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To Be Real: On Emily Nussbaum’s “Cue the Sun”
Olivia Stowell reviews Emily Nussbaum’s “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV.”...
To name a few of the low points that Nussbaum details: Barris’s Gong Show(1976–89) featured such acts as a pair of teenage girls “licking and sucking Popsicles in silence” for almost two minutes, An American Family(1973) producer Craig Gilbert insisted that Pat Loud (the mother of the titular family) let cameras film her telling her brother that she planned to divorce her husband, and The Real World co-director Alan Cohn followed cast members home from a blind date and told them “he wasn’t going to leave until they kissed.” In an interview with Nussbaum, MTV director Jim Jones jokingly referred to that kiss ultimatum as “the original sin of reality television.” CBS would be able to cast a contestant to represent every type of person—rural, urban, Black, white, rich, poor, young, old—pulling in youthful viewers without alienating the AARP crowd.”This analysis of Survivor ’s approach to TV demographics—often replicated across other game-documentary programs—reflects reality television’s entanglement with industry practice and commercial, corporate logics. Through its dependence upon real people being willing to offer up their lives to the cameras and to the audience, reality TV has collapsed seemingly distinct boundaries—between the commercial and pedagogical, the authentic and artificial—and helped produce the norms that govern contemporary popular culture in the process.
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