Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV
Emily Nussbaum
Random House, 2024

If, after a decade of researching the Jewish question, you had revealed to me that Jews largely invented the reality television genre, my reaction would hardly be one of surprise. Given Jewish overrepresentation in the television industry overall and the altogether sordid and sleazy nature of reality TV, it seems almost a given to assume that the same group of people who played pioneering roles in the world of pornography would also have birthed the genre that gave us bottom of the barrel shows like Jersey Shore and Love Island.

As a result, I was far from shocked when the Jewish names came thick and fast as I read through Cue the Sun!, television critic at The New Yorker Emily Nussbaum’s newly released history of reality television. Cue the Sun! chronicles the explosive cultural impact of what was always television’s least respected genre, from its early pioneers in the radio industry up until the election of a reality television star as president of the United States of America. Utilising interviews with key players in the industry and uncovering the threads of influence that link seemingly disparate television shows together, Nussbaum has given us another entry in the non-fiction genre I like to call the ‘inadvertent Jew-exposé.’ The type of history book which documents a stunning variety of Jewish characters across its narrative arc, but altogether fails (or refuses) to identify them as Jewish or offer any type of analysis of the Jewish nature of their endeavours and the impact that their Jewish identity may have had on their decision making.

Where Cue the Sun! did surprise me was how sexually suggestive, exploitative, voyeuristic and taboo breaking the precursors to the genre were, even as early the 1940s. It wasn’t that reality television was a once pleasant type of cheaply produced programming that devolved as the tastes of general audiences shifted. An underlying darkness marked by a willingness to provoke and mistreat, a pathologisation of the nuclear family, and a hostility to Christian cultural mores was present from the very beginning. A fact that perhaps can only be explained by the identity of the people who birthed it. As recounted in Cue the Sun!, these Jewish pioneers – Allen Funt, Chuck Barris, Craig Gilbert – and their latter-day successors like Mike Fleiss and Lauren Zalaznik, gave the world a genre that there are plenty of reasons to hate, but one that no-one can now ignore.

Candid Cameras

Pinning down what reality television actually is is a difficult task, even a quarter of a century after the genre first came of age in the 1990s. Nussbaum comes up with the term “dirty documentary”, television shows that merge the technique of the documentary filmmaker with commercialism or other forms of story-telling that place a premium on entertainment over truthfulness. As Chapter 1 details, reality television has its origins in the audience participation genre of American radio in the 1930s and 1940s, where ordinary people would be invited on to programs as guests or contestants. Such radio programs were dime-a-dozen during the era and considered vulgar by respectable society who had an instinctual reaction against attention seeking and the spectacle of a public confessional. Nussbaum highlights The Original Good Will Hour as one of the earliest such examples, where Jewish radio host Lester Kroll played the character of ‘John J. Anthony’, a marriage counsellor who gave relationship advice and encouraged his guests to vent and confess on air.

Nussbaum identifies four ‘streams’ or varieties of broadcast entertainment that would eventually combine to create the modern genre. The oldest (and arguably least subversive) were the game shows or talent shows, primarily quizzes and other such contests, with physical competitions also becoming popular once the age of television dawned. Whilst often critiqued for their tawdriness and not without major scandal, such shows were limited by the audio-visual technology of the day and still lacked the necessary innovations to be described as reality television in the sense we would understand it now. The man who provided two of the most important innovations, and the undoubted inventor of the prank show – the second stream – was Allen Funt.

Born to a Russian-Jewish family in New York, Funt worked as a radio producer for the US army during World War Two. Realising that the latest generation of microphones were now small and discreet enough that they could be hidden without being discovered by an unwitting participant, Funt came up with the idea for a radio program that hoped to capture insights into people’s hidden behaviours. After a series of failed attempts at secretly recording conversations, which resulted in nothing more than inane chit-chat about daily life, Funt stumbled on the secret ingredient — the act of provocation.

Whilst installing a microphone in a dentist’s operatory, a patient walked in and mistook Funt for the dentist, setting herself down on the chair for treatment. Funt rolled with the mistake and recorded the shocked reaction of the patient, informed that her wisdom teeth were inexplicably missing. As Nussbaum notes:

“It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow – to confuse or irritate them, to throw them off balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion…A Reality host needed to do more than simply ask questions. He… had to be a provocateur, willing to engineer situations and heighten drama.”

The resulting radio program created by Funt in 1947, Candid Microphone, which jumped to television in 1950 as Candid Camera, developed the staple elements of the hidden camera setup as well as the producer-provocateur who moulds the scenario. Recording equipment could be set up almost anywhere to capture a reaction creatively provoked by Funt’s team. Classic pranks from Candid Camera include a sketch on the street involving a man carrying a suitcase which had another man stuffed inside, with passers-by trying to free him after hearing the calls for help, or students at an elite high school being given the results of career aptitude tests telling them they were destined to be bricklayers.

Candid Camera was considered a radical and “deeply destabilizing experiment” in its day .” Who knew where one of these newfangled hidden cameras could be set up to secretly record your reactions? Its legacy is evident in every prank-style show broadcast since then (and indeed in every reality show), shows like Punk’d or character-driven versions like Sascha Baron Cohen’s assortment of ethnic personas. Shows which disguise callousness or even cruelty towards an unsuspecting participant with the cover of humour. The success of Candid Camera also attracted the attention of social scientists of all stripes, intrigued by the behavioural revelations.

Borderline exploitative, Candid Camera relied on Funt and his crew extracting release signatures from the unsuspecting participants, often by aggressively waving enough cash under their noses until they gave in. Once the novelty of Candid Camera wore off in the late 60s, Funt turned pornographic, with an X-rated version called What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? Filled with nudity and vulgar sexual questioning, the film hits it provocative peak with a prank involving an interracial couple kissing in public (a white woman and a black man) in front of a group of elderly people.

Of Dates and Divorces

Moving on from Allen Funt, Chapters 2 and 3 chart the precursors of the other two streams of reality television, the dating show and the real-life soap opera. The modern dating show, of which the examples are too many to count, is the creation of television producer Chuck Barris. In the mid 1960’s Barris took the basic concept of televised dating and sexed up with music, a bright and colourful set, and the allowances in candour afforded to him by the ongoing sexual revolution. The Dating Show, which originally aired in 1965 on ABC, prodded its contestants with titillating and sexually suggestive questions and soon became a prime time hit. Multiple follow-up game shows developed by Chuck Barris Productions — most famously The Newlywed Game and the anti-talent show The Gong Show – only became trashier, culminating in 3s a Crowd in 1979. The format was a contest between a husband’s wife and his secretary, each answering questions to see who knew the man better, with the clear implication of adultery. The show was eviscerated in the press for its sexism and cancelled within a year.

The real-life soap opera, a now ubiquitous type of television featuring non-actors in every setting known to man owes its birth to Craig Gilbert. Modern variants cover everything from pregnant teenagers, pawn shop owners, celebrity families and wife-swapping households, but the original outing involved a solitary camera and a suburban family in California. Gilbert’s creation, An American Family, was broadcast on PBS in 1973, and launched the Loud family as the first reality stars, the original Kardashians.

Like Allen Funt, Gilbert envisioned his creation as a noble undertaking, a documentary that captured generational change and the American family in its natural habitat, like an anthropologist studying a far-flung tribal society. Gilbert was undoubtedly inspired by Margaret Mead, directing and producing Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal, a 1968 television special which saw Mead return to the New Guinean village which formed the basis of her research in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Using the voyeuristic cinema verité style of filmmaking (again a Jewish invention, originating with Dziga Vertov – born David Abelevich Kaufman – and French born filmmaker Edgar Nahoum) Gilbert’s crew followed the Loud family in their daily life across the span of seven months. Eldest son Lance Loud, a flamboyant gay man, became a breakout star and LGBT icon. The real star of the show however was Patricia Loud as the empowered ‘real housewife’ who initiated an on-screen divorce against her husband Bill.

When husband-and-wife duo Alan and Susan Raymond, the two-person film crew who became almost part of the family, began to feel their camera was peering too deeply into the Loud’s lives, too many ethical boundaries being crossed, Gilbert insisted they press on. An ethical filmmaker would see divorce and family breakup as fragile and private moments not fit for broadcasting, where the presence of the camera could well destroy any chance at rehabilitating the marriage. Gilbert instead saw compelling television. Gilbert knew he needed a ‘confession scene’ of Pat explaining her decision in order to tie the story together, a scene that she was unwilling to allow cameras to witness. Eventually he convinced an intoxicated Pat to let him film a conversation with her brother where she laid out her reasons for ending the marriage in intimate detail, describing Bill’s affairs with other women.

An American Family attracted around 10 million viewers per episode, drawn in by the level of intimacy never before seen on television, and turned the Louds into household names. The series was portrayed as an indictment of marriage and the nuclear family, a narrative the series itself leant into with the choice of font for the word ‘family’ in the title sequence, as if to imply a family cracking and falling apart. The Loud family themselves, lambasted as vapid and self-obsessed by critics, felt betrayed and turned against Craig Gilbert. Ultimately the series raised the question, how real is reality when the camera is rolling? Modern audiences are under no illusions as to the level of fakery and exaggeration present in the performative antics of the Kardashian family. For 1970s audiences, these were questions encountered for the first time.

The Real World

As Nussbaum tells it in Chapter 4, a lull set over television during the 1980s, a decade where studios dialled back on risky and avant-garde productions. TV viewers settled into the safety of daytime talk shows and scandal-free audience participation outfits, hits like Real People or The Peoples Court (both gentile-produced) that avoided the producer-provocateur dynamic. The prolonged Writers Guild strike in 1988, which deprived Hollywood of creative ideas, spurred the launch of two further proto-reality shows which stood the test of time. The Fox series Cops, which trailed real police officers and ambushed criminals with a candid camera, and America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFHV), a mail-in clip show created by Jewish producer Vincent Di Bona. It was a show broadcast on MTV of all places which began to coalesce these earlier streams and launched reality television as a distinct genre.

MTV’s The Real World, what could then still be labelled an unscripted soap opera, aired in 1992 and contained many of the recognisable elements of modern reality television; a diverse cast of characters living together in one house, the ‘confession booth’ for giving commentary and airing grievances, and the all-overseeing producers filming and deliberately provoking the cast for an on-screen reaction. Co-created by soap opera veteran Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, with various Jews involved at the directing, editing and executive levels, the long-running series was directly inspired by An American Family.

The first season gathered seven young Americans from across the country in a New York loft, filming their daily life and the inevitable conflicts that confining together a group of diverse personalities will eventually produce. Prodded on by the crew, the series covered all the hot button ‘real world’ issues of the day; Rodney King and racism, drug use and abortion, sexuality and ‘coming out’. Bunim/Murray Productions continued the Real World format throughout the 1990s, the company later producing celeb-reality shows The Simple Life starring Paris Hilton and mega-hit Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Chapter 6 turns to the Fox network, at the time trying to market itself as a riskier broadcaster, and the soon-to-be reality kingmakers Mike Darnell and Mike Fleiss. The creative duo, the former going on to create the singing contest American Idol, the latter the dating show The Bachelor, worked together on found footage clip shows with titles like Shocking Behaviour Captured on Camera, rip-offs of AFHV. In the year 2000, they created Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, a gimmicky production that spliced together a quiz show with a Barry Diller-esque dating show. The on-screen engagement of two strangers who had barely set eyes on each other before the question “Will you marry me?” was uttered would end up being only the first in a now long line of marriage-themed shows that have dragged the institution of marriage into the mud.

Reality Goes Mainstream

Chapters 7 through 9 of Cue the Sun! sag under the weight of a 100-page slog that extensively details the origins of the ratings hits Big Brother (first US broadcast 2001) and Survivor (first broadcast 2000), followed by a blow-by-blow account of the highlights of the first seasons of each show. Originally aired in the Netherlands, CBS executives imported its Dutch creators to mastermind the first season of US Big Brother. More social experiment than soap opera, Big Brother debuted to a less than stellar ratings result. A second season purged of Europeans was overseen by Arnold Shapiro, Alison Grodner and Lisa Levenson, who sexed up production and turned up the dial on debauchery to the desired ratings effect.

Now firmly in the 21^st century, Nussman’s narrative struggles to keep pace with the explosion of reality television programs in the US and beyond that followed in the wake of Survivor and Big Brother. The formula now established and the genre a veritable success story, producers were empowered to pitch shows to the major networks at their hearts content. No idea was too wild, trashy or sexually provocative for consideration. In fact, that clearly became the draw card. The oftentimes hapless participants rarely understood what they were getting themselves into, and if they objected, all the networks had to do was show them the fine print and where they willingly signed away on the dotted line.

Bachelor Nation, as the The Bachelor franchise (first season broadcast in 2002) would eventually come to term itself, grew into a global empire under the production team of Mark Fleiss and Lisa Levenson. According to Nussbaum, The Bachelor popularised the editing trick known as the ‘Frankenbite’, the deceptive splicing of two unconnected film or audio samples together, creating an entirely new scene. Another success story of reality television is the Bravo cable television network, which specialises in real-life soap operas and “queer” shows. Bravo owes its success to Lauren Zalaznik, also an alumnus of MTV’s The Real World, who produced programs specifically targeted at “gay men and their female friends.” The result was fashion shows such as Project Runway (pitched by Harvey Weinstein, who wanted a program that would give him access to young models) and the Real Housewives franchise, beginning with The Real Housewives of Orange County (first broadcast 2006) and counting upwards of 40 spin-off versions in cities around the world.

You’re Fired!

The daughter of a Democrat lawyer close to the Clintons, Nussbaum’s disdain for Donald Trump and The Apprentice, the game show that reinvigorated his public image, comes as no surprise. Chapter 13 ‘The Job’ reads more as takedown of Trump than a history of the admittedly successfully and popular television show he starred in. Nussbaum fills the chapter with allegations of racial slurs and sexist comments issued by Trump during production and behind-the-scenes gossip on Trump’s scandalous behaviour, verified by some and denied by others.

The Apprentice added little new to the reality game show format other than unabashed capitalism. Its importance to the narrative of Cue the Sun! exists primarily in the character of Trump and his later political achievements. Nussbaum acknowledges that plenty of other factors led to the election of Trump in 2016. Though reading between the lines, one deduces a sense of dismay about the role reality television played in his rise, a black mark on an otherwise progressive and left-leaning genre. The creative mind behind The Apprentice, British born producer Mark Burnett, also the original producer of Survivor, is admonished for the destructive role he played in American society in a way that none of the other reality television creators are.

Mostly White Men

“They were mostly (but not all) white men, something that was true of the majority of the people who had the power to produce television, until recently.”

As the above quote taken from the introduction indicates, Cue the Sun! begins with a distortion that continues throughout the book. The creators of reality television were mostly white men, and no further inferences can be drawn from that fact, other than to point out that reality television has become more diverse over the years. Nussbaum occasionally identifies some of the individuals in the book as Jewish, but as mere biographical footnote. It’s not as if Nussbaum isn’t willing to notice a pattern. In Chapter 12, she allows herself to confidently point out that a:

“…striking portion of early reality producers were gay men… Perhaps gay men were more attuned to the tensions between behaviour and performance; maybe they were more willing to innovate, as outsiders.”

If gay men were overrepresented in the reality television genre due to their ‘performative’ nature and position as societal outsiders, why did Jews play an even more prominent and over-representative role? Nussbaum is unwilling to provide an answer.

To start off with, one can point to the nature of Hollywood, from its origins a Jewish institute. The studios of Los Angeles remain the heartland of reality television, so a strong Jewish presence in the genre and its precursors is as expected as it is in every other genre of television produced in America. Another common theme throughout Cue the Sun! is the taboo breaking nature of reality TV, going all the way back to its pioneers. Craig Gilbert put real-life divorce, adultery and homosexuality on prime-time television. In episode after episode, Chuck Barris launched euphemistic and sexually provocative questions at naïve young dating show contestants, questions which toed the line on what was acceptable to air on television at the time. A Jewish impulse born out of what Natham Abrams infamously called the “atavistic hatred of Christian authority.”

A deeper answer lies with understanding the act of provocation, a defining characteristic of reality television. Or as the creators of The Real World called it, the catalyst of “throwing pebbles into the pond”, disturbing the calm and controlled disposition of the person being filmed. Provocation takes many forms, but even simply placing a camera in front of someone with no script or instruction as to what to say or do is a provocative act, goading them to perform. As Nussbaum notes, the less ethical a reality show is (i.e. the more provocative the production and the more naïve the participant), the more authentic and compelling the footage captured ends up being. For the showrunners, producers and editors detailed throughout Cue the Sun!, the appearance of tears, raised voices and discomfort were scenes to be celebrated, signs that riveting television had been produced.

In all, the best explanation to the predominant Jewish role uncovered by Cue the Sun! is that Jews are more at ease with provoking and making gentiles uncomfortable than gentiles are at provoking a member of their own race. The historical precedents in the more extreme cases are well known. The Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia staffed the secret police with Jews, knowing that a Jew would have fewer moral qualms about torturing and mistreating their victims than an ethnic Russian Cheka agent would have in doing the same to his fellow Russian. Centuries of ethnic separation, religious laws that morally differentiate between the ingroup and outgroup, and the longstanding persecution narrative appear to have given Jews enough of an emotional detachment that they are more willing to countenance exploiting and manipulating a gentile for commercial gain or for television ratings. Perhaps there is even a sense of being able to get one over a goy, a chance to put an overconfident fame-seeker in their place or to ridicule the wannabe starlet from flyover country.

Even the author, herself a member of the tribe, ends the book on a disturbingly unsympathetic note. Those early reality TV participants, taken advantage of by a phenomenon that had yet to even be defined, are deserving of pity. But for Nussbaum, those contestants who grew up in the 21^st century with reality television all around them, cognisant of its true nature: “...they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ‘em crash”. Crash they still do, alongside the crashing moral standards of Western culture, something which the Jews who birthed reality television bear more than a passing responsibility for.

Notes

Nussbaum, E 2024 Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, Random House, New York USA, p. XV

Ibid., p.15-16

Ibid., p.19

Notoriously Stanley Milgram of the Yale obedience experiment and Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment: Ibid., p.23

Not an obvious Jewish name, his heritage is confirmed by a gravestone adorned with Hebrew script: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228000402/craig-p.-gilbert

Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.58

Nussbaum notes the conceptual similarity of Cops with Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.

Born Mary-Ellis Paxton, married into a Jewish family.

Mike Darnell’s ancestry is unclear.

Also a Jewish creation, Nussbaum points the finger at editors Daniel Abrams and Josh Belson: Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.321

Ibid., p.346

Ibid., p.XVI

Ibid., p.336

Abrams, N 2003, ‘Triple Ethnics: Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American Porn Industry, Jewish Quarterly, 51(4), p.27-31

Nussbaum, Op. Cit., p.115

Ibid., p.390

Ibid., p.391

Notoriously Stanley Milgram of the Yale obedience experiment and Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment: Ibid., p.23

Not an obvious Jewish name, his heritage is confirmed by a gravestone adorned with Hebrew script: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228000402/craig-p.-gilbert

Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.58

Nussbaum notes the conceptual similarity of Cops with Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.

Born Mary-Ellis Paxton, married into a Jewish family.

Mike Darnell’s ancestry is unclear.

Also a Jewish creation, Nussbaum points the finger at editors Daniel Abrams and Josh Belson: Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.321

Ibid., p.346

Ibid., p.XVI

Ibid., p.336

Abrams, N 2003, ‘Triple Ethnics: Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American Porn Industry, Jewish Quarterly, 51(4), p.27-31

Nussbaum, Op. Cit., p.115

Ibid., p.390

Ibid., p.391