Okay, Reality TV has got me hooked.
I escaped addiction to Survivor, Fear Factor, and the self-perpetuating bachelor/ectomorphic bachelorette make-out marathons, but this NBC show featuring Donald Trump is my new prime time guilty pleasure.
There is so much about this show that feeds into the capitalist weltanschauung of the United States that I could write pages of clumsy, enthusiastic prose to describe it all. To spare you that awful spectacle, here’s a summary instead:
Out of 215,000 applicants, The Donald selected 16 “survivors” – only he and the Almighty know how or why – as contestants.
The show runs for a total of 16 weeks, with one person being “fired” each week. At the end, the winner will be president of a Trump company for a year.
It isn’t clear what the nature of the company will be, but the job promises to be “the dream job of a lifetime”, with a handsome salary and, presumably, the perks of being an executive in the Trump organization.
Trump has divided the group of would-be apprentices into two teams, the men versus the women. Lame, but this maybe is not so much reflective of Trump’s own predilictions (he is the sponsor of the Miss Universe contest) but rather his evaluation of the capacity of the American TV viewer to easily differentiate between the contestants (“boy. girl. unk.”).
The first contestant fired was the “smart academic but no street savvy” MD/MBA who bombed out in the lemonade stand competition. Admitting that “sales is not my forte”, this gentlemen was filmed chasing hapless pedestrians and a bike rider around the Fulton Street Fish Market, carrying a hand-made sign on poster board while he shrieked “Lemonade – one dollah, one dollah”.
What intrigues me the most about the show is not so much the contestants, each of whom represents an (ahem) entrepreneurial paradigm, but the opportunity to listen to how Trump and his two steely-eyed senior advisors, chummily referred to on the website as “George and Carolyn”, decide who stays and who gets canned.
This is a good cop/bad cop scenario: The Apprentice’s Donald Trump is a tough but likeable “billionaire next door” kind of guy, comb-over and all. It’s true: we find ourselves agreeing with the fatherly wisdom he shares with the contestants, and feeling a pang of sympathy when he confides that he enjoys dinner in his palatial dining room, “not often enough”.
I’m also enjoying how the producers are setting up certain contestants as “the heavies”, the ones you really want to get voted off, as well as the “good guys”, like the plucky PhD who grew up in “the projects”, but sees herself as a team-builder and an organizer, albeit one with fashion model good looks and hyper-competitive drive.
With only a couple of dweeb types left, presumbably with limited half-lives, it’s only a matter of time until this show becomes a voyeuristic mud wrestling fight by a bunch of “beautiful enough for prime time”, sound bite-producing overachievers who will hurl balance sheets instead of clots of dirt at each other.
I’m loving this, every silly, manipulative moment of it. Is this a great country, or what?