Cue the Sun!

Nussbaum traces reality TV's roots back further than the genre's Real World-era origin story, connecting Allen Funt's hidden-camera stunts and 1970s documentary experiments like An American Family to the Real Housewives and The Apprentice decades later. Her case is that the genre's ethical murkiness, its blurred line between manipulation and authenticity, was baked in from the start rather than a corruption that crept in later. Nussbaum, a longtime television critic, resists treating reality TV as simply lowbrow spectacle, instead reading it as a genuinely innovative and unstable form whose creators were often as confused about what they were making as viewers were about what they were watching. The chapter on The Apprentice lands with obvious political weight, tracing a direct line from a ratings gimmick to a presidency. It's cultural history that takes its subject's contradictions seriously rather than mocking them.