Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

by Emily Nussbaum

It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow—to confuse or infuriate them, to throw them off-balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion.

“What are they gonna do, put me in movie jail? It’s a fake jail!”

“Craig didn’t destroy the family. Craig destroyed himself, and the family’s fine.”

“We didn’t like an idea unless it had a little bit of ‘You can’t put that on television.’ ” —

He had a net worth of about $1.3 million. I said, ‘Does that really count as a multimillionaire?’ And Mikey said, ‘Well, 0.3 is a multiple…’ So we rolled the dice.”

He didn’t have a choice about the host: Moonves had insisted they hire a low-level CBS news anchor named Julie Chen.

After the Survivor fire, Burnett told reporters that if his cameraman had dropped his camera to help the contestant who was getting burned, “I would have fired him on the spot.”

“I was like, ‘You guys, it’s really bad—it’s not, like, funny bad, it’s bad bad.’ To me, it’s like eating the heads of babies.”

a reach