Emily Nussbaum Tells the True Story of Reality TV

When New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum began working on her book about the origins of reality TV, she says that the deeper she looked “the darker things got.” She found reality stars whose lives were wrecked and “methods of production so ugly they’re hard to look at.” But she says reality TV has also elevated the struggles of ordinary people, taken on historically forbidden subjects like queerness and divorce and pioneered new filmmaking techniques. We talk to Nussbaum about her new book “Cue The Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV,” which she calls her attempt “to describe the reality genre through the voices of the people who built it.”