Cue the Sun!, UnREAL, and How to Spot a Ponzi Scheme

FIELD RESEARCH, VOL. 2, ISSUE #3

Hey Fam,

Welcome to Field Research, a twice monthly newsletter featuring informative and entertaining takes at the intersection of art, business, and culture.

I’m your host, Amran Gowani, a mad scientist turned corporate mercenary turned totally well-adjusted author. My debut novel Leverage — a propulsive, darkly hilarious Wall Street thriller — will be published by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in August 2025.

It’s the height of spooky season, so in today’s issue I’m tackling the most grotesque, repulsive, horrifying, nightmarish atrocity imaginable: reality TV. I review and recommend Emily Nussbaum’s excellent book Cue the Sun! and the darkly satirical Bachelor spoof UnREAL, plus I teach you the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme.

Enjoy the show.

I. TRACK OF THE DAY

II. GET SMARTER

Here are five things worth knowing about humanity.

1. Crypto WMDs: Take the worst aspects of slum lording, homeowners associations, and timeshares, mash them up, tokenize them into tranches of tradable equity, slap them on a blockchain, and you’ve got Crypto Bros’ brilliant plan to “democratize” real estate investing. This financial voodoo will exacerbate money laundering and cause a future financial crisis, of course, but move fast and break things, amirite?

2. Garbage in: This WSJ article — and many, many like it — analyzes the challenges of political polling and wonders if the “experts” will once again whiff on predicting the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Let’s be clear: political polling is social science, and social science is horseshit. This entire prediction racket is noise and deserves none of your attention. Everyone should vote, because that’s how the game of democracy is played, and then we’ll see what happens.

3. Failson: Cooper Hefner, son of the late Playboy founder Hugh, is offering to take the once prestigious media company private in a $100 million deal. This is a shocking and tragic revelation. Shocking because I thought Playboy was already defunct, and tragic because $100 million could support an army of OnlyFans creators.

4. Impulse control: A statistical analysis of patients taking Ozempic — a GLP-1 inhibitor approved to treat diabetes and obesity, and which could ameliorate a wide swath of addiction disorders — indicated those with histories of opioid and alcohol abuse were 40% less likely to overdose and 50% less likely to become intoxicated, respectively, while using the drug. This is wonderful news. Now do smartphones and social media.

5. Gold rush: Doomsaying in the West, diversification in the East, and, most importantly, paranoid central bankers across the globe have been on a gold-buying bonanza, which has sparked a near forty percent spike in the covetous commodity’s price over the past year. Should you buy some, too? If you want to gamble at the world’s largest casino, sure, go for it. Just don’t expect the lustrous metal to keep you alive in the wasteland.

III. READ: CUE THE SUN!

In Cue the Sun! — the title’s inspired by the 1998 film The Truman Show — Emily Nussbaum relies upon deep reporting and sharp societal observations to chronicle the creation, development, and explosion of reality TV. She begins with the genre’s humble and unexpected origins (e.g., Candid Microphone and Queen for a Day), details its early flirtations with proper cinéma vérité principles (e.g., An American Family and The Real World), and concludes with its consumption of American culture writ large (e.g., Survivor, The Bachelor, and the rise of Bravo).

What I loved: Nussbaum’s prose is witty, engaging, and conversational, which makes Cue the Sun! read less like a dry business book and more like you’re sitting at a bar while a loquacious friend regales you with sordid tales from their depraved and dysfunctional workplace. Throughout the narrative, Nussbaum does an excellent job contextualizing how the genre evolved in response to specific cultural and technological trends. For example, Bravo leveraged the early success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to “gentrify” the genre with campy, stylish shows aimed at the queer community (e.g., Project Runway) and wealthy [White] women (e.g., The Real Housewives franchise). The text is also loaded with pithy insights — every reality show is a “prank” show — and surreal factoids — a bona fide serial killer participated as a contestant on The Dating Game.

I wanted more: Data. Nussbaum’s critical analysis is on point, her reporting is second to none, and she makes a compelling qualitative case for why reality television might be humanity’s most influential form of media. That said, the book features zero tables, charts, or graphs and is generally light on numbers. I’m sure space constraints and style considerations played a role, but I would’ve loved to see some supportive figures (e.g., programs produced and dollars invested by decade, ad-buy rates by year, Nielsen ratings vs. television mainstays such as live sports and prestige TV, etc.).

I wanted less: POTUS 45. The book concludes with the development and production of The Apprentice and Nussbaum argues reality TV had become so influential by the mid-2010s the genre effectively elected a president. As a sane person who has never watched The Apprentice, I have no doubt the show reframed the once and possibly future POTUS as a genius businessman and helped said nepo-duncecap appeal to a significant portion of the electorate. Problem is, it’s impossible to quantify exactly how important the show was to his rise, and IMHO it’s too simplistic to suggest the program was a deciding factor. Decades of unchecked neoliberalism (e.g., trickle-down economics, outsourcing of “blue-collar” jobs, media deregulation, the opioid crisis) and geopolitical dumpster fires (e.g., the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq) have conspired with centuries of misogyny and bigotry to create our cultural, economic, and political malaise.

Don’t sleep on the OG.

Final verdict: I really enjoyed this book and strongly recommend it. If you’re strapped for time, or cash, or possess but a cursory interest in reality TV, however, you can ascertain Cue the Sun!’s key takeaways from this excellent Forum interview.

From the vault: A few months ago me and

Carlos Greaves

pitched a groundbreaking, money-minting reality show to Bravo.

IV. A POEM ABOUT: HALLOWEEN

Title: Dark chocolate
The food 
of the
gods,

is picked
by
slaves,

and sold
by
monsters.

From the vault: Last fall I wrote a pitch-black piece of satire examining the many human-made horrors plaguing the trillion-dollar chocolate industry.

V. JARGON JUNCTION: PONZI SCHEME

Named after legendary Masshole Charles Ponzi, a Ponzi scheme is a classic financial innovation which utilizes fraud and deception to hoodwink unsuspecting investors and generate financial ruin.

These scams have been around for centuries and remain distressingly popular because they’re disturbingly easy to execute.

Here’s how they work:

An ambitious, silver-tongued fraudster raises money from an initial group of suckers, then purports to pay this initial group of suckers an impressive return with money raised from a new group of suckers. For instance, imagine the first group invests $100,000 and the second group invests $250,000. The organizer of the scheme could then pay the first group $150,000 and claim they reaped a +50.0% nominal return.

This deception creates the perception the investment is a winner, which entices even more new suckers to join the fray. Perhaps a third group invests $500,000, for example. As long as the cycle continues, and the payouts are infrequent, the Ponzi schemer will produce enough liquidity (e.g., cash on hand) to propagate the myth and rope in more rubes.

In theory, this process could repeat until all possible dopes were duped, though one of two outcomes will inevitably kill the vibe. Less commonly, the perpetrator will steal the money, abscond to a country with no extradition clause, and disappear forever. More commonly, too many investors will ask for their money back at the same time, and when the Ponzi organizer can’t pay up, the scheme will collapse¹. In both scenarios the victims will quickly realize they’re cooked.

Peddlers of Ponzi schemes tend to be sketchy, pushy finance-types who promise impossible returns with impossible consistency, refuse to register their investments, employ “complex” and “sophisticated” strategies too hot for vanilla, run-of-the-mill investment funds, always balk when you ask for your money back, and are too busy making moves in the market, Bro, to bother with administrative hassles like “accounting” and “documentation.”

While these warning signs might appear obvious, rarely can our sad little monkey brains resist a good get-rich-quick scheme. As always, stay frosty out there.

VI. WATCH: UNREAL, SEASON ONE

Co-created by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, UnREAL follows a large, extremely messy cast of characters who are creating and competing on a fictional dating show called Everlasting, a not-so-subtle stand-in for The Bachelor. The narrative eventually centers on the love-hate relationship between cynical showrunner Quinn King and self-destructive producer Rachel Goldberg, played by Constance Zimmer and Shiri Appleby, respectively.

What I loved: UnREAL is bleak, grim, and darkly funny. While season one isn’t even a decade old, its comedic sensibility feels edgy and in your face, as if it’s from a bygone era. I often found myself laughing out loud and wondering if I could pull off the same jokes today. In particular, UnREAL delivers cutting critiques of The Bachelor franchise’s consistent bias against non-White participants and lustily subverts the romantic (read: sexist) tropes the long-running franchise has both exploited and exacerbated on its way to reality TV dominance. This biting satire also does a superb job showing viewers how the reality sausage gets made. Everlasting’s — and by extension The Bachelor’s — preditors² ply participants with booze, deprive them of food, isolate them from the outside world, and induce them to cry on camera, all to manipulate the contestants and create world-class cringe.

Tragic auto-fiction: Nussbaum interviewed UnREAL co-creator Shapiro, who was a real-life producer on The Bachelor, for Cue the Sun!’s chapter on the ubiquitous dating show. A quick read between the lines suggests UnREAL is less a fictionalized depiction of reality and more a documentary masquerading as entertainment. For my money, this makes UnREAL an even stronger show, and The Bachelor an even bigger train wreck.

One and done: UnREAL ran for four seasons, but the consensus among critics and fans is the subsequent years fell short of the first’s misanthropic magic. I tapped out accordingly, but if anyone has watched the whole series and recommends seasons two through four, please let me know.

Final verdict: I absolutely loved UnREAL season one and believe it belongs in the pantheon of all-time great television shows. Do yourself a favor and binge-watch this weekend.

Where to watch: Netflix.

VII. SOMETHING: AWFUL

As the selections in this issue suggest, over the last few months I’ve been researching and surveying the reality TV landscape. During my travels and travails through the genre I stumbled across what might be the worst television program ever produced: Couple to Throuple.

Check out this trailer:

If you find yourself intrigued, I can assure you the excitement won’t last.

All ten episodes of this cringe factory are shockingly humorless and abysmally edited. Every “reveal” is telegraphed and all the “drama” is clearly — and poorly — manufactured. Even the show’s “competition” elements fall flat, with losing singles facing no actual consequences and winning couples putting zero skin in the game — figuratively speaking.

You might be thinking: well, surely a ridiculous, salacious reality show would at least attract ridiculous, salacious contestants, right? Nope. Everyone on this show is a charisma vacuum, devoid of charm, mystery, even loathsomeness. The designated villains are, at best, catty, and, at worst, banal. And no matter how freaky-deaky people get, they’re never sexy.

Ultimately, Couple to Throuple’s creators made a TV show where a dozen horny humans engaged in multiple gender-fluid threesomes, and it was boring. Truly a new nadir for our species.

As for the broader concept of polyamory, I pass no judgements. Letting people do whatever they want with their lives is called freedom, and I’m a big fan of the idea.

That said, observers from around the interwebs have suggested this show’s depiction of polyamory is reductive and obtuse. I’ve disappointed one woman more than enough already, so I’ll take their word for it.

VIII. UP NEXT

The fourth issue of Field Research 2.0 will drop in about two weeks. I hope you’re enjoying the new format. Feedback is always welcomed.

I also plan to publish a special Leverage-themed issue, with all the novel’s gory details, in mid-November. Stay tuned.

Finally, if you’re still reading, I’ll assume you’re a true fan or a true hater. Either way, here are some helpful ways you can aid my authorial endeavors:

• Follow me on: Instagram || Threads || Goodreads || LinkedIn

• Forward this email to a friend or family member

Thanks always for your support and engagement, Fam.

Catch you next time.

Amran

1. This is what happened to Bernie Madoff’s fund.

2. A portmanteau of “producer” and “editor” used in the reality TV world.