'Cue the Sun!' is a riveting history of reality TV

Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum first conceived her sweeping chronicle of the rise of reality TV in 2003 — shortly after the debut of The Bachelor and three years into Survivor. But back then the reception from fellow writers was as icy as public attitudes towards the genre. “You better write that one fast,” she recalls a friend warning her. “Reality television was a fad… a bubble that would pop before I could get anything on the page.”