This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, a nonfiction selection from the 2025 Adult Summer Reading list written by Pulitzer Prize recipient Emily Nussbaum.
In Cue the Sun!, Nussbaum rewinds the tape all the way back to the dawn of television, highlighting early forays into the reality genre such as Candid Camera and The Gong Show. These are shows that have been normalized by a thin veneer of nostalgia, and Nussbaum expertly introduces them in a way that highlights how unusual this programming was for its time.
It’s when Nussbaum begins probing the pioneering early 1970s reality program An American Family, which was billed as a documentary when it premiered and yet clearly bears more resemblance to today's Kardashians than it does to video journalism, that this book comes alive. The cast of An American Family are as compelling on the page as they must have been on screen, and the chapter about them makes for solid bedrock on which Nussbaum builds the rest of this cultural history.
I lived through the reality television boom of the 2000s, and it’s easy to forget in hindsight just how controversial the reality genre was not so long ago. I found myself realizing cultural demarcation lines in places that I hadn’t noticed before. Shows like The Bachelor and Survivor almost seem milquetoast now, but perhaps they say more about our culture than we notice at first glance? All of this reality television people have scoffed at for decades is actually important, and perhaps it has crept deeper into our lives and influenced our behavior more than any of us have realized.
Check out Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum and other nonfiction picks from the 2025 Adult Summer Reading list at the Sioux City Public Library today!
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