Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson were still “Newlyweds” grappling with the chicken or tuna conundrum when television critic Emily Nussbaum first came up with the idea of writing a book about reality TV. “I waited 20 years until reality TV was an established industry and I had a career writing about television,” Nussbaum says about the impetus for “Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV,” which she conceived of in 2003 during a conversation with friends and colleagues amid the explosion of the genre with the shows “The Bachelorette,” “America’s Next Top Model” and “Joe Millionaire.” Dissuaded by these naysayers, who dismissed the genre as a flash in the pan (insert chortle here), Nussbaum carved out a career in criticism as a culture editor for New York Magazine and as a current staff writer for the New Yorker, covering such prestige shows as “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” in essays that were collected in her first book, 2019’s “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution.
” That was part of a two-book deal with Random House, so for her second, Nussbaum thought she’d revisit that idea from two decades ago, not from a critical point of view but from a reported one. Using more than 300 interviews with the people who invented the genre, Nussbaum crafts the story of the origins of reality TV from 1947 to 2009. But wait — television was a new medium in 1947, let alone reality television.
That’s the first clue that “Cue th.
