Cue The Sun! by Emily Nussbaum

I did not love this book but I think it is because while the author does a bang up job of covering the unexpectedly lengthy history of reality TV, that the genre just doesn't much work for me. Unless it is the Great British Bake Off, in which case I am all in. What makes us look at the wide range of shows we call “reality TV” and say they have more in common than they do differences? This book is here to answer that question. A reasonable facsimile of reality television has been with us for a long time—about as long as the TV set has been a mainstay of the American living room. The story of its invention, then, is in part the story of how television workers were making the forerunners of reality TV long before anyone would call it that, and how at every step along the way, innovation was entangled with ambivalence, uncertainty, and, sometimes, exploitation. The author serves as a knowledgeable guide to reality TV’s past and present, peppering Cue the Sun! with well-researched details, lively anecdotes, and primary-source accounts of the genre’s checkered development across decades. As she demonstrates, reality television as we know it today is the product of a rich stew of influences, including Queen for a Day’s depictions of female complaints and the “Warholian coldness” of Allen Funt’s prank show Candid Camera in the 1940s, An American Family’s cinema verité–family soap hybrid and Chuck Barris’s provocative game shows in the 1970s, and COPS and America’s Funniest Home Videos’ clip-show formats predicated on real-life stakes in the 1980s and ’90s. No wonder, then, that the descendants of such varied programs may not look related at first glance. All of this leads up to the modern reality show, whereby strangers are filmed in an apartment they share or on a deserted island they have been left on, and one by one they are voted off. As you can imagine, there is a very dark underside to it all, and we are not spared any of those details. This will not make you want to revisit those shows, so beware.