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4.07 AVERAGE
4.07 AVERAGE
Very entertaining and interesting! There is so much detail and behind the scenes information that you don’t realize while you’re watching the show.
It was fascinating listening to the beginnings of this genre and how it evolved. Though I enjoyed the history of it decades before I was born, I was even more engaged when shows I had more of a memory of were discussed.
It was fascinating listening to the beginnings of this genre and how it evolved. Though I enjoyed the history of it decades before I was born, I was even more engaged when shows I had more of a memory of were discussed.
informative
medium-paced
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Interesting and informative. The author links reality tv to the trump presidency. Some of the stories along the way are horrifying, some a funny. One thing that stuck out to me was she described a firefighter killed on 9/11 as being killed “while defending the twin towers”. They were trying to help people and to see if they could put out the fire, not really defending.
informative
medium-paced
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Whoever took the book out of the library before me read the chapter on The Apprentice with Cheeto dust on their hands. The irony is not lost on me.
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
A really comprehensive history of the inception and history of reality television (and its cultural media implications.)
funny
informative
fast-paced
Remarkably written and studiously researched. Cue The Sun tells the story of the genre of voyeurism in the full context of American history. Really, really well done and supremely unsettling.
this was really good but I’m ready to read something else now, would definitely recommend this though
I went into Cue the Sun as someone who doesn’t watch reality TV but loves dissecting the cultural machine behind it. My YouTube algorithm knows this all too well, it’s all video essays and retrospective deep-dives. So this book, in theory, should’ve been a slam dunk for me. And to be fair, Emily Nussbaum delivers a deeply researched, impressively comprehensive look at how reality TV came to be what it is today. The writing is smart (which, Pulitzer Prize winner, sure), and the behind-the-scenes anecdotes add some new context. But despite all that, I found it surprisingly tough to stay engaged. Some chapters absolutely had me, while others felt more like required reading. It’s not that the content was bad... it just didn’t feel like it wanted to be fun, and I kind of needed it to be.
Structurally, the book starts strong, laying a foundation for the early days of reality TV with a lot of care and detail... maybe too much detail. There were long stretches that felt like someone was explaining the rules of a 2003 Fox reality show I’d never heard of, in painstaking depth. Meanwhile, major cultural touchstones (Project Runway, Survivor, The Kardashians) were almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it summaries in the final chapters, which felt oddly rushed given their impact. I wanted more analysis and a little more punch behind the facts, but still, it’s a valuable and impressively constructed piece of media history. Just maybe not the pop culture page-turner I’d hoped for.
Structurally, the book starts strong, laying a foundation for the early days of reality TV with a lot of care and detail... maybe too much detail. There were long stretches that felt like someone was explaining the rules of a 2003 Fox reality show I’d never heard of, in painstaking depth. Meanwhile, major cultural touchstones (Project Runway, Survivor, The Kardashians) were almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it summaries in the final chapters, which felt oddly rushed given their impact. I wanted more analysis and a little more punch behind the facts, but still, it’s a valuable and impressively constructed piece of media history. Just maybe not the pop culture page-turner I’d hoped for.