EPISODE 596 / Cue the Sun!

Back in 2003, Emily Nussbaum developed a covert guilty pleasure: she started watching the streaming 24-hour feeds of the first season of Big Brother in the U.S. Big Brother is a reality television show that debuted in the US in the year 2000. If you’ve never seen it, the show is basically about a group of people who are isolated in a house that’s under constant surveillance, and one contestant gets voted out each week. For Emily it was a sort of comfort watch.

In the early 2000s, reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor were beginning to conquer network and cable television. Nussbaum was one of millions of Americans submitting to the unscripted TV takeover. At the time, Nussbaum was a freelance writer in search of a book idea. And she had the thought that maybe she could turn her slightly cringey habit into a book all about reality TV. “…And I said this to this friend of mine,” recounts Nussbaum, “and he said, well, you better write that fast. And his idea was, this is a gimmick. This is a trend, and it’s going to die within a very short time. And by the time you write a book on it, it’ll be gone.”

Clearly, that prediction did not come to pass. Twenty some years later, Emily Nussbaum did write that book, and it’s called Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV. It traces the early history of this controversial form of entertainment, its decades-long creation process, how it shapes our world, and why – love it or hate it – you should probably understand reality television.

click here to see the original webpage on the brilliant 99% invisible website

Family photo of the Louds, who were the subject of a 12 part television documentary, "An American Family", PBS-Public Broadcasting System - eBay item photo front photo back Public Domain