TV critic Emily Nussbaum on the Messy, Enthralling History of Reality TV

The 'New Yorker' writer talks about her acclaimed new book 'Cue the Sun.'

We develop profound relationships with the critics we admire. We anticipate their likes and their dislikes, we enjoy seeing our preferences mirrored in their own, and sometimes we like being prodded toward something new that we might not have discovered on our own.  

For more than a decade, as she served as a television critic first at New York magazine, and then at The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum was that voice for me. Witty, insightful, with an encyclopedic knowledge of television, and insistent that we stop treating television like some lowest-common-denominator purveyor of mediocrity, Nussbaum won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2016.  

And while I still find that I miss hearing her commentary on television week in and week out now that she is no longer The New Yorker’s television critic, she has returned with a remarkable new book called Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, in which Nussbaum attempts to wrestle with the messy story of reality television.  

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Cue the Sun! (named after a line from The Truman Show, itself a movie about a proto-reality series) is funny and harrowing in equivalent terms, deeply admiring of reality’s creativity and painfully aware of its lasting harms—Donald Trump not least among them.

I recently had the chance to talk with Nussbaum about the history of reality television, the economic underbelly of television production, the kinds of shows even reality-TV vets often refuse to participate in, and much more.

On pioneering 1950s-era reality TV program/game show Queen for a Day:

Queen for a Day [was] like some weird mixture of The Bachelor and GoFundMe. A panel of five women were chosen from a studio audience of fans of the show. And each of them would tell an incredibly personal story about their life. The winner was the person with the worst life. 

Afterwards, that person was anointed queen for a day. They put a literal crown on their head. Critics in general thought the show, even among the audience participation shows of their period, was the worst...partially out of misogyny, like it was embarrassing and gross because it was women talking about their lives. 

[Yet the show] doubled as both degrading, and kind of liberating, because after all, they were unlocking this closet of secrets. You can see all the DNA that ripples through many of these female-centric shows on Bravo [and] on The Bachelor.

On defining the reality TV genre as a singular mashup of authenticity and contrivance:

I define it as when you take cinema verité documentary...where you just take a camera, hold it in place, wait for something to happen, and then from that, truth emerges. And then you merge it with something that is a more commercial, repeatable, pressured structure of format. So that could be a soap opera, it can be game shows [or] sports.

I compare it to cutting a drug with something that makes it speedier, faster, more intense, more profitable, and most importantly, puts more pressure on the people that are in it. So that they will squeeze out some kind of surprising, shocking, sometimes moving, sometimes upsetting, authentic emotion. 

The reality show that turned Nussbaum into a reluctant voyeur—and helped inspired Cue the Sun:

Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I was an obsessive web watcher of season one of Big Brother, when it was not a hit. They had just started showing streaming, and I would put the Big Brother cast, while they were sleeping in California, in the corner of my screen in New York. This is a very embarrassing habit. And I did feel uncomfortable about it, but I definitely did not stop watching it. 

On how production would manipulate contestants during early seasons of The Bachelor:

People were rewarded for getting people drunk, lying to them, and driving them into nervous breakdowns that can then be turned into amazing moments for the show, where the cast members would look like a crazy person who's having a panic attack, or a cold person who wouldn't open up, or a sweet person who then genuinely fell in love, or a villainous person. 

Lisa Levenson, who was the co-creator of the show with Mike Fleiss, she would reward people with $100 bills and Prada purses for getting people to cry. 

On how the people who worked on The Apprentice felt about Donald Trump, then and now:

The people that I spoke to on that show had very complicated feelings about it. They thought Trump was a clown. They thought of it as a comedy in a lot of ways, but they were proud of the hard work they did, and that they were working on a big network hit. Some of them made a lot of money. 

A lot of the people in the cast worshiped Trump. The crew did not. The crew knew who he was.  They were New Yorkers. They thought of him as a TV character.  

On how Cue the Sun! aims to be a critical analysis of reality TV while also highlighting the genre’s innovations and impact on popular culture:

Certain kinds of pop culture [like reality TV]...get treated as alternately juvenile, feminine, disposable, and poisonous, toxic, a bad habit, all of those kinds of things. I feel like there's a connection between those things, and this book is an attempt to talk to that. But the book is more 50/50. I tried not to skimp on the darkness of it. But I also did want to celebrate the creativity. 

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MOPC’s full Q&A with Emily Nussbaum

One of the things that fascinated me most about your book is where you start your story, with shows like Queen for a Day and Candid Camera that date back to the very start of television.  What surprised you most in terms of what you learned about the roots of reality television?

One of the biggest things was not only did reality television and reality programming in general go back much further than I realized, but the moral debate around reality went back just as far. There had always been this incredible excitement about seeing ordinary people put on radio, and then on television. 

Simultaneously, in the media, there was this horror that people were breaking the rules about public and private, there was this growth of narcissism, it was exploitative, it was shocking and tacky. The excitement about these shows and the moral distress about these shows and the sense that they suggested something unnerving about American culture literally went back to World War II.

The [mistaken] notion I think people have is that reality television is not only a modern genre, but also symbolic of a post-technological change in human nature. That basically at the turn of the century, when the internet exploded, everybody turned into a massive narcissist. We all became each other’s paparazzi and that's when reality exploded. 

The other thing that cannot be overemphasized is that from the beginning, reality television was an economic tactic. It's a way of not paying writers and not paying actors. It was a strike-breaking mechanism. But the fact that that was true, and that that was true from the beginning, is not actually in contradiction with the fact that a lot of people who made it did very provocative, innovative, creative things. I mean, a lot of talking about reality has to be talking about the dark side, and the interesting and admirable side, simultaneously. And that was the big challenge.

In many ways, Queen for a Day seems to provide the template for much of what would attract audiences to reality series.  To what extent is the horrified response to shows like these grounded in discomfort with unvarnished women on television?

Queen for a Day [was] like some weird mixture of The Bachelor and GoFundMe. A panel of five women were chosen from a studio audience of fans of the show. And each of them would tell an incredibly personal story about their life. They were competing for who had the worst life. They would tell a story about how their husband had lost their job, how they got sick, how they were abandoned, how they'd been beaten, how their child got sick, all sorts of terrible stories. And then at the end of the thing, after they had all told their stories to the host, the audience would clap, and an applause-o-meter would say who the winner was. The winner was the person with the worst life. 

Afterwards, that person was anointed queen for a day. They put a literal crown on their head, an ermine robe, they gave them a scepter and sat them on a throne. But the reason people watched it was really about watching these women tell their stories. 

Critics in general thought the show, even among the audience participation shows of their period, was the worst. They thought it was the worst partially out of misogyny, like it was embarrassing and gross because it was women talking about their lives. 

It doubled as both degrading, and kind of liberating, because after all, they were unlocking this closet of secrets. Scripted sitcoms did not show stories [like these].  It was like Ozzie and Harriet, and this propaganda of happy heterosexual couples leading middle-class lives, you know, vacuuming in pearls and heels. This showed working-class women, and actually showed a racial variety of women, and they were spilling the beans on all the ugliness of lives for women long before second-wave feminism came along. It had a consciousness-raising group quality to it. 

You can see all the DNA that ripples through many of these female-centric shows on Bravo, on The Bachelor and things like that. And it's that stream of reality television that's all about women going out in public and telling their dirty secrets, all the private drama, spilling out all the tea, and other women bonding over watching it. 

It was fascinating to me to understand how much overlap there was between the cinema verité documentary filmmaking of figures like the Maysles brothers and the pioneers of reality TV.  Did reality pioneers think of their work as extending out the style and tone of verité for a television audience?

The way I define reality in this book, because people often ask about that, is that I define it as when you take cinema verité documentary, which people think of as a very fancy, elite, prestigious discipline, where you just take a camera, hold it in place, wait for something to happen, and then from that, truth emerges. And then you merge it with something that is a more commercial, repeatable, pressured structure of format. So that could be soap opera, it can be game shows, can be sports.

I compare it to cutting a drug with something that makes it speedier, faster, more intense, more profitable, and most importantly, puts more pressure on the people that are in it, so that they will squeeze out some kind of surprising, shocking, sometimes moving, sometimes upsetting, authentic emotion. So even within something very contrived, reality TV generally has something authentic in it. And I think that's what attracts people.

Alan Cohn, when he was assigned to edit the first season of The Real World, he had this feeling [that] this is my chance to translate cinema verité for the MTV generation. One of the things about reality-TV jobs is there was no such thing as reality TV. There was no such thing as a reality-TV producer or editor. People were making their jobs up from scratch. And a lot of people who got into this were documentarians.

It feels like the first show you see as being entirely recognizable as reality-TV in orientation is the 1973 PBS series An American Family.  What role did the show play in the story of reality television?

I think a lot of people who were involved in it bridle at being included as a reality-television show.  But it’s undeniably a part of reality- TV history. For people who don’t know about it, An American Family was a 13-episode documentary on PBS about a well-off family in California, Bill and Pat Loud, and their teenage children. During the course of the show, Pat asked Bill for a divorce, and they went through a divorce. Also, their oldest son, Lance Loud, was gay. And that was an enormous shock for television, to have this visibly gay man who was this wildly artistic, charismatic guy on TV. 

The Raymonds, who were filming the show, thought of themselves as very much as in the tradition of cinema verité documentary. The way people reacted to the show is recognizably the way they react to reality TV. They were titillated, they were appalled, they judged the people who were in the show, they felt like they knew the people who were in the show. They judged them for having participated in it. And they were obsessed with it, and talking about it. And they saw the show as a mirror for their own experiences. And it became a massive hit for PBS, but also a guilty pleasure for people, where they were sort of shocked and appalled that a fancy network had put on a show like this. 

The other outcome was that the Louds themselves became what were undeniably the first reality television stars. They were known to everybody. They were famous for being famous. And people both worshipped and adored, and absolutely judged and disdained them. They were like a running joke. And they kept trying to repair this in the press. But it was very difficult because the more they went out in public, the more people were like, “Who are you people who are always on television? How embarrassing.” I feel like that show in 1973 was just a huge turning point for the genre, for the American culture. 

Part of what makes this book so delightful to read is the way it hacks a path through the thicket of reality history by concentrating primarily on the first seasons of shows.  Were there any exceptions you needed to make to that approach?

I wrote a lot about first seasons, because this is a book about the spaghetti-on-the-wall period in reality TV. It's about where this genre came from, how these formats were invented. 

And all of these shows change after the first season. One show I do talk about a later season is Real World, because in the first season there is this very touching naivete and Gen X obsession with authenticity on the part of not just the cast, but the crew. That show, which came out in 1992, was absolutely riddled with discussions about whether you could interfere. By season three, the cast knew what the show was, and they were eager to participate. They weren't really resisting it the same way. The two main figures in season three [include] Pedro Zamora, who's really one of the most incredible people ever to appear on television. He was a gay Cuban American guy who had AIDS, who deliberately went on the show, because he wanted to educate the population by giving them someone to know. And Puck, who was one of the first real reality-TV villains, who was this shady, obnoxious San Francisco bike messenger, who was bigoted and rude and refused to participate in a community. It made for a brilliant season of TV, not just because those characters were set in contrast with one another, but because they were both self-aware of the fact that they were on camera. They both knew what they were doing. 

That's one of the things that changed about reality TV as it went on. At a certain point, people understood they might not understand how the show would be made, they might not understand the emotional repercussions, they might be naive about what it meant to be famous but have no money, but they knew they were going on TV, and they wanted to get famous. I have a lot of sympathy for people who want to get famous. I think there's this really nasty modern thing, where somehow the desire for fame itself means that people deserve anything that happens to them. When people are going on a reality show, of course, they want to get famous! The expectation that they have completely pure motives is something nobody expects of the crew and the creators.

Is there an ethics to the production, or the consumption, of reality TV?

It’s funny, because the period I write about, from 1947 to 2009, is in general a period of innocence of the people making these shows. And the innocence being sort of the secret sauce for the cast, because the less they expected and knew how to respond to the production, the more authentic their responses were, because they couldn't fake it. They couldn't act it out, and they really weren't prepared. Some of these very powerful moments in early reality TV are very, very authentic in that way. But the thing I point out is the more innocent it is, the more unethical it is, because nobody can consent to it. 

The faker it is, the more ethical it is, because the faker it is, the more the people who are participating understand that they are performing in a contrived charade. The more genuine the show is, the more it's taking people by surprise, pressuring them to fall in love, having them starve on an island, taking them by surprise with a camera that's hidden, the more real their behavior is, and the more precious that is to audiences. Because there are certain kinds of responses that, even if they make you uncomfortable, when you're watching them, you really can't look away. But there's no getting away from the moral discomfort that creates in a sensitive audience member who also understands that there's this kind of cruel, spying aspect. I mean, honestly, I think part of the reason that people judge cast members is because it relieves them of their responsibility for watching them be exposed, ashamed, or exploited. If it's their fault, you don't have to worry about that.

Are there reality shows that people shouldn’t be watching?

I asked all the crew members, ‘What kind of show won't you do? What is the point at which it seems unethical to do it?’ A lot of them said prank shows, because prank shows are very nonconsensual. But a lot of them said dating shows, which really surprised me. There are people who will appear on shark shows and starving shows and torture shows, but they feel like there's something about dating shows that’s so tender, with messing with people's emotions, and making them genuinely fall in love, and then fucking with their heads. 

I am not a person to stand on some high, judgmental platform about all these shows. Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I was an obsessive web watcher of season one of Big Brother, when it was not a hit. They had just started showing streaming, and I would put the Big Brother cast, while they were sleeping in California, in the corner of my screen in New York. This is a very embarrassing habit. And I did feel uncomfortable about it, but I definitely did not stop watching it. 

So I could not have more sympathy for somebody who is watching something that they also feel a little squicked out by. 

It'd be great if the book creates a conversation about that. I do think that it would be good if people advocated for better treatment of both the cast and the crew. I think reality crews should have unions, and that there should be rules of the road for cast members as well. If you're watching the show, and you care about the people who make it and appear on it, you should care that they actually have decent treatment. But this is part of a larger conversation about Hollywood. This is not only about unscripted television.

The labor piece of reality-TV programming feels really crucial and underappreciated.  This is an economic story as much as it’s an artistic story.

From an economic aspect, the appealing thing for executives is the fact that you pay people less, that it’s non-unionized. Les Moonves greenlighted Survivor because it cost him nothing. They had presold a lot of advertising that was planted inside the show. And it was unbelievably inexpensive. They put it on as kind of a summer experiment, that even if it had flopped, it would have netted out fine for the network. It was a no-risk gamble for CBS. Instead, it became a culture-rattling phenomenon that created major stars on television like Richard Hatch, and turned Mark Burnett into a major player, who obviously went on to create other shows.

And the main thing they did was it set off an earthquake of production for reality TV, because everybody wanted to imitate what had happened with Survivor. Survivor sets off this volcano of productivity. And after that it becomes an industry, and a real genre. Before that, it was essentially a set of experiments that people thought were fads, and they kept dismissing and saying nobody will ever rewatch these shows. They're not important.  They’re just junk that dumb people watch.  After Survivor, reality was not going anywhere.  So everything you see today are the aftershocks of what happened during those years.

It was great, and a little terrifying, to learn about the behind-the-scenes roles played by producers on shows like The Bachelor, and the ways in which they manipulated performers, and then also the footage itself, to tell the stories they wanted to tell, including “Frankenbiting” (manipulating audio to create new material) and hostile or misleading edits.  It made me understand that the [fictional] series UnREAL was essentially a documentary about reality production.

I very much appreciated how candid people were with me about what they were doing. For the early seasons of The Bachelor, they had interview methods where [producers] would essentially repeat a question over and over again, until the person answered the way they want. Some cast members would go with this, they'd be like, ‘I want to please the producer.’ Some would resist, but they had all sorts of psychological methods of breaking people down. On shows like The Bachelor, people were rewarded for getting people drunk, lying to them, and driving them into nervous breakdowns that can then be turned into amazing moments for the show, where the cast members would look like a crazy person who's having a panic attack, or a cold person who wouldn't open up, or a sweet person who then genuinely fell in love, or a villainous person. Lisa Levenson, who was the co-creator of the show with Mike Fleiss, she would reward people with $100 bills and Prada purses for getting people to cry. 

I'm not telling anybody what they should watch or not watch. But I think that the way the show keeps its viewers in the position of just being allies with the producers is harmful. I think it's in everybody's best interest to know how these shows are made. 

One [producer] who I quite liked, and think is incredibly smart, was talking about some of her early experiences. I think this was on a version of The Bachelor. [A contestant] said “but,” he said “her,” and he said “flies,” and she put it together to have him say “I got butterflies.” And she did it because the guy was totally inarticulate and dumb. She was trying to build some emotion into the scenes. 

Everyone should be reminded this stuff is completely legal. Because the contracts someone signs when they appear on a reality show says that the editors and the producers are allowed to lie about them, to misrepresent their story, to cut it in any order that they want. And they are not only not allowed to sue for that, but they also can't speak about it because there are very strict NDAs. And if they have complaints about mistreatment, they're forced into arbitration.

In one way, it's a collaboration between production and cast, in ways that I sometimes see as beautiful and creative and powerful in the culture. And in other ways, it's a collaboration between two sides who have completely unequal power. Producers and editors, and especially creators and networks, have all the power, especially in modern reality TV. And during the period that I write about in this book, everybody was working all that out.

Does the intense phoniness of so much reality TV actually serve as part of the attraction of contemporary reality? And does the success of The Apprentice, and Donald Trump’s election, similarly indicate the audience’s perverse willingness to believe whatever they see on television?

I think that’s how viewers watch. They watch in a bifocal way.  They simultaneously believe that everything’s real and everything’s fake. I think that the reality genre is so important. You can't cut it out of the cultural conversation. Trump was elected because of The Apprentice. People voted for him because that show rebranded Trump and sold him as a product. That is not what he is. I don't even think that's a controversial thing to say. I think there are many things that elected Trump, but I don't think it would have happened without The Apprentice. 

People who love reality TV see it as a guilty pleasure and a way to chill out. They don't necessarily want to think about the trauma of people who had bad experiences. They just want to experience it as dumb fun and the people who are on it as dumb, fascinating fame whores.  People who hate it also think about it that way!

So ideally, I hope this book is for both groups. Because, in fact, I think it's kind of the most important modern television genre. It's in everything, so it's incumbent upon people to see it thoughtfully. That doesn't mean never enjoy it, or never see the pleasures of it, or never praise the things about it that are provocative and genuinely, creatively inspiring. 

It elected the president, it shapes the way people have relationships, it shapes the way people date. Certainly, it shapes the way people think of themselves. I think a lot of younger people who are online, because they have access to different kinds of technology, are their own reality producers. They do a version of what they see on reality TV, but they do it on Instagram, or TikTok. [To] see the origins of that kind of self-presentation is helpful in understanding that this isn't something that started happening in 2015. It's a deep human impulse to see other people like yourself acting in what either are, or feel like, spontaneous ways.

Your chapter on The Apprentice is particularly fascinating, including hearing from one of the show’s producers, Bill Pruitt, say on the record that Trump used the N-word while on the show.

I'm not the first person to publish that story. The story about Trump having said the N-word on the set of The Apprentice is a story that Pruitt bravely and helpfully came out about when he thought it could do some good and people were trying to understand what was happening with Trump running and nobody listened to it. And apparently people have the memories of goldfish because it's coming out again this year and people are like, ‘What? Trump said the N-word on the set of The Apprentice?’ I have enormous respect for Bill for it. 

The people that I spoke to on that show, they had very complicated feelings about it. They thought Trump was a clown. They thought of it as a comedy in a lot of ways, but they were proud of the hard work they did, and that they were working on a big network hit. Some of them made a lot of money. Now, when they think about it in retrospect, some of them feel really terrible, repentant, and awful about the fact that the show did this. 

A lot of the people in the cast worshipped Trump.  The crew did not.  The crew knew who he was.  They were New Yorkers.  They thought of him as a TV character.  

Everybody, everybody on earth should read [James Poniewozik’s] Audience of One.  It provides the sharpest lens on not just The Apprentice, and not just Trump, but on television itself. It sees Trump through television and television through Trump. Oh my god, that book is so good. 

You had mentioned earlier the idea that female-centric series like Queen for a Day played a key role in creating the modern reality landscape.  Do you see that messy-women dynamic as the dominant trend in 21^st-century reality programming?

This is only one part of reality. Sometimes when I talk to people about this book, either they're big Bravo/ Bachelor fans, and they assume that's what the book’s about because, for some people, that's what reality is. 

Shows like The Real Housewives and the Kardashians play into that kind of camp sensibility. And I do think that there's something about reality TV, in its weird, punk, outsider, provocative, over-the-top kind of circus-like focus on behavior as performance, that ties into a lot of ideas about gay identity and female identity, and particularly gay culture. 

Perhaps the diametric opposite of the Bravo mentality is the long-running Fox series Cops, which has been presenting a hyped-up version of police officers’ work for more than three decades.  What do you make of series creator John Langley’s argument, which you describe in the book, that the series was less copaganda and more a verité look at the dank underbelly of American life?

John Langley was the biggest advocate for the idea that this is a cinema verité show that took cameras and brought them to neighborhoods and showed urban poverty, and drug abuse, and violence, through a kind of neutral lens. I do not stand by that analysis. I don't think that is what Cops is. I think there's an unfixable ethical problem with Cops everybody recognizes, which is that the policeman and the camera people arrive on the scene together. And the people, who are often drunk, or high, or at the very least out of control, and being arrested, are then asked to sign a paper saying they can go on the air. I just don't think we can get past that. 

But I can tell you how John Langley sees this argument. He thinks it's a classist argument, because he points out, correctly, that there have been several cinema verité documentaries which had agreements with the police going back to Frederick Wiseman’s Law and Order, and the very fascinating Police Tapes, a really amazing documentary made by Alan and Susan Raymond, who filmed An American Family. 

So he's basically like, ‘I made it entertaining. My thing was on Fox, so everybody looks down on it.’ People can judge for themselves. I don't think Langley’s justification holds up. 

Is there a way to watch the show and actually understand things about urban poverty and crime? Probably. Are the accusations and criticisms in the show, including the racial ones, also justifiable? Definitely. 

I did end up feeling affected by [Langley’s argument], because what makes us see one type of thing as a classy documentary, and another thing is a tawdry, disgusting reality show? It's really a big continuum. I would say that, for instance, [the Maysles brothers’ film] Grey Gardens, which everyone adores, is actually the most ethically disgusting type of exploitative reality show. Those people were put on the show because they were related to the Kennedys, because they were wealthy. They were mentally ill and not able to consent to it. And people thought it was amazing. Why is that documentary? What makes something documentary? What makes it reality?

One of the most interesting threads that runs through your book is this notion that reality stars have all the perils of celebrity—obsessive surveillance, relentless criticism—with few of the rewards, including wealth.  How has that changed over time?

When you learn how the sausage is made, you develop less of a taste for it. But it is also true that, despite the many problems, I can't deny that when people go on reality shows now, they do have a greater awareness of what it means to be a reality star. Because reality stars are a big part of the culture. There's a post-reality path that you can take. There are people [who] make a conscious and intelligent choice to understand, I have the kind of personality that's going to pop on the air. This is how I'm going to use it. This is how I'm gonna get a platform. 

Lots of reality stars I’ve talked to have said, once you become famous on one show, there's other shows that use former reality stars on it. You can make more money, you get treated a little better once you actually have some fame.  

Do you ever miss the practice of being a weekly television critic at The New Yorker?

Not really.  Sometimes I want to weigh in on a particular show. But what can I say? I'm a flibbertigibbet. I like to jump from thing to thing. I would love to write more TV criticism, and I'm sure I will. And that was a dream job to have. Incredible editing and fact checking. Everything about that supports a really high level of writing. But some people who are critics go into it because they want to write criticism. I went into criticism because I wanted to write about TV. And because I had an argument to make about TV, and I feel like I've made that argument about TV. And I like the freedom to try other things. 

My last piece was an investigative piece about Love Is Blind.  This woman, Renee Poche, she was sued for $4 million.  She can’t speak publicly because of her NDA.  I talked to everyone else on the set.  So that was a great experience for me.  Because I was able to tell her story without her having to tell it. The response has been really good.  I actually just got a note from one of the sources in my book, who’s a reality producer.  And he loved the piece.  That was very satisfying.  The people I care about most for that piece are people within the reality world.  If they think I got the story right, and if I nailed the problem, then I’m happy.  Because people write about reality as a frothy thing. That piece was different from this book.  That’s much more critical of the genre.  The book, did you find it more negative or more positive?

I found it very even-handed.  I’m obviously much less knowledgeable about the form, and also perhaps more critical as a result, but I was particularly intrigued by the argument you make that reality has its own heritage, and its own style.

I think the argument I'm making in this is very connected to other arguments about comic books, about sitcoms, about television in general, about certain kinds of pop culture that get treated as alternately juvenile, feminine, disposable, and poisonous, toxic, a bad habit, all of those kinds of things. I feel like there's a connection between those things, and this book is an attempt to talk to that. But the book is more 50/50. I tried not to skimp on the darkness of it. But I also did want to celebrate the creativity. The Love Is Blind piece is a very critical piece, not just about Love Is Blind, but about the rules of the genre in general, and the methods and the legalities. It's about the legal situation, and it's about the labor situation. I hope that that piece and other writing about it leads to people writing thoughtful, investigative pieces about all the elements of that further, rather than just writing about the shows as like a fun, fluff part of publications. People should dig into it.

I think you and I both feel this. TV history is very important. It is the key medium of the world in many ways. It's the crucial American medium for a long time. It was treated as trivial in the same way as reality television is treated as trivial. I'd be all for an explosion of other books on specific aspects of this. And honestly, while I was writing this book, I wished that I was writing a whole book about Candid Camera, about An American Family, about The Real World, about Survivor.

I’m going to ask you to put on your dusty TV-reviewer hat and tell me about current shows you particularly recommend.

You know, it's funny because I still watch a lot of TV. Not as much as I was watching when I was writing criticism. There are shows that would not surprise anybody that I watch. I like Girls5Eva. I'm looking forward to watching the Ripley adaptation that I heard is terrific. Oh, and Evil just restarted. I love the King shows. You should watch the first two or three seasons on Netflix. It's great. Brilliant. Shows have been a mixed bag in the last two years. The stuff I’ve liked has often been really weird. I liked I'm a Virgo, the Boots Riley show. That was really provocative and cool. I like the Dead Ringers adaptation. I seem to have been the only person on earth who likes Swarm, which I thought was really brilliant. So a lot of these kinds of unpleasant, intense, visually powerful, dark social commentaries. But I also love Abbott Elementary. What have you heard about that’s good?

I really liked 3 Body Problem.

I liked 45% of 3 Body Problem. Or 50%.

I just feel like the TV industry is in a big crisis right now. And it deeply worries me whether people will be able to put out good and ambitious stuff, which is what I've always been interested in. I mean, TV is an industry that’s simultaneously an artistic and financial industry. People who run these networks don't care a lot about making the kinds of shows that critics adore, that push the medium forward. I worry about people being able to maintain that. And also, I worry about the lives of TV [writers]. There's all this stuff that just makes it harder to maintain a career.

The most brilliant scripted writers, in my insane, art-worshipping opinion, should be celebrated and given just enough funds to maintain perfect security forever so that they can write whatever they want, without getting into the stratosphere. 

Are there critics you turn to whose work you particularly admire, or who help guide your thinking through a particularly knotty series?

There are a ton of people, but I feel like if I name people, I’m leaving people out. James [Poniewozik] is one of them. There are a lot of good people writing about comedy. I like Kathryn VanArendonk, and Jason Zinoman at the Times. I love the writers that I've worked with at the New Yorker. Inkoo [Kang] is writing the column. Vinson Cunningham is going to be writing about television also. I'm really excited.

Part of the thing that's nice about TV critics is that you write your own pieces, but they're in conversation with other people's pieces, It replicates a lot of the nature of television, where it's a debate, even if you're not bringing up somebody else's pieces. There's a kind of world of TV criticism that I think has been incredibly fruitful. I'm a pretty online person. I read all sorts of stuff that's not traditional criticism, just people talking on Reddit, or whatever.