Emily Nussbaum > Quotes

“Decent people sometimes create bad art. Amoral people can and have created transcendent works. A cruel and selfish person—a criminal, even—might make something that was generous, life-giving, and humane. Or alternatively, they might create something that was grotesque in a way that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from it, full of contradictions that were themselves magnetic.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she dissects the darker history of positive thinking, the cult of optimism that has, in recent decades, she writes, metastasized into “an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“I'm its creature, the way we are all creatures of the art we care about, even if decide to throw it in a garbage can.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“From the 1960s on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh realpolitik, one based on her experience: Looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money - and from men as the route to money - you were dead in the water. Women were one another's competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary. Like Moses and the Promised Land, she couldn't cross over.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Panicked, Mary stares into the camera, then holds up her hand, making a wiping motion and droning “Erase! Erase!” It’s the primal scene of reality TV stardom, rendered as bleak comedy.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“American consumers take pride in their media savvy; they are too hip to be fooled, too jaded to be appalled.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“These days, we are all performing what a friend of mine once called “the audit,” struggling to reconcile the stories we used to tell ourselves with the ones we tell ourselves now.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“When you’re put on a pedestal, the whole world gets to upskirt you.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“As the medium changed and more “auteurist” shows got green-lighted, and as “showrunner” became a term of art, turning television writers into celebrities with their own fan bases, shows that could be traced to one clear creator often got more credit from critics—a bias that tended, among other things, to favor drama over comedy. To quote BoJack Horseman: “Diane, the whole point of television is it’s a collaborative medium where one person gets all the credit.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“a moral lasagna of questionable aesthetic choices”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Barris spoke longingly about the comedic collective that Judd Apatow had built, and said that he wanted to create something like it—“a contemporary, racially eclectic, gender-eclectic, experience-eclectic salon.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Among other things, these are, in fact, movies about men who fall madly in love with middle-aged women—their peers—but get rejected by them. Those women (who are played by a cadre of amazing actresses including Diane Keaton, Farrow, and Judy Davis) are prickly, funny, demanding, messy, controlling, complicated, and intellectually accomplished figures. They’re generally portrayed as preferable to younger women, but harder to hold on to.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“It’s always the same, that someone was a small kid in Nowheresville, they were gay, they were hiding it, and then they saw Lance and realized they weren’t alone,” Susan told me. Lance recognized his celebrity as a vocation, which meant that he alone among the Louds accepted the Raymonds’ role,”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“The way most WGA writers saw it, the genre was the enemy—a wedge networks used to resist union demands, first in 1988, when the WGA struck for twenty-two weeks, and then again in 2001. If reality laborers suffered, maybe they deserved to.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Reality shows were strike-breakers, too—the slimy beneficiaries of anti-labor tactics, funded by executives who didn’t want to pay writers and actors.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Anyone could rebrand a mediocre businessman, some small-timer in need of a glow-up. But taking a failed tycoon who was a heavily in hock and too risky for almost any bank to lend to, a crude, impulsive, bigoted, multiply-bankrupt ignoramus, a sexual predator so reckless he openly harassed women on his show, then finding a way to make him look attractive enough to elect as the president of the United States? That was a coup, even if no one could brag about it.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Langley’s next anti-drug project, the 1985 music video “Stop the Madness”—which you must google immediately—was a for-hire project produced by actor Tim Reid, a member of the Entertainment Industries Council for a Drug-Free Society.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Scanlon would go on to edit two more seasons of The Apprentice, then got fired, two weeks before Christmas, after a male editor came back from paternity leave.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“he also helps link it to other women’s “stories”: the soap, the rom-com, the romance novel, and, more recently, reality television. These are the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun. They’re “guilty pleasures,” not unlike sex itself.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Real fanhood, in other words, is, at its purest level, love. As in Corinthians, fanhood is patient, kind, not rude, etc. (It is also not easily angered and it keeps no record of wrongs.) The Fan of Faith is superior to the Fan of Science, and while it’s natural to have questions, the ideal viewer should behave less like a nagging critic and more like a soul mate, supportive and committed even when doubts creep in.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“one version, gay male creativity is a superpower, healing the world and building bridges. In the other, it’s realpolitik, an awareness of how to “trade up.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“In his manifesto “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” the novelist warned that the boob tube was infecting literary novels with this empty self-loathing, passing on a strain of nihilistic irony like some aesthetic tapeworm.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Early on, LAPD commander Daryl Gates had said no to Cops filming in his city. Then, in 1991, George Holliday recorded the beating of Rodney King, graphic evidence of police brutality that led to a mass uprising a year later, after the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict. In 1994, the new LAPD police chief, Willie Williams, agreed to let Cops film his officers. “At this juncture, it makes certain sense for the department to receive some positive coverage,” said Gary Greenebaum, the president of the police commission, in the Los Angeles Times.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“While Dragnet wasn’t a reality show, it played one on TV,”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Viewers who craved other visions of creativity, other styles of filmmaking, or a different brand of funny or beautiful, felt that pressure, too; we felt it from without (in media messages that certain art was less important) but also from within. It was hard not to internalize these rules, even when you resisted them, even when they excluded your story.”
― Emily Nussbaum, I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution

“Jon Kroll, a game show buff who had been raised in a hippie commune, amid what he described as “naked acid parties, hot tubs, and madness”—a perfect résumé for the job.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“He and the real estate mogul Donald Trump were supposed to develop a show based on the board game Monopoly, a project that was a model of corporate synergy, uniting three brands—a high-end documentarian, a fake tycoon, and a game that celebrated capitalism.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“Who you sympathized with came down to which kind of behavior you found more unstable: the notion of marrying a stranger to get a free week in Vegas or the idea of seeking your soulmate on a Fox game show.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“The Bachelor was a more immersive experience, like being trapped inside an erotic terrarium, lulled by floating rose petals. In a world of tacky, The Bachelor was a fancy show.”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV

“The catalyst for these protoreality shows was, as ever, a labor strike:”
― Emily Nussbaum, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV