‘F*cking With Reality’: Inside the Rise of TV’s Guiltiest Pleasure
Fair or not, “reality television” is still that grungy catch-all term, television’s version of Circus Circus compared to “Prestige TV’s” Bellagio. Circus Circus survives in Las Vegas by serving a specific audience, and the hustling, striving, lying, scheming stars and creators of reality programming do the same.
And no book has better illuminated more than eight decades of the groundbreaking genre’s fun, infuriating, and poignant creation until the arrival this week of Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV, by former New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum.
“This is a scrappy group of hardworking people who are funny and provocative, and part of this colorful, wild subculture,” Nussbaum tells The Daily Beast. “A lot of people want to wash their hands of it. Oh ‘reality,’ it’s shocking, it’s titillating, who cares.”