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Cue the Sunset: The Rise and Fall of Reality TV

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Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV, published in late June, is a riveting, rollicking, and frequently shocking history of reality TV. Nussbaum’s deep dive into the genre’s occasionally wildly experimental, usually carefully calculated, and often callously exploitative blend of authenticity and fakery transports readers back well before MTV’s The Real World and even the 1973 PBS 12-part drama An American Family to the days before TV itself. She traces the storyline back to Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone, which delivered the same sort of “cruel carnival” of humiliating pranks over the radio in the 1940s that would later make the jump to TV as Candid Camera.

The book draws its title from the memorable closing scene of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) when Truman, unwitting subject of a 24/7 reality TV drama since birth, becomes aware of his predicament and attempts to flee his artificial world under cover of darkness. As show creator and director Ed Harris throws one obstacle after another in Truman’s path, he bellows to his crew, “Cue the sun!” Then he warns his wayward charge, “There’s no more truth out there than in the world I created for you.”

Decades into the modern era of reality TV that kicked off with The Real World in 1992 and hit its commercial stride eight years later with Survivor, it’s safe to say that all of the many layers of artifice underpinning reality shows, their manufactured challenges and plotlines, the ways some cast members cannily capitalize on the shows to build careers and others fall naively into the traps show creators set for them, are well-exposed by now.

Thus it can be jarring to read that the Real World era of reality shows were launched by a renegade mix of Gen X idealists and cynics. The former group believed the new genre could inject some truth and authenticity into TV’s fiction-dominated world, while the latter saw a big payday in dumbing down and trashing up cinema verité for kids raised on MTV. 

And though it’s hard to dispute the fact that the cynics won out, it’s also foolish even for the genre’s legions of detractors to deny reality TV’s enormous and enduring impact on media and culture. From its inception, reality TV upended the industry's established and hard-won labor structure: guild-affiliated writer- and actor-free, reality TV was always a strikebreaker’s dream and a worker’s nightmare. Even in the 2023 strike, the WGA acknowledged that there was “little it could do, when it came to resolving the problem of reality labor.”

Nussbaum argues that reality TV’s capacity to fashion real-world-shaping fraud peaked with the Trump-centered The Apprentice, which took “a failed tycoon who was heavily in hock and too risky for almost any bank to lend to, a crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show, then [found] a way to make him look attractive enough to elect as the president of the United States.” 

As Mike Fleiss, creator of The Bachelor, conceded to Nussbaum, “All that talk about the decline of Western civilization and the sign of the apocalypse? It turned out to be true.”

Though Cue the Sun reads more like a biography than an obituary, the book lands as reality TV appears to be collapsing while the scripted side of the business also contracts. More than one pundit has proclaimed reality TV's demise at the hands of TikTok, the “now everyone grows up on video” platform that reality television prefigured. Appropriately, Patrick Caligiuri, producer of some of reality TV’s most successful shows—Big Brother, The Amazing Race, Naked and Afraid—took to TikTok and LinkedIn to declare “Reality TV is dead.” 

Of course, unscripted shows aren't going away, even if they're leaving “TV.” But this may indeed be the end of the line for producers and profiteers who have made careers and fortunes in the genre as we’ve known it. Or maybe they’re just crafting another rising-from-the-ashes storyline. I wouldn’t put it past them.

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