Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV Quotes

“Panicked, Mary stares into the camera, then holds up her hand, making a wiping motion and droning “Erase! Erase!” It’s the primal scene of reality TV stardom, rendered as bleak comedy.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Howard “Sandman” Sims, the “exterminator” from the amateur night at the Apollo Theater, also claimed to have inspired the gong.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Anyone could rebrand a mediocre businessman, some small-timer in need of a glow-up. But taking a failed tycoon who was a heavily in hock and too risky for almost any bank to lend to, a crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show, then finding a way to make him look attractive enough to elect as the president of the United States? That was a coup, even if no one could brag about it.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“The way most WGA writers saw it, the genre was the enemy—a wedge networks used to resist union demands, first in 1988, when the WGA struck for twenty-two weeks, and then again in 2001. If reality laborers suffered, maybe they deserved to.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Scanlon would go on to edit two more seasons of The Apprentice, then got fired, two weeks before Christmas, after a male editor came back from paternity leave.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“cartoonish stereotypes were the industry default.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Frank Berry, then the head of the NAACP, also objected to the show, but from a different angle. The way he saw it, the problem with Cops wasn’t that it worked with the police—it was that cops behaved better on camera than they did in real life, concealing their racism.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Early on, LAPD commander Daryl Gates had said no to Cops filming in his city. Then, in 1991, George Holliday recorded the beating of Rodney King, graphic evidence of police brutality that led to a mass uprising a year later, after the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict. In 1994, the new LAPD police chief, Willie Williams, agreed to let Cops film his officers. “At this juncture, it makes certain sense for the department to receive some positive coverage,” said Gary Greenebaum, the president of the police commission, in the Los Angeles Times.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“The catalyst for these protoreality shows was, as ever, a labor strike:”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Reality shows were strike-breakers, too—the slimy beneficiaries of anti-labor tactics, funded by executives who didn’t want to pay writers and actors.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“one version, gay male creativity is a superpower, healing the world and building bridges. In the other, it’s realpolitik, an awareness of how to “trade up.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“The Bachelor was a more immersive experience, like being trapped inside an erotic terrarium, lulled by floating rose petals. In a world of tacky, The Bachelor was a fancy show.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Langley’s next anti-drug project, the 1985 music video “Stop the Madness”—which you must google immediately—was a for-hire project produced by actor Tim Reid, a member of the Entertainment Industries Council for a Drug-Free Society.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“He and the real estate mogul Donald Trump were supposed to develop a show based on the board game Monopoly, a project that was a model of corporate synergy, uniting three brands—a high-end documentarian, a fake tycoon, and a game that celebrated capitalism.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Jon Kroll, a game show buff who had been raised in a hippie commune, amid what he described as “naked acid parties, hot tubs, and madness”—a perfect résumé for the job.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Who you sympathized with came down to which kind of behavior you found more unstable: the notion of marrying a stranger to get a free week in Vegas or the idea of seeking your soulmate on a Fox game show.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“While Dragnet wasn’t a reality show, it played one on TV,”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“If the ’70s had given off the funk of a stained shag carpet after a basement orgy, the ’80s were more like a plastic slipcovered sofa in the living room, ready for company.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“It’s always the same, that someone was a small kid in Nowheresville, they were gay, they were hiding it, and then they saw Lance and realized they weren’t alone,” Susan told me. Lance recognized his celebrity as a vocation, which meant that he alone among the Louds accepted the Raymonds’ role,”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“pack in its acute focus on female suffering, offering up a unique blend of abjection and Vegas glitz, like The Bachelor crossed with GoFundMe.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV