Cue the sun! : the invention of reality TV / Emily Nussbaum.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The rollicking saga of reality television, a "sweeping" ( The Washington Post ) cultural history of America's most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer--"a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture" (NPR)

"Passionate, exquisitely told . . . With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail . . . [Nussbaum] knits her talents for sharp analysis and telling reportage well."-- The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

In development as a docuseries from the studio behind Spencer and Spotlight

ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe

FINALIST FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION

Who invented reality television, the world's most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can't we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of "dirty documentary"--from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump--Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.

In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium. She introduces the genre's trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World --along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor . We learn about the tools of the trade--like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor's best friend--and ugly tales of exploitation. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality's peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script.

What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds--and why won't they speak to the couple who filmed them? Which serial killer won on The Dating Game ? Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more . A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Better Write That One Fast (xiii)
• Spaghetti Against the Wall: 1947-1989 (1)
• 1 The Reveal: Queen for a Day and Candid Camera (3)
• 2 The Gong: The Filthy, Farkakte Chuck Barris 1970s (29)
• 3 The Betrayal: An American Family (49)
• 4 The Clip: America's Funniest Home Videos and Cops (85)
• The Rev Up: 1990-2000 (111)
• 5 The House: The Real World (113)
• 6 The Con: The Nihilistic Fox '90s (147)
• 7 The Game: The Invention of Survivor (and Mark Burnett) (171)
• 8 The Island: Survivor: Borneo (193)
• 9 The Feed: Big Brother (234)
• Cue the Sun!: 2001-2007(ish) (265)
• 10 The Explosion: Reality Blows Up-and Becomes an Industry (267)
• 11 The Rose: The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire (304)
• 12 The Wink: Bravo and the Gentrification of Reality TV (333)
• 13 The Job: The Apprentice and the End of Reality Innocence (360)
• Epilogue: Fake It Till You Make It (388)
• Acknowledgments (395)
• Bibliography (399)
• Index (421)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1 The Reveal Queen for a Day and Candid Camera Dirty documentary set off its first moral panic in 1947, just after World War II. Radio still ruled the roost back then, as it had since the 1920s, broadcasting opera, jazz and news, comedy and Shakespeare, all of it live--a cozy console the whole family could huddle around. Now and then, there was a prestige blockbuster like Orson Welles's War of the Worlds--­a scripted sci-fi drama so realistic, listeners freaked out, convinced that aliens were invading the Earth, for real. If you were a radio writer or actor, you could make a nice living. If you were a star, you could make a killing. Still, even in the early days, ordinary people sometimes stumbled onto the airwaves--­and around the 1930s, disc jockeys began taking phone calls from listeners. These unknowns did something the pros had never done: They confessed their secrets to the world, liberated by the sensation of strangers listening in. It was the beginning of talk radio--­the first strand of the "audience participation" trend, a fad that would jump to television in the late 1940s, like a tapped cigarette ash starting a forest fire. Pundits hated the audience participation shows from the start, a response that was saturated with class revulsion: These were vulgar programs, created by vulgar people, for vulgar people, about vulgar people. Worst of all, they were insanely popular. One of the earliest of these DJ-pioneers was Lester Kroll, a former cab driver from New York City and the son of an immigrant lacemaker. In 1929, Kroll went through an ugly divorce, and then, after he refused to pay child support, got tossed into "alimony jail." His months in the clink appear to have radicalized Kroll: He became an anti-alimony activist--and then a self-appointed expert on marriage itself. According to It Sounds Impossible, a dishy 1963 history of early radio written by former CBS executives Sam J. Slate and Joe Cook, the self-promoting Kroll, a wannabe playwright and an amateur lecturer on the Times Square "flea-circus belt," found his way into radio through the Depression-era WPA, then shrewdly rebranded. By 1932, he was no longer a high school dropout: Instead, he was thought leader "John J. Anthony," the highly educated founder of a "Marital Relations Institute." He offered advice on the tiny Long Island station WMRJ, and soon, across the nation. "Never was a program concept uglier--or a show more fun to listen to than The Original Good Will Hour," wrote Slate and Cook. Each week, Anthony invited fifteen to twenty guests, chosen based on their letters, to come to his studio, then "eat their hearts out over who did what to whom at home." The radio host's visitors confessed to everything under the sun, from cheating to (on at least one occasion) murder. Critics sometimes suspected Anthony of using actors, but no fakery was required, according to Slate and Cook: A cadre of viewers stepped up right away, eager to "broadcast [their] troubles, anonymously or otherwise." The show became a smash hit, particularly with women, who ate up the host's confident, supremely smarmy advice, which often boiled down to "stop nagging." By 1939, the show was airing on more than seven hundred stations and Anthony had become a tycoon, the Dr. Phil of his era--­and also a juicy target for satirists, who mocked him as a maudlin phony. The Good Will Hour got canceled, then re-­upped, a few times, but by the time it ended in 1953, it had plenty of company on the dial, as radio producers encouraged regular people to step in front of the mic, for cash or kicks--­and, often, for both. Some of these programs were traditional quiz shows, like Dr. I.Q. or Name That Tune, a tradition that went back to the 1923 man-­on-­the-­street program Brooklyn Eagle Quiz on Current Events. But more anarchic formats bubbled up as well, relying less on skill than on their guests' willingness to uncork and let loose. On People Are Funny, contestants took wacky dares, like checking a seal in to The Knickerbocker Hotel. On Welcome Travelers, train passengers spooled out personal stories. On Bride and Groom, couples got married, live, decades before The Bachelor was a dark gleam in reality producer Mike Fleiss's eye. On Kiss and Make Up, Milton Berle judged marital fights, while on Rebuttal, media victims gave their side of the story. The most sadistic show of the bunch, Truth or Consequences, featured a buzzer and humiliating punishments for the losers. For the ordinary Americans who agreed to appear on them, these programs were a lark--­a quick, bracing splash of attention, with little downside. On the radio, you might become briefly famous, but it was stardom of an appealingly low-­stakes type: When no one could see your face, you could be a celebrity to your neighbors while remaining anonymous in the larger world. By the late 1940s, the audience participation formats had evolved into a robust genre, so ubiquitous that they were a threat to scripted shows and high-budget star performances. In 1948, the dryly scathing radio critic John Crosby, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, joked that there were so many audience participation shows on the air, they'd soon outnumber the fans who enjoyed them: "Eventually ALL the people will be tearing around from one radio studio to another, answering the questions and carting home the iceboxes. Nobody will have time to listen to the darn thing." Crosby, a Yale dropout who, like Lester Kroll, had originally intended to write plays, became, instead, the shrewdest observer of the audience participation era, which exploded just as he rejoined the Herald Tribune, in 1946, after a stint in the military. (A crime reporter when he first got the assignment, he didn't even own a radio.) A genial literary assassin who once joked that his job was to be "literate about the illiterate, witty about the witless, and coherent about the incoherent," Crosby devoted dozens of droll columns to these protoreality shows, taking potshots at their absurdity, their frivolity, and their commercialism. He was genuinely disturbed by one trend, however--­the "misery shows," in the tradition of Mr. Anthony's call-­in advice show, the kind of programming that was fueled by, and also designed to produce, tears and trauma. In 1946, Crosby wrote a scorching pan of The Good Will Hour, repelled by Anthony's "sanctimonious and infinitely complacent" schtick. Then, one month later, Crosby launched a full-scale attack on the audience participation genre, in a column titled "The Modern Thumb Screw." It had a banger of a lede: About two thousand years ago, a Roman emperor used to pitch winsome young Christian girls into his eel pond and watch with great enjoyment while they were devoured by the eels. This served two purposes. It fattened the eels for the table and it amused the emperor. This practice has been illegal for some time but the enjoyment of human suffering, otherwise known as sadism, is still buried not too deeply in all of us. Since radio is always eager to gratify our instincts, particularly our baser instincts, it has devised its own eel pond, the human misery program. Crosby described, in furious detail, a short-­lived radio show, A. L. Alexander's Goodwill Court, in which legal disputes were adjudicated, live, by a mediation board--­a sort of great-­grandfather to the 1980s small-­claims court TV series The People's Court. In one episode of Goodwill Court, wrote Crosby, a birth mother and a foster mother had sobbed as they fought over custody of a child, rattled by what the critic described as "mike fright," the terror of speaking into the live microphone. The program amounted to "a peep show of the worst sort," he wrote, comparing it to superior art forms. Fiction writers had the moral bandwidth to handle this depth of human suffering, he argued; nonfiction radio shows merely exploited it. "From Mr. Alexander's program we get life in the raw without poetry, without art. The tabloid newspapers show us the undraped leg. The human misery program offers us the undraped heart--­listen to it fizz." Other observers were more amused than outraged. The same year Crosby wrote "The Modern Thumb Screw," Associated Press writer Jean Meegan published a more playful account of the new fad, with the heading "Critics Scream, Actors Howl, but Audience Participation Shows Go On and On and On." Like Crosby, Meegan took a few shots at the new genre, quoting a psychologist who decried the hollow lives of guests, in a sniffy description that might condemn many modern podcasters: "Being 35 years old and living in Brooklyn isn't much of an achievement, but on the radio it sounds meritorious." Excerpted from Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Utilizing extensive, fascinating details, this book by Pulitzer Prize winner Nussbaum (I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution) traces the origins of reality TV through its most influential incarnations. Stemming from radio call-in shows where people could vent their problems, Candid Camera gave birth to the prank show in 1948. The 1960s produced The Newlywed Game, but the serious Watergate/post-Vietnam era spawned An American Family, viewed as a real-life soap opera. It featured 20-year-old Lance Loud--the first openly gay person in a television series, and he played a gay character too--and the unexpected divorce of the Loud parents. The 1980s delivered America's Funniest Home Videos and Cops, and 1992 introduced MTV's The Real World--a cast reality show that led to others such as the Real Housewives franchise, which fans devoured and critics derided. Nussbaum devotes extra time to the cultural behemoth Survivor and Big Brother, which airs multiple times a week, and many view them as examples of voyeurism. The book also covers production nightmares of various shows. VERDICT A detailed, engaging focus, interpretation, and historical commentary on the evolution and reception of reality shows. A must-read for social scientists and reality TV aficionados.--Peter Thornell

Publishers Weekly Review

In this boisterous chronicle, television critic Nussbaum (I Like to Watch) charts unscripted television's evolution from Candid Camera's 1948 premier through the first season of The Apprentice in 2003. Shedding light on the genre's progenitors, Nussbaum argues that the cinema verité PBS documentary series An American Family (1973), which chronicled the foibles of an affluent California family of seven, established the reality soap opera format that MTV's The Real World (1992--present) later popularized. Nussbaum profiles the "amateur sociologists, gleeful manipulators and shameless voyeurs" who pioneered the genre, describing The Newlywed Game creator Chuck Barris as a braggadocious P.T. Barnum--esque figure with a tenuous allegiance to truth (one of his memoirs implausibly claimed he'd been an assassin for the CIA). Detailed interviews with cast, crew, and producers provide juicy behind-the-scenes tidbits about the making of such shows as Big Brother, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Survivor, whose inaugural season almost collapsed amid allegations that a camera operator attempted to tip the competition by dropping a Clif Bar for a contestant to find. The most shocking stories reveal the ethically dubious strategies producers use to gin up drama. For instance, one Bachelor producer recalls needling a bachelorette about her eating disorder until she cried, and then editing the footage to "make her look like a hysterical stalker." It's a rowdy and unsettling look at how reality conquered television. (June)

Booklist Review

Reality television may be ubiquitous, but it's not new, as The New Yorker's Pulitzer Prize--winning Nussbaum illustrates in this fine book. She traces its roots to radio, then to TV shows that capitalized on people's willingness to look silly in front of a camera: Candid Camera, The Dating Game, and The Gong Show. The real grandmother of today's reality TV, though, may be 1973's An American Family, which followed the Louds of Southern California; scores of early gay reality stars recall looking up to oldest son Lance Loud. Nussbaum digs into the creation of juggernauts like Survivor and Big Brother, and the innocence of the first season of each, when the contestants weren't constantly aware of performing for the camera. She covers producer manipulation on The Bachelor and the ascension of Bravo, and ends with The Apprentice, leaving readers to answer for themselves whether reality TV is responsible for the Trump presidency. Whether fans of the genre or not, readers will enjoy this deep dive into a format that, for better or worse, is here to stay.

Kirkus Book Review

A Pulitzer Prize--winning critic chronicles the history of reality TV. In 2003, when New Yorker staff writer Nussbaum, author of I Like To Watch, first pitched her idea to write a book about "a hot new pop-culture genre," her friend told her that she "'better write that one fast'….Reality television was a fad, he told me--a bubble that would pop before I could get anything on the page." Yet, as her entertaining narrative proves, reality programming existed long before 2000--and will continue for years to come. Nussbaum begins her examination with a behind-the-scenes look at reality radio shows such as A.L. Alexander's Goodwill Court, a predecessor to courtroom dramas like The People's Court; Candid Microphone, the prank-show forerunner to Candid Camera; and Queen for a Day, which the author describes as "The Bachelor crossed with GoFundMe." Nussbaum then draws parallels between An American Family, one of the first shows to document a loving relationship between a mother and her gay son, and The Real World, the MTV program that introduced the world to queer Cuban American AIDS activist Pedro Zamora. The author also uncovers a variety of disturbing little-known facts. For example, she reports that the first man featured on Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? not only barely qualified as a millionaire, but also participated in the show after an ex-fiancee filed a restraining order against him. Nussbaum brings her critical, compassionate, practiced eye to a subject that she infuses with the intensity recognizable to readers of her previous book and her work at the New Yorker. She is adept at drawing connections among pop-culture trends and painting big personalities with a broad stroke--though the text is sometimes overly detailed, which contributes to its prodigious length. A thoughtful and comprehensive history of a TV genre that shows no signs of disappearing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.