

As Americans began to understand the notion of reality fame in the 2000s and pursue it as a career path, participants lost some of the guilelessness that made characters like Lance Loud of “An American Family” — one of the first gay men to come out on television — so captivating. Major celebrities were able to capture some of it in shows like “Newlyweds” and “The Osbournes” in an interesting reversal: Reality was a genre that could transform real people into celebrities, and celebrities into real people. What cast members lost in innocence, they gained in power and leverage: Contestants learned how to shape themselves in the producers’ image, to aim for a “good edit” — or at least a “villain edit” that they could parlay into more opportunities. One of them did it all the way to the White House.

Nussbaum’s lengthy book occasionally gets mired in the corporate sturm und drang in the C-suites of network executives. Far more interesting are the sections that take us onto the sets. What was it like, for example, to be locked in the “Big Brother” house on Sept. 11, 2001, and have no idea that America had been attacked? Or to be a crew member on “Survivor,” enduring some of the same hardships as the cast — near-starvation, heat exhaustion, aggressive lizards — but for none of the fame or glory?

Or, what was it like to get married on live television to a man you just met? Nussbaum’s exploration of Mike Fleiss’s reality empire (you know him best for creating “The Bachelor” and leaving it after a discrimination investigation) is partly told through the voice of Darva Conger, the winner of the 2000 special “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” That marriage, of course, imploded when it emerged that star Rick Rockwell was more of a thousandaire and also had a restraining order filed against him by a previous fiancée.

Conger recounted to Nussbaum that when she said yes, reading off a teleprompter, she was in shock, and that later she was afraid to be left alone with Rockwell. But given the twisted gender politics of the time, she, too, was vilified in public for doing the show as a lark — a refrain that later solidified into a maxim about “Bachelor” contestants who are “here for the wrong reasons” — and then posing for Playboy to make money after she lost her job as a nurse.

After the “Multi-Millionaire” scandal, Nussbaum writes that Fox instituted a new policy at an all-company meeting, met with a round of applause: There would be no more reality shows. You can take a look at the network’s current lineup to see how well that mandate stuck.

But if everyone was addicted to the profits, no one wanted to be stuck with the bill. As “Cops” creator John Langley, widely credited as one of the godfathers of the genre, told Nussbaum: “I’m not responsible for the bastards that followed.”

So many have followed in Conger’s path: bachelors and bachelorettes, the pod people of “Love Is Blind,” the tempters and temptresses of “Temptation Island,” the affianced of the extensive “90 Day Fiance” multiverse. There are shows that could have been, and endings that never would have happened, had there been less — or more — manipulation by producers.

The book touches only briefly, near the end, on recent efforts to reckon with reality TV, led by figures including Bethenny Frankel, one of the “Real Housewives of New York City,” who has suggested that reality casts unionize, and cast members of “Love Is Blind,” who have sued over allegations of mistreatment and have started a foundation to support reality show contestants. Though Nussbaum doesn’t seem particularly supportive of their actions — “They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ’em crash.” — her reporting makes a fine case for why they are necessary.

Savvy cast members these days aren’t rubes, it’s true — they’re more like collaborators who know what levels of drama and antagonism are required to make good TV and who willfully provide them. So they ought to be compensated accordingly, and by the production, not merely by brand deals offered to them after they become stars. Throw enough pebbles in the pond — to use “The Real World” co-creator’s metaphor — and you might unintentionally raise the waterline.

Maura Judkis is a reporter for Style. She and Jacob Brogan, who edited this review, formerly recapped “The Bachelor” for The Washington Post.

Cue the Sun!

The Invention of Reality TV

By Emily Nussbaum

Random House. 440 pp. $30

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