Passionate, exquisitely told ... With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, Nussbaum... outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent concoction ... Nussbaum walks that line deftly, crafting a book that may be best at reaching those who love reality TV and could be turned off by a more relentlessly critical tome.
Show me a history of reality TV and, honestly, sorry, I don’t much care. But show me a history of reality TV written by Emily Nussbaum...and I am now very interested ... Does not disappoint. This is a smart, thorough, often skeptical history of the genre. It is also witty and extremely entertaining.
Quick-witted, brilliantly written ... Nussbaum offers a treasure trove of anecdotes that seizes our attention like an action sequence, while asking incisive questions about a world increasingly scripted for consumption ... Nussbaum's deft reportage serves her well. She flavors cultural commentary with puns and slang.
The book gives us glimpses into the fraught production of these shows, their divided receptions, and the melancholy biographies of some of the thousands of people who have appeared on these shows ... Nussbaum, as always, makes her case for the seriousness of her subject simply by taking it seriously. Attentive not just to the cultural footprint of the reality show but to its ticky-tacky specificity, Cue the Sun! provides a sometimes grim, occasionally gleeful account of the way that television can not just mirror but also create real life ... Nussbaum sees these human moments as screen moments and describes them with the same care she might otherwise apply to a prestige drama series.
Sweeping ... Nussbaum’s lengthy book occasionally gets mired in the corporate sturm und drang in the C-suites of network executives. Far more interesting are the sections that take us onto the sets ... The book touches only briefly, near the end, on recent efforts to reckon with reality TV.
While many critics have painted reality TV in broad strokes, Nussbaum captures fascinating complexity and nuance ... Despite the book’s strengths, at crucial times the accounts of insiders prove insufficient; context and a critical counterpoint are needed. But in its commitment to handing the mic to the makers, the book eschews outside perspectives ... Despite that blind spot, overall Cue the Sun! is both entertaining and enlightening — full of eye-popping insight and rollicking prose.
Well-researched, somewhat grueling ... Despite Nussbaum’s gleeful fascination with the genre, she also exhaustively exposes how reality TV made producers wealthy while they exploited their casts and the people who worked on their shows, non-union labor all ... Reality TV is by nature ephemeral; in that light, celebrating it is futile. To do so, Nussbaum has to put down people with higher ambitions, and to ignore the way reality TV started as an experiment in exploiting Gen X in a war of all against all.
Readers who have come to rely upon Emily Nussbaum for smart and well-written television criticism will devour Cue the Sun! Reality television is here to stay, and anyone who wants to understand what makes it so appealing, and at times so problematic, will find this book an excellent starting point.
Utilizing extensive, fascinating detail ... A detailed, engaging focus, interpretation, and historical commentary on the evolution and reception of reality shows. A must-read for social scientists and reality TV aficionados.
Nussbaum serves as a helpful guide to reality TV’s past and present, peppering Cue the Sun! with well-researched details, lively anecdotes, and primary-source accounts of the genre’s checkered development across decades ... points to not only the ways that reality television has been with us far longer than we’d think but also the ways that the subjectivity of the present is 'reality-televisual' ... Nussbaum’s history of reality television not only shows us how a genre becomes a genre but also how reality TV has become 'a shared language, a way to talk about politics and identity, emotion and ethics, what was fair and what was real.' Cue the sun, then—we’re all angling for our 15 minutes of fame under it.
