Book Club
By Hana Zittel
Published Issue 131, November 2024
Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum (2024)
Emily Nussbaum’s latest book began as an idea all the way back in 2003. Hoping to capture the emerging trend of reality television, Nussbaum was inspired to cover the phenomenon in response to the massive hits of Survivor which debuted in 2000, and American Idol and The Bachelor first airing in 2002. Instead, she waited, and in retrospect, that was the best choice. Looking back from 2024, it would have been hard to predict that these low cost productions, without actors or often writers, would come to dominate the television and cultural landscape.
Cue the Sun! takes its name from a line delivered by the show creator in the 1998 film, The Truman Show, when Truman is close to escaping his staged life as the star of a never-ending reality program that started at his birth. Like in The Truman Show, the architects of the reality TV boom, profiled in Nussbaum’s book, were tenacious creators flexing ethical boundaries to explore a new way of making television and capturing the human experience. At best, many were cinéma vérité purists and pranksters, and at worst, master manipulators driven by the untapped potential of this inexpensive format.
Though its media dominance seems sudden, the base ideas of reality TV have roots in radio. Audience participation radio programs rose to popularity in the 1940s with shows like Candid Microphone, which eventually translated onscreen to become the more famous Candid Camera, and Queen for a Day, a game show where women could plead for new possessions or financial and medical aid. The popularity of these programs proved that vast audience appeal could be created without a script, capitalizing on the raw emotions of real people. As the genre transitioned to television, the breadth of human experience and emotion was on full display from shows like Chuck Barris’ The Gong Show and The Newlywed Game that captured the shock and humor of the unexpected, to the unscripted moments on the early PBS production, An American Family, that displayed the intensity, drama and complexities of familial love.
Going on to explore its darker sides, Nussbaum dives into the explosion of hits like The Real World, Survivor and the “copaganda” parading as entertainment in Cops. Each of these shows was a pioneering format in the genre that had grim undercurrents in their productions and methods. As she analyzes the rapid ascent of reality TV, Nussbaum leads us to the corrupt culmination of these creations, a reality TV star president, and people who have turned the fad into a perpetual influencer creation machine.
Nussbaum’s history of the genre is thorough, fascinating and surprisingly even-handed. A genre that is easily disparaged, Nussbaum also shows the good side of this boom, the ability of reality television to diversify the characters we see on our TVs and produce wider access to stories told by those who are living them. Cue the Sun! is a wonderfully captured cultural analysis of a genre that has woven its way onto our screens and has created an inescapable cultural shift.
Bless the Daughter Raised By A Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire (2022)
“At parties I point to my body and say
Oh, this old thing? This is where men come to die.”
Warsan Shire’s first full-length poetry collection sharply captures youth, womanhood, the body, grief, family, and migration with elegant prose and distinctive form. Shire is a Somali British poet and the poetry writer for Beyoncé’s Lemonade. In this collection, her poems blend the deeply personal with the universal, the discomfort and beauty of youth, and her own trauma and family relationships. In Home, an incredibly strong poem on migration early in the collection, Shire writes:
I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark.
Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore. No one would
leave home until home is a voice in your ear saying —
leave, run, now. I don’t know what I’ve become.
A visceral poetry collection, Shire’s work is mesmerizing, leaving lingering imagery and creating a singular reading experience. Shire is the author of two previous chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. She is also the author of the film Brave Girl Rising about a young girl living in one of the world’s largest refugee camps.
Hana Zittel is a librarian at the Denver Public Library in addition to being a librarian at the Denver Zine Librarian. She grew up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and pretty much just likes being outside with her pup when she has some free time, and reading, that might have been assumed though.
Check out Hana’s October Book Club in case you missed it, or head to our Explore section to see more of her past reviews.
