Cue the Sun! — Dinaburg Writes

by Emily Nussbaum

On the very first page, Cue the Sun! nearly lost me. When I chose the book, my posture was already that I was not the target audience–I do not particularly love reality TV outside of Netflix’s The Circle–but I do like reading about how economic pressures shape how modern fables are created, and I quite like the author. Image my surprise when the parasocial bond I formed from years of reading The New Yorker was tested on the very first page:

Now and then, there was a prestige blockbuster like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds–a scripted sci-fi drama so realistic listeners freaked out, convinced that aliens were invading the Earth, for real.

This is basically not true. It is known—about as sure as we can be for proving the veracity of things that happened 80 years ago as ephemera on the radio—that War of the Worlds had a tiny audience that knew it was a radio play:

Few listeners, small reaction, yet explosive propaganda. Factoring in where this narrative arose from–newspapers, those barons of printed words, threatened by an emerging news-media format–and it shakes out that if your livelihood depended on discrediting a new form of dissemination, you’d want to underscore the unreliability of radio, too. “It’s not to be trusted: the masses, they are gullible. They must not have access to such programs else society itself is in danger.” And so forth.

So I pocketed this little bump in my trust levels for Cue the Sun! and kept going. I knew about the apocrypha surrounding War of the Worlds, but next to nothing about the reality TV (outside of the crush I had at eighteen on Jenna from Survivor based solely on seeing her once during the series premiere, which I watched with my friends while we crashed at someone’s stepmom’s house to kick off our High School graduation trip).

it’s odd that goat to most people means “greatest of all time” but in Survivor parlance it is like, a bad thing. very contronymy.

Perhaps it was the the immersive levels of humbug (not a Dickensian invention but a real word that meant fakery or exaggeration, thus ol’ Scrooge is really saying “Christmas? That’s not a thing.”) I experienced throughout the book, but by the time I looped back around to read my notes and write about the book, I was startled that my level of frustration for the author’s War of the Worlds exploit was basically zero. In fact, looking at it now, I see a little bit of Barnum in the author herself:

“Darnell laid out his strategy, which was pure Barnum: If they didn’t say the footage was real, nobody could call it a lie…. “My hats are off to the people who created it or the poor alien who is dead on the table.”

It says, “Listeners freaked out,” not “It created a national crisis that threatened the State.” Sure, even if there were 10 listeners, one or two might have believed it. Points to the author for asking forgiveness, not permission, and for not breaking kayfabe.

Unlike most of my reviews, which I write so I can read my own thoughts about a book five years down the road (Snow Crash, I’m looking at you), I don’t know what I’ll want to know about Cue the Sun! in the future. It’s a big recent book from a well-known author; I read it kind of quickly (which is an of itself a piece of metadata that a savvy potential “consumer” might realize—either it’s pretty breezy or I was really into it)! It got mentioned in The New Yorker! I am a big The New Yorker guy—which I offer up way too often—but I do pick up a large number of book recommendations from their pages. To me, it’s an interesting balancing act: reading a weekly magazine by necessity overrides time that could be dedicated to reading books, so New Yorker subscribers are probably reading fewer books overall but perhaps more interested in the books they do select? Would that mean advertising in magazines would be helpful, or are you just preaching to the choir (and what choir already has a full schedule)? When I read “Going Clear”—which feels like it has the same sort of imprimatur as Cue the Sun!—I was still a part of the New York Bar Association’s Committee on Media Law, which let me sneak around fancy offices like ABC, HBO, and The New Yorker itself. A person cited near the back of that book, who was on the committee (with far more reason than I) mentioned that many of her colleges pointed out her brush with stardom, which surprised her: People were actually reading the whole book!

Many more people like reality TV than are invested in learning about Scientology. I…think. Is this book going to be big? I really don’t know. Will this book have broad interest and thus I might get some spillover traffic from people poorly searching the internet for the answer as to whether or not they should read it? Only time and squarespace metrics will tell.

Because, like, why read Cue the Sun!? Did it put anything into grand perspective? Did it change the way I felt about any big moments in TV programming? Did it make me more or less likely to watch reality TV going forward? Not really, no. It’s just sort of an interesting way to spend your time. The author is talented, with fun sentences like, “Every time a free AOL disc frisbeed into someone’s mailbox, it felt like an invitation to dial in, then confess, anonymously, to strangers. Mixing the internet with reality TV was the speedball of pop culture.” I am not implying the book is mindless junkfood in a simple parallel to the frequent label that is tritely applied to reality programming. Just that the book is structured in a comprehensive and clear way—it does not have a “twist” or “reveal” like it would if it were aping its subject matter, for which I was probably subconsciously braced.

The closest it comes from breaking out of its, “Here’s what was happening during this creation of this show” format was a bit of a crafted arc to the grand narrative, as it culminates in The Apprentice. I assume this is to give Reality TV more capital-I Impact: from the morass of Reality TV rose the spectre of Trumpism–how ironic that “reality” crafted a persona of competence that impacted the actual world. But this sort of “character on the screen was talented, so real person can now be President” storyline is a rerun of Reagan’s America. Take this excerpt from the pages of The New Yorker, about a discussion of Reagan and his Iran-Contra deal–“Holding Reagan accountable felt like a category error, like trying to convict a squirrel of trespassing”—and tell me the modern remake isn’t just the same script with a more intentionally malevolent star. The line between who someone plays on TV and who they are in real life should be easy to remember, but it’s not. If you learn nothing else from this book, you’ll probably remember that.

There are some cool facts, too.

The voice of Daria from Daria was in the pilot of The Real World, which is amazing to me but way way more because of Daria than because of The Real World (I’d like to order one book about Daria, please):

In the 1991 pilot for The Real World, Tracy Grandstaff, a twenty-two year-old MTV employee who had seen a flyer in the break room, then applied as a lark…would go on to have a big career at MTV, landing a second role on an iconic series. She became the deadpan voice of Daria, the ultimate Gen X cynic, on the eponymous animated show.

The other little bon mots–the bits I love about non-fiction–centered around generic structural issues of filming reality TV: get ‘em drunk, keep ‘em isolated, knock ‘em off balance, and then film it:

The more trusting (or drunk or exhausted) the participants were, the more likely it was that they’d ultimately crack, releasing a flood of feeling that couldn’t be faked. This was most obvious on prank shows back to Candid Camera, but if you looked at things from a certain angle, all reality shows looked like prank shows.

Reductionist though it may be, that’s kind of it.

I feel at a little bit of a loss. The book was a smooth surface, with little to grip onto or pull apart. “Slickly produced,” you might say. It felt so breezy, but not in a mind-numbing mirror to reality TV but in the sense of, “Oh, structuring a book this way makes so much sense, I’m not sure how else it could be done.” It’s mostly chronological, but each chapter really digs down into one show, giving you a mini-storyline within the larger grand arc of reality programming. I wish I could explain the allure of this book, but like just “throwing on” Survivor or whatever when you don’t feel like “choosing” a new show to watch, picking up Cue the Sun! when you don’t know what else to read is a pretty good way to pass the time.