“Not to mince words, The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum is one of the best, if not the best, critic writing about TV today.”

—Los Angeles Times

Pulitzer Prize-winner Emily Nussbaum is the New Yorker theater critic, a renowned essayist, and the author of I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through The TV Revolution and Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV.

Drawn from over 300 interviews, Cue The Sun! is a deeply reported non-fiction deep dive into the history of reality television that both broadens our understanding of the genre (and its roots in the documentary form) as well as helping the reader to understand its ascent through pop culture at large. Starting with some of the earliest examples of unscripted programming (like proto-prank show Candid Camera, exploitative game show Queen for a Day, and early docu-series prestige fare like An American Family) right up to some of the world-conquering giants of recent vintage (Real World, Survivor, The Apprentice), Nussbaum’s work does for the much-maligned reality genre what she has already done for television at large: holds it up as a medium worthy of cultural analysis. An Editor’s Choice pick by The New York Times, Cue the Sun! was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and was named a Best Book of 2024 by The New York Times.

“Some critics, even great ones, you read to agree or disagree with them, but Emily Nussbaum writing about television is something else again. As you read her, you can feel her enlarging your mind: not just what you think about the show at hand or television itself, but pop culture and our place inside it. Her fantastically smart work has always been a pleasure to read a week at a time.”

—Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway

I Like To Watch is a collection that combines timely new works with previously published essays and profiles, mostly from her groundbreaking stint as TV critic at The New Yorker. The New York Times called I Like To Watch “confident, dauntless criticism — smart and spiky, brilliantly sure of itself and the medium it depicts.” In a starred review, Kirkus raved about it as “sharp, insightful writing that firmly positions Nussbaum as one of the leading TV critics of our time.” The Los Angeles Review of Books described Nussbaum as “a striking prose stylist, fierce and chummy by turns, with an illuminating analytic eye — exactly the qualities you want in a critic.”

“Taken together, the pieces in I Like to Watch form a searching, brilliant history of American attraction, repulsion, and fascination in the era of peak TV. The book assembles a picture, alive with rigor and pleasure, that only Nussbaum could paint of a medium that has risen and transformed into a high-culture institution that’s also an ever-shifting experiment about scorn and anxiety and desire. We’re lucky to have this record of it, as well as this casual reminder that criticism, at its very best, is an irreplaceable thrill.”

—Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

Nussbaum previously worked as the culture editor at New York Magazine, where she created “The Approval Matrix” and wrote essays and profiles on multiple subjects, among them pop culture, feminism, and academia. In the past, she worked for Slate, where she wrote the “Summary Judgment” column; at The New York Times, where she wrote the “Reruns” column for the Arts and Leisure section; and at Lingua Franca and Nerve, among other publications. In 2014, she won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, for “television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.” She has a master’s in Poetry from New York University and a bachelor’s from Oberlin in English and Creative Writing. Upon becoming named as New Yorker magazine’s Theater Critic in 2025, she said, “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to write about theatre for The New Yorker, my home since 2011, and a crucible for thoughtful and nuanced criticism. Ever since the pandemic threw this city completely out of whack, all I’ve wanted was to be back in a live audience, in front of artists opening themselves up to the world. I can’t wait. In the words of Nahum from the brilliant TV show Slings and Arrows, ‘I must confess, I love drama.'”

On her Twitter feed, which reaches nearly 300k followers, she writes about television, movies, books, politics, and other topics. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband (technology journalist Clive Thompson) and their two children.

For more information on Emily Nussbaum, please visit her on Instagram, Twitter and at emilynussbaum.com.