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A new book tackles the splendor and squalor of reality TV 

Critic Emily Nussbaum makes the case for the guilty pleasure as an art form.

Chris Harrison, Peter Weber, and Madison Prewett on The Bachelor‘s season 24 finale in 2020.

In that regard, Cue The Sun! is a required text for anyone who wants to understand how reality TV — or as Nussbaum calls it, “dirty documentary” — arrived at its current tipping point. The almost 400-page book includes interviews with former reality television participants, producers, editors, and assistants. It’s a riveting chronicle of the low-budget, “guilty pleasure” genre, beginning in the 1940s and concluding in the early 2000s with the truly culture-shifting program, The Apprentice. What Cue The Sun! ultimately exposes is the paradoxical and queasy nature of reality TV, a boundary-pushing artform that often relies on a lot of depravity to keep the wheels turning.

The most riveting chapter in Nussbaum’s book focuses on the lore of the long-running CBS hit Survivor, starting with its odd beginnings as a Scottish radio experiment. This inspired the controversial Swedish television show Expedition: Robinson, which premiered in 1997 and raised serious ethical questions after the series’ first eliminated contestant committed suicide. Undeterred by this incident, producer Mark Burnett brought the series to America in 2000 in the form of Survivor.

“I wasn’t that interested in Survivor when I started the book,” says Nussbaum. “But by the time I finished writing about it, I was convinced that the Survivor format was an invention on the level of the telephone or the car.”

It was a few years after the arrival of Survivor that Nussbaum felt inspired to write a book. In 2003, she could feel reality TV becoming its own sort of movement, like the New Hollywood era.

“I discovered reality TV had roots all the way back to World War II on radio,” she says. “There was already a burst of programming featuring regular people and the moral outrage that always accompanied it.”

Those programs included the radio show Candid Microphone, which premiered in 1947, and its televised equivalent Candid Camera, which aired the following year. Both series were created and hosted by pioneering prankster Allen Funt. His elaborate tricks on his oblivious subjects using hidden cameras precedes the work of “reality auteurs” like Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen.

While modern docu-comedies like The Rehearsal and Jury Duty have been described as experimental “prestige” takes on the unscripted genre, Nussbaum presents these types of shows as the purest form of reality TV, a style that prevailed before audiences’ demands for salaciousness and melodrama made it a lot more complicated.

She draws similar parallels between the ’60s game show Queen For A Day and 1970s PBS docuseries An American Family with modern programs like Real Housewives and Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Both shows gave TV its first taste of melodramatic, slice-of-life reality programs. On Queen For A Day, women would essentially compete for who had the worst life in order to win prizes, like household appliances. The image of host Jack Bailey surrounded by a group of women trading in — and oftentimes, exaggerating — their personal woes for the audience’s sympathy feels reminiscent of a Real Housewives reunion.