Cue the Sun!
A review of

Cue the Sun!

The Invention of Reality TV

Emily Nussbaum • Random House • 2024
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Mirror to the World

by David Meyer

Critic Emily Nussbaum offers a deep, hilarious, insightful plunge into America’s subconscious: reality TV.

Essayist and critic Emily Nussbaum – a Pulitzer Prize winner who also wrote I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution – traces reality TV’s evolution from tawdry spectacle to cultural dominance, from voyeurism to entertainment.

Life As Spectacle

Reality programming began in the radio era, with Candid Microphone, which evolved into Candid Camera. Audiences proved to love technology that inserts itself into people’s lives, searching for something “authentic, buried inside something fake.”

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