Cue the Sun! puts this in a new perspective. Despite Nussbaum’s gleeful fascination with the genre, she also exhaustively exposes how reality TV made producers wealthy while they exploited their casts and the people who worked on their shows, non-union labor all. The company I worked for was run the same way. What reality TV did was inscribe this system into a particular form of television, combining the way its workers were exploited with the way its cast members were taken advantage of on camera and off, and then after the shows were over. Reality TV has always been more about reunions than unions.
Throughout the book, Nussbaum brings up the way people on these series got temporarily famous without making much money, and how it led to “trauma-bonding” between them the same way it did between the lower-level employees behind the scenes. In Nussbaum’s account, working on and being on The Bachelor in particular seemed pretty close to date rape. As with the traumatized, the lives of the people who appear on these shows tend not to go well later. The lower reaches of entertainment news are still filled every day with their early deaths and suicides, their jail sentences and broken marriages, and the failing businesses they start in order to capitalize on what they thought was fame. Two of the cast members of Vanderpump Rules have just opened a sandwich shop, which on the ladder of success is a few rungs down from a sexy unique restaurant.
Mark Burnett, of course, got bigger and bigger until, along with Jeff Zucker and NBCUniversal, he got Donald Trump elected president. Cue the Sun! leaves the impression that had The Apprentice not happened, Nussbaum would have a sunnier view of reality TV, no matter how ethically challenged and morally suspect the rest of it was.
Even in the case of Trump, she lets television off the hook. We all had a hand in Trump’s election, she concludes. “Everyone ignored the danger Trump posed to the country, because he was too good for business,” Nussbaum writes, conflating the TV industry with its viewers. She lets us know that Random House, the publisher of Cue the Sun!, her own book, publishes The Art of the Deal, Trump’s business memoir. If she and Random House are not innocent, who is?