From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

If you heard the recent interview with Eddie Murphy in the New York Times,

he talks about what he does to unwind these days, which is to watch The Golden Bachelor and the masked singer.

So there's probably no better time than now to talk to my guest, Pulitzer Prize winner,

Emily Nilsbaum, the staff writer for the New Yorker, who is written on television and popular culture.

Figure my imprecision here.

But the book is Q the Sun,

the invention of reality TV.

And one of the things I find so fascinating

is that so many misfits

who don't fit any place else

in entertainment

ended up in reality TV

in one way or another.

Going back to Alan Fund

in the beginning of the book,

to Bob Eubanks, Chuck Barris, John Murray,

people didn't fit anywhere else, Fenton Bailey, who ended up finding a way for themselves into reality TV.

I wonder why you think so many people who didn't quite fit other places did so well.

It's true. It's an interesting part of the story is that there are a bunch of people who were marginalized

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