Amna Nawaz:
… and arguably reshaped American politics.
A new book by “New Yorker” staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Emily Nussbaum, “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV,” traces the history of this now-ubiquitous genre.
I recently sat down with Nussbaum and asked her why she started thinking about writing this book 20 years ago.
Emily Nussbaum, Author, “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV”: It was because I was obsessed with watching the first season of “Big Brother” in the United States on video streaming, which was very new at that time.
I had also been very into “The Real World” and I was fascinated by what seemed like an entirely new genre that was bubbling up, like a new industry. So I wanted to write a nonfiction book about this kind of growth of a new Hollywood.
So when I got to it years later, I started looking into the history of the genre, and I assumed, frankly, the way that I had at the time that it was a modern phenomenon. And only once I started doing research did I realize that there was a real back history to reality television, and that’s where this book came from.
It’s an origin story.
