CABLE ANTIHERO DRAMAS LIKE THE SOPRANOS HAD A CUMULATIVE audience of millions; the dark superhero movies of the 2000s were among the highest-grossing films of all time. But arguably the genre that did the most to popularize the concept of the antihero is one not generally associated with it: reality TV. Reality shows both appealed to the thirst for authenticity—though their setups were contrived and their stories edited—and promised a peep into realities more exciting than your own. But also, unusually for broadcast TV, they featured protagonists who weren’t conventionally likeable—who echoed the notion, reverberating across the culture, that this was not a world made for nice people.
The stakes in these shows were not life and death. But their philosophy vibed with a certain sharp-elbowed spirit of the age. It’s a cutthroat, zero-sum world, they said. For you to win, someone has to lose, and when someone else gains, it is at your expense. Maybe you have to cheat and lie, but aren’t you doing it for the right reasons? To feed your kids? To achieve your dreams? To find someone to love? Then get out there and do what you’ve got to do. Sometimes you have to work the dark side.
On February 15, 2000, the network reality-TV era arrived with the lurid shivaree of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, a Fox prime-time special that demonstrated that there was ratings gold in a pursuit for the affections of a man of questionably inflated wealth.
In this two-hour beauty-pageant-cum-meat-market, fifty young women—chosen from 3,000 auditioners nationwide—vied for the hand in marriage of Rick Rockwell, a jut-jawed motivational speaker from San Diego. They wore wedding dresses. They participated in a swimsuit contest, because, host Jay Thomas said, their husband-to-be wanted to be sure his lady would be “as comfortable on the beach as he is.” The ten semifinalists were asked “personality test” questions, such as whether they’d mind their husband going to a strip club. Finally, Rockwell made his selection, dropped on one knee, then wed emergency-department nurse Darva Conger in a civil ceremony under a floral arch large enough to double as the funeral wreath for Western civilization.
The show was the definition of a word-of-mouth success. The Nielsen ratings built by the half hour: 10 million, 12.3 million, 18.9 million, 22.8 million. In those numbers you can practically hear the phones ringing across the country, friends telling friends, “You will not fucking believe what is on Fox right now.”
By any common-sense measure, every word in the title Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? was specious except the “Who” and the question mark. The “marriage” lasted seven weeks before Conger—who walked away with prizes including a new Isuzu Trooper and a three-carat diamond ring—got an annulment. (She auctioned off the ring.) And Rockwell, a onetime comedian and actor whose credits included Killer Tomatoes Eat France!, was a multimillionaire only by the most generous measure. Fox contended that he was worth $2 million, with $750,000 in liquid assets. His 1,200-square-foot house in Encinitas, California, had two broken toilets in the back yard.
But it’s not as if the millions in the audience, by and large, thought they were seeing true love bloom before their eyes. They were watching spectacle: the breaking of a TV taboo, the self-satisfaction of watching what other people will do for (theoretical) money and (definite) media exposure. The marriage might be fake; the millions might be illusory. But the metadrama—the drive to appear on and “win” a TV show—was real.
Multi-Millionaire was the brainchild of Mike Darnell, a Fox executive in charge of “special programming,” a category that had included Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, built around a hoax video of an ET’s dissection. He was inspired, he said, by attending a cousin’s wedding. A wedding is, after all, a staged event, complete with an audience and roles (groomsman, bridesmaid, officiant), rich with symbols of love, winners and losers (catch that bouquet!), and the hope for a prosperous future: “wish fulfillment,” as they say in the biz.
Not long after the show aired, Rockwell was revealed to have had a restraining order for alleged domestic abuse, a scandal that killed Multi-Millionaire as a franchise. But the ratings incited interest in reality TV as a genre. Darnell would go on to bring more and less respectable reality hits to Fox, from the lust-on-the-beach bacchanal Temptation Island to the aspirational singing contest American Idol. The special’s producer, Mike Fleiss, would create ABC’s The Bachelor.
And the gross, captivating two hours of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? contained within it the kernel of the entire reality TV genre to come. Shock. Greed. Pumped-up drama. Zero-sum competition. Sex. And above all, the relentless challenging of norms: the feeling that you were watching a thing that you were not supposed to be able to see on TV—and yet here it was.
REALITY TV IS almost as old as TV itself. In 1948 Allen Funt brought his radio prank show, The Candid Microphone, to television, where it became Candid Camera. As important as the practical jokes—e.g., a woman would ask passersby to help with a broken-down car, which turned out to have no engine—was the “reveal,” in which Funt would tell his marks: “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera.”
It was a simple gag comedy, but like many later reality shows, it had a layer of social experiment. You were also seeing how people would respond to someone in distress, or how they would handle being duped. (The show’s training of its audience was so successful that in 1969, when hijackers took control of an airplane Funt was flying on, his fellow passengers assumed they were being pranked.)
Cheap nonfiction entertainments—game shows, dating shows, variety shows, talk shows, The Gong Show—were TV staples for decades, evolving with the times. In the 1950s, You Asked for It presented dangerous live stunts at the audience’s request. At the tail end of the populist ’70s, NBC’s Real People valorized unsung Americans: turkey callers, senior-citizen disco dancers, and Tom “Wrong Way” Wooten, who pedaled a bicycle backwards across the United States.
There were also occasional standouts of ambition. In 1973, PBS aired An American Family, a twelve-episode cinema-verité narrative about the Louds, of Santa Barbara, California. It was meant to chronicle ordinary middle-class life; it ended up capturing the breakup of Bill and Pat Loud’s marriage and the coming-out of their gay son, Lance. The show was criticized as intrusive, destructive, and manipulated for drama—but it was also a national obsession, a stunning document of American society’s All in the Family moment of upheaval.
You couldn’t re-create the found drama of a series like that. But you could create the conditions for drama, which was the idea behind MTV’s The Real World in 1992. Inspired by An American Family, producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray devised a format in which a group of young strangers would live in a house, cameras would roll, and what would happen would happen. What happened ranged from hookups to alcohol abuse to violence to various brands of interpersonal friction.
The third season, set in San Francisco, had its own Loud Family moment of social relevance, with the story of Pedro Zamora, a gay AIDS activist who had the disease himself. Zamora was not only a rare gay personality on national TV, he would for some viewers be the first person they knew living with AIDS—and, the day after the season finale aired, he would be the first person they knew to die from it.
The story was not happenstance. Zamora was intentionally cast, as was David “Puck” Rainey, a belligerent bike messenger who provided much of the rest of the season’s drama by traumatizing his housemates. But The Real World promised, and often delivered, something beyond just drama. Its introduction promised to show what happened “when people stop being polite and start getting real.”
In other words, the promise of The Real World, and decades of reality TV that followed it, was authenticity. It argued that there was something genuine in human interaction that TV didn’t show you, because TV was too bound by commercial pressures, the mores of its audience, the artifice of genres like sitcom and cop show.
But it was more than that, The Real World’s slogan implied: actual people didn’t show you their real selves either. They were socialized to be “polite,” which, the show’s introduction implied, meant fake. In The Real World’s progressive formulation, this was small-c conservative inhibition, but in the early 1990s political conservatives were making a parallel argument. In 1991, I sat in a packed crowd at the University of Michigan’s football stadium, where the commencement speaker, president George H. W. Bush, made his first public attack on “political correctness”—which he said “declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits”—to an audience of students who would watch the premiere of The Real World a year later.
By a few seasons into its run, an appearance on The Real World was a highly sought-after résumé item—a basic-cable Rhodes scholarship, drawing over 35,000 applicants a year. One housemate, Sean Duffy, parlayed his fame from season 6 to become a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy—a conservative who struck up an unlikely friendship with Zamora in season 3—became an omnipresent commentator on Fox News.
Young people knew The Real World was a construct; it acknowledged that, which played to the Generation X impulse to be suspicious of mediation, not to be a sucker. Reality fans might not know exactly how their shows were manipulated—how participants were plied with alcohol on dating shows, or how scenes filmed at different times were stitched together to seem like a real-time interaction. (“Frankenbiting” was the term of art.) But they knew that something like The Real World was a created environment, like a workplace, which in fact it was. Reality TV required a stance that was simultaneously credulous and skeptical: the awareness that you were being manipulated was part of the entertainment. The “reality” that reality fans were watching, then, was that of people authentically responding to a fabricated environment—the real experience of being on a TV show.
SO WHO WANTS TO MARRY A MULTI-MILLIONAIRE? was nothing new, per se. But it was in a new place: on a major TV network, at the top of the ratings.
In 2000, traditional broadcast TV was in a commercial, artistic, and existential crisis. First, the fragmentation of media—all those cable channels—meant that even the most popular shows now had lower ratings. But hit shows with celebrity actors, like Friends and ER, weren’t getting any cheaper to make. Second, The Sopranos, which had premiered the year before, was the kind of pop-culture sensation that the broadcast networks couldn’t create. HBO wasn’t policed by the Federal Communications Commission, because it didn’t use the public airwaves, so it could air as much profanity and show as many naked strippers at the Bada Bing as it cared to.
But even if you suspended the FCC content rules, the old networks couldn’t make an equivalent to The Sopranos. It was too demanding. Like a literary novel, the show had a dense serial plot, explored moral gray areas, and required close attention to details and subtext. Because HBO’s viewers paid to watch, The Sopranos only needed those viewers who were really into The Sopranos. The big networks couldn’t afford that.
Next to cable, network entertainment was simply . . . boring.
Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? was vile, reductive, exploitative, outrageous, caricaturing, sexist, and stupid. But it was not boring. Reality TV had its own version of the HBO value proposition: here is something TV didn’t used to give you. It challenged the norms and pieties of traditional TV storytelling.
Survivor, which premiered on CBS in May 2000, combined the voyeuristic shock appeal (and bikinis) of Multi-Millionaire with the stakes of a game show and the pretensions of, as its executive producer Mark Burnett grandly liked to call it, a “social experiment.” Sixteen contestants, living as a “tribe” in Borneo, had to work together for food and shelter, while also voting members off one by one until the last one standing won a million dollars. Nominally, the show was about humans against nature. The real game, and the real attraction, was human against human.
The first season’s master of the “social game” was corporate consultant Richard Hatch, who would become the first of many reality-TV antiheroes. He was openly gay—a rarity on network TV in 2000—and he stood out early on for his habit of striding around the beach naked, his torso pale and fleshy, his nethers pixellated for prime time. But above all he was first to crack the idea that the key to this game was not wilderness skills but shamelessness and the will to flout social norms: to lie, to make alliances and break them, to convince people that it’s in their interest to hold their nose and work with you until you no longer need them. In the finale, his vanquished opponents awarded him the million bucks in spite of this, or rather because of it. They recognized that he outplayed them.
Early on, there was a moral panic around Survivor, its critics arguing that it was spiritually corrosive and celebrated bad behavior. This was simplistic. (I speak as someone who’s watched the show religiously since the first season.) A level of moralism was built into Survivor—as with a soap opera, you couldn’t really enjoy it without judging the “characters.” If anything, the show was didactically moral; one season, featuring returning players, was subtitled Heroes vs. Villains. Going into the season 1 finale, most audience members polled were rooting not for Hatch but Rudy Boesch, a seventy-two-year-old former Navy SEAL—as was the host, Jeff Probst. “Everybody on the crew wanted Rudy to win,” he recalled. “The only outcome nobody wanted was Richard Hatch winning . . . [It] would be a disaster.”
In fact, the audience shrugged it off. What Survivor, and shows like it, did do when it came to their antiheroes was to invite you to compartmentalize morality from outcome. The logic of a Tribal Council vote isn’t, “Richard is not really bad.” It’s: “Richard is bad, but he’s entertaining, and he played a great game.”
Many reality shows would invite the same logic: Maybe American Idol’s Simon Cowell was cruel when he destroyed another off-pitch singer scratching the nails of her ambition down the chalkboard of her limited ability. But he was right—he was just willing to say what the rest of us would be afraid to. Would you want your kids to be like Richard Hatch? Maybe not. But did he deserve to win? Hey: it takes a crooked guy to win a crooked game in a crooked world! Courtney Robertson, after winning The Bachelor, wrote a memoir whose title could well be the motto of the genre, if not of this entire era of American history: I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends.
But Survivor was more than a soap opera, a man-vs.-nature story, a sporting event, and Lord of the Flies. It was also a masterpiece of applied postmodernism, a faux reality built entirely from simulacra of the real world, an imitation of life more satisfying and pliant to the creator’s will than reality itself could ever be. It was laden with enough signifiers and signs to keep a semiotician occupied for years. And though it was created by a British man (Mark Burnett) using the template of a Swedish series (Expedition Robinson), it was, in its determination to tame actual nature into a submissive, stylized replication of itself, thoroughly American.
For his 1975 essay “Travels in Hyperreality,” Umberto Eco traveled across America exploring the country’s fascination with simulations and reproductions, “instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.” He visited a re-creation of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Oval Office in Austin, Texas; a re-created nineteenth-century farm on Long Island; and—of course—Disneyland, where he rode a boat down a simulated wild river.
An animatronic crocodile in the river at Disneyland, Eco argued, is more satisfying than an actual crocodile in the wild, because it conforms to our idea of a crocodile better than the real, living thing does. “A real crocodile can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding,” he writes, but through Disney’s reliably menacing robo-crocs, “faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands.”
Survivor took place on the daydream of a desert island. What does that mean? Well, what would you draw in a cartoon? What had you seen on Gilligan’s Island? (In the first season, contestant Greg Buis, intuiting that Survivor was a TV concept of an island built out of previous TV concepts of islands, pretended to talk on a “coconut phone” like Gilligan had.) There needs to be sand. There need to be palm trees and coconuts. There need to be machetes and bamboo huts and treasure maps—all the accoutrements stored in your subconscious in a trunk labeled “Desert Island.” On Survivor, nature wears itself as a costume, like a celebrity walking on set for a sitcom cameo “as himself.”
Burnett deployed iconography as if designing a religious liturgy. Each contestant was given a tiki-style torch, which was extinguished when he or she was eliminated. “Fire represents life,” host Jeff Probst intoned. The show loved nature allegory: it intercut scenes of contestants scheming with footage of insects preying, rats scuttling, snakes slithering. Life, the visuals said, is a struggle red in tooth and claw, and—even if this was a show about people “surviving” while trailed by camera crews—it was giving you the real-deal version of mankind’s true state. In the season 1 finale, Susan Hawk, a truck driver from Wisconsin, endorsed eventual winner Richard by comparing him and runner-up Kelly Wiglesworth to feral creatures: “I believe we owe it to the island spirits we have come to know to let it end in the way that Mother Nature intended: for the snake to eat the rat.”
SURVIVOR WAS ACCOMPANIED that same summer by CBS’s Big Brother, another European import, which applied the same crabs-in-a-barrel approach to contestants sequestered together in a house wired with cameras. In the eighteenth century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon, a prison in which any inmate might be under surveillance at any time, so that all prisoners would constantly have to mind their behavior. Big Brother and its followers were the panopticon in reverse. Continuously being watched meant continually acting out, the better to make it into the final edit.
There was a short-lived sentiment, after the 9/11 attacks, that a new, more sober era of wartime would be the end of reality TV. Surely, in dark times, people would turn to more wholesome entertainment. Surely, a series called Survivor would seem glib, insensitive, out of touch at a time when towers were collapsing and the country was preparing for two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like so many literal-minded attempts to bet against the unkillability of the American entertainment impulse, this one was dead wrong. Reality TV did not just survive 9/11. It became the defining entertainment form of the 2000s. Like the sci-fi B movies of the Cold War, reality shows, with their themes of constant strife and competition, were a palatable way of processing the angst in the daily news.
Reality shows had, on the one hand, a socially progressive streak: series like Bravo’s makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reflected and encouraged diversity, and reality shows were often more inclusively cast than sitcoms and dramas (even as they played with and against stereotypes). But reality TV also reflected a conservative sentiment: that life was a social-Darwinist competition and that people had gone soft in what was still a hard world. Only you, the individual, could rely on yourself to advance your own interests; the community was an illusion. (If Ayn Rand were born later, she might have conceived The Fountainhead not as a novel but an architecture reality show: Project Skyscraper.)
Hanging over all this was the populist argument of reality TV, that it represented you. TV, it promised, was no longer a velvet-roped club only for the celebrities and the elect. You, or at least someone like you, could get onto the other side.
THUS THE GENRE MULTIPLIED. There were dating shows, quiz shows, home-renovation shows and talent shows. There was Chains of Love, Rock of Love, Flavor of Love, and Conveyor Belt of Love. American Idol, American Candidate, American Gladiators, and American Inventor. Design Star, Nashville Star, Rock Star, and Dancing with the Stars. Joe Millionaire, Average Joe, and The Joe Schmo Show. Shark Tank, Whale Wars, The Mole, and The Swan. Fear Factor, The It Factor, The Benefactor, and The X Factor. Some reality shows cast celebrities, like The Osbournes, the MTV “reality sitcom” about the home life of Ozzy Osbourne—a heavy-metal terror reinvented as a dotty rich dad. Others created celebrities, like The Simple Life, about the exploits of socialite Paris Hilton and her friend Nicole Richie, which premiered weeks after a sex tape of Hilton and her boyfriend was released to the public.
Survivor, meanwhile, was a staggering hit, not simply by the standards of a fragmented media era but by any era. Its first season finale had 51.7 million viewers. The second season was the number-one show on TV. It became such a consistent and established success that its live finale episodes became events in themselves, demanding a dramatic setting.
For the fourth season, that setting was New York’s Central Park. On May 19, 2002, an invitation-only crowd squeezed past post-9/11 security to watch host Jeff Probst announce the winner and Rosie O’Donnell emcee a reunion special at Wollman Rink. It was there, on a tiki-beach set constructed atop the park’s skating center, that Mark Burnett noticed the signs, in all-capital letters, commemorating the rink’s renovation by Donald J. Trump, who, as any Hollywood professional knew, had spent almost a quarter century playing a businessman on TV.
Trump had been approached before by producers about starring in an Osbournes-type reality show, but he turned them down. After the Survivor finale, Burnett came to him with a different idea: Survivor in the business world, an extended “job interview” whose winner would be hired by the Trump Organization.
Burnett made the deal the way contestants would later win out on the show: flattery. “He told me all the right things,” Trump said, among them that he had been Burnett’s idol since he read The Art of the Deal as a young, hustling entrepreneur, selling T-shirts on Venice Beach. It would be a few hours’ work a week. It would be convenient: the “boardroom” set—where Trump would meet with and judge contestants—would be built on a floor in Trump Tower.
Above all, it would give Trump, whose job was largely to be famous, the chance to reintroduce his TV character to a new audience. Every week, on national TV, contestants would leave footprints on their rivals’ skulls for the chance to win his favor. He would be spoken of reverently. He would be feared and desired. Other reality shows might have a host (Jeff Probst) or a judge (Simon Cowell) or a star (Paris Hilton). Donald Trump would be the host, the judge, the star—and the prize.
Trump brought something more to The Apprentice than the ability to offer a job. Reality TV is the art of symbol, and Trump had been amassing signifiers of wealth his entire image-obsessed career. His airplane, a Boeing 727 that he picked up used and plastered with the name TRUMP. The silhouette of a giant “T” standing outside the Trump International hotel. His apartment, an orgasm of gold and chandeliers that outdid the palatial love lairs of The Bachelor. The casinos, the helicopter, all branded with his name. Above all, his foundational brand symbol, Trump Tower, which The Apprentice would use lavishly.
Trump’s set dressing would flash the same signal on The Apprentice—“Rich Guy”—that it had on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, on 60 Minutes, in Home Alone 2, instantly establishing the show’s atmosphere and cachet. And Mark Burnett would not have to pay a dime to create them.
Donald Trump had essentially been building a reality-TV set for decades before reality TV existed. His life’s work was creating Umberto Eco’s daydream simulation of “business,” something that, like Disney’s mechanical crocodiles, more closely matched the popular fantasy of success than the bloodless, boring machinations of actual business did. He had been playing himself as a character for years. He embodied a lifestyle that was enviable yet accessible. His life looked like the last five seconds of a commercial for scratch-off lottery tickets.
The author Fran Lebowitz would later say that Trump was “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” But that’s exactly what reality TV is about. The Bachelor is a lonely person’s idea of love. Survivor is a shut-in’s idea of nature. The Apprentice didn’t need a businessman. It needed the idea of a businessman. That was Donald Trump. It was the entire point of him. He had spent a lifetime in symbiosis with television, adopting its metabolism, learning to feed its appetites. Now, finally, he would merge with it.
THE OPENING SHOT of The Apprentice, which premiered in January 2004, places you hurtling toward Manhattan over the water. It is a ride-of-the-Valkyries assault of images of wealth, narrated by Donald Trump:
New York. My city. [Video of a teeming Times Square.] Where the wheels of the global economy never stop turning. A concrete metropolis of unparalleled strength and purpose [overhead shot of the Chrysler Building] that drives the business world [floor of the New York Stock Exchange]. Manhattan is a tough place. This island is the real jungle. If you’re not careful, it can chew you up and spit you out. [Homeless man, sleeping on a bench.] But if you work hard [construction workers toiling on a building], you can really hit it big, and I mean really big.
Trump didn’t just bring his own props to The Apprentice. He brought his own stories: the self-aggrandizement of The Art of the Deal . . .
[Interior of Donald Trump in his limo.] My name’s Donald Trump and I’m the largest real-estate developer in New York. [Pan down 40 Wall Street, to the lettering “THE TRUMP BUILDING.”] I own buildings all over the place. Model agencies. [Trump watches a model strut down the catwalk.] The Miss Universe pageant. Jetliners. Golf courses. Casinos. [Exterior of the blindingly lit Trump Taj Mahal.] And private resorts like Mar-a-Lago, one of the most spectacular estates anywhere in the world.
. . . and the face-saving narrative of The Art of the Comeback, which the show retold as prologue to its narrative of strivers climbing the jagged glass wall of success:
But it wasn’t always so easy. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back and I won, big league. I used my brain. [Trump talks on the phone in his office.] I used my negotiating skills. [Trump shakes hands with men in suits.] And I worked it all out. [Liveried doormen at the gleaming entrance of Trump Tower.] Now my company’s bigger than it ever was, it’s stronger than it ever was, and I’m having more fun than I ever had. [Trump poses with boxing promoter Don King.] I’ve mastered the art of the deal. [Still-life of Trump: The Game.] And I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest quality brand. [Rows and rows of Trump Ice water bottles.] And as the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else.
In barely two minutes, the opening communicates a message that Trump had spent most of the 1990s trying to send: that Donald Trump is not a has-been or a trivia question—he’s everywhere and everything. The terms of his survival, his transformation into a figurehead—the introduction glides past all that. (That “I own” in the monologue ignores, for instance, that the Taj Mahal was by then owned, following a prepackaged bankruptcy, by the publicly traded Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. And “largest real-estate developer”? Well, who’s to say what “large” means!)
Like his creditors past, The Apprentice is interested in preserving Trump’s brand value. Donald Trump’s name is on things, the introduction says, on fabulous things—and now it is on NBC, on your TV, the most important real estate in the world.
The opening ends with Trump seated, hunched over, in his helicopter: “Who will succeed? And who will fail? And who will be . . . The Apprentice?” Then, through the magic of editing, we’re sucked out of the chopper as it tilts toward the skyline, TRUMP on its side, its passenger lofted above it all.
LIKE SURVIVOR, The Apprentice has a liturgy, every episode following a sequence as ritual as the Catholic mass:
The Opening Hymn. “What if . . . you could have it all?” the opening titles ask, over a golden cross of Manhattan sky and a fisheye shot of a private jet. On the logo, Trump looms over the Manhattan skyline, tall as the Empire State Building, as a man with a briefcase runs toward him desperately. He, or his body double, walks through a doorway, a black silhouette drenched in light (the same way he would walk on stage at the 2016 Republican National Convention). He struts from a limo, a model’s pout on his face, hand on his silk tie. The contestants’ names run by on stock tickers, amid a dizzying montage of Trump branding. Trump Tower’s sharp corners reflect golden light. You hear the heartbeat bassline of “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays. If you remember only one lyric, it’s the infectious chorus: “Money money money money—Money!” For decades, Donald Trump had been a brand. Now he has a jingle.
The Introductory Rites. We join the contestants in their Trump Tower suite, where they get a call on a gold-toned phone—like the one Ivana Trump showed off on This Old House two decades before—summoning them to meet “Mr. Trump.” (It is always “Mr. Trump.”)
The Presentation of the Host. We happen upon Mr. Trump busying himself with business: inspecting a construction site, visiting a golf course, taking a phone call (“Be a hardass, Scott . . . OK, so long”), getting upbeat reports from underlings. (“So Barry, I hear we’re killing the competition.” “We are!”)
The Weekly Text. The two teams, modeled on the competing “tribes” in Survivor, get the episode’s task, which might involve drawing up an ad campaign or operating a restaurant. The challenges, triumphs, and backbiting, all overseen by Trump’s associates, fill the middle of the show, interrupted by—
The Homily. Like Trump’s books, The Apprentice is pitched as self-help. Each week, Trump delivers a bit of canned wisdom that foreshadows the conflicts that will play out in the challenge. “Don’t negotiate with underlings.” “Nobody else is going to fight for you.” “The leader that wants to be popular, that leader is never going to be successful.” Having listened as a boy to self-help minister Norman Vincent Peale preaching the power of positive thinking, he is now assuming the pulpit.
The Offering of Gifts. After the task, the winning team collects a reward, which is usually Donald Trump. They dine with him at the 21 Club’s “Fred Trump Table” and jet off to his Florida palace, Mar-a-Lago. In the first episode, they visit his apartment—Heaven, if Liberace were God—the camera lingering on the statuary, fountains, and gilded ceilings to the swell of synthesizer strings and a chorus. The apartment was made for this kind of public display, even if Trump tells the winners, “I show this apartment to very few people. Presidents. Kings.” And now, by Nielsen’s estimate, around 18.5 million Americans.
The Confession of Sins. The losers repair to the boardroom, where, Trump warns, “somebody will be fired.” The soundstage corporate lair is inky-dark as an old master painting. (Producers designed the set after the room where Ned Beatty gives his “The world is a business” speech in the movie Network.) It oozes cigar-club masculinity, even when Trump is flanked by a female sidekick: the steely Carolyn Kepcher (“There are many men buried in her wake”) or his daughter Ivanka. It’s what you would produce if someone handed you a crayon and told you to draw what “business” looks like. Gold door handles. Stiff chairs. A stack of note paper that no one ever uses. And the massive wooden table, where Trump sits in a red-leather throne.
The Prayers for Forgiveness. Now, the free-for-all begins. It’s a reverse communion, designed to sunder the congregation rather than bring it together. Players assign blame and plead innocence. They cajole, they attack. Above all, they suck up, reminding Trump that they’ve studied his biography and worldview—like Sam Solovey, who appeals to Trump’s often-repeated belief that success is genetic: “I’ve got genetic pool big-time, Mr. Trump, just like you got from your father, Fred Trump, and your mother, Mary Trump.”* Often, Trump ignores what happened in the challenge altogether, basing his decision on what happens in this room, which leads to—
The Concluding Rite. The most politically significant two-word catchphrase in TV history, a verbal execution that tells you Mr. Trump is decisive, that someone must lose so that you can win, that life is harsh and dark and thrilling, with salvation for the elect but wailing and gnashing for those who displease the Father and are cast from the garden: “You’re fired.”
The mass is ended. Get your ass outta here.
OVER SEVERAL SEASONS of Survivor, Burnett had learned how to produce a tight, riveting TV competition, and the first season of The Apprentice shows it. The casting aims at giving everyone in the audience someone to see themselves in: racially and geographically diverse, evenly split by gender. For red-state Americans, there’s Troy, the “country bumpkin” with a high-school diploma, pitted against elite-educated city slickers. (All the contestants are introduced with broad symbolism: a player from Los Angeles is pictured in front of the Hollywood sign, a real-estate agent at the gates of a mansion, and so on). The challenges and close living quarters maximize conflict. (As well as, fingers crossed, romance—although that can be implied in editing if Cupid doesn’t cooperate. The first season milked a flirtation between Nick and Amy for all it was worth.)
Above all, Burnett knew how to push buttons. Reality TV, from The Real World on, thrived on divisions that people recognized from life. A big one was gender. The first season of The Apprentice, and some later ones, divided the candidates into teams of men vs. women, which had worked for Burnett earlier on Survivor: The Amazon. This allowed the show to toy with stereotypes while ostensibly disavowing them. (“Women have a tougher time in the workplace—or so they say,” said Trump, who would later suggest that a female debate moderator who was tough on him was having her period.) The show encouraged the women to use sexuality (they pitched a phallic ad campaign for an airplane-leasing company to win the second episode) while shaming them for it (a contestant was fired for dropping her skirt to sell candy in the second season).
The biggest, shiniest button was race. Survivor established that a breakout reality show needs a villain, and The Apprentice found its first in Omarosa Manigault, a former aide to vice president Al Gore and the only black woman in the cast. Tall, intense, and imposing, Omarosa (her mononym is the true mark of her fame) recognized that The Apprentice was a psychological game first and a business challenge second (if that). She used calculated drama and cutting remarks to destabilize her opponents and wreak turmoil—for instance, accusing a competitor of racism for using the phrase “calling the kettle black.”
This was gold for reality TV: people getting “real” about race, the ultimate topic sublimated by polite society. This guaranteed her screen time: “When I was a good girl, there were no cameras on,” she said. “The minute I started arguing, there was a camera shooting me from every angle.” It also allowed her, as media critic Jennifer L. Pozner pointed out, to be edited according to a TV template dating back to Amos and Andy: the Angry Black Woman. She was a troublemaker, overbearing and strategically irrational—and, to white viewers inclined toward such messages, an example of an African American cynically deploying the “race card” for her advantage.
Omarosa was playing the most Trumpian game: Always foment conflict. Chaos creates opportunity. Divide your opponents with irrationality. Above all: Bad attention is better than no attention. She would not win the season, but she won celebrity, and would have the longest association with Trump. In 2010, he appeared with her on Donald J. Trump Presents The Ultimate Merger, a dating show in which she was the bachelorette. (“Is there anybody that can tame you?” he asked, sliding her a metal briefcase with dossiers on prospective suitors.) She appeared in a string of other reality shows and published a self-help book, The Bitch Switch. After his election, Trump hired her to a $179,700-a-year White House position as communications director for the Office of Public Liaison.
BUT THIS TIME, the star of the reality show was not the villain. It was Donald Trump, or rather the television character “Donald Trump,” birthed on Tom Brokaw’s couch in 1980 and now revised again, a quarter-century later, on NBC. The Apprentice could use Trump as a shorthand for wealth because he had made himself one—insouciant, cocky, boastful—on 60 Minutes and Robin Leach and Phil Donahue. It could present him as amusing and accessible because he later played himself that way on The Fresh Prince and Drew Carey.
Like movie producers rebooting Batman, Burnett and Trump made the new, updated character a palimpsest of the previous versions. Yes, Trump was all those things, The Apprentice said, but he’s also a very serious businessman. His heavy-browed scowl, his jowls, his parodic puff of hair—these recast the 1980s tabloid playboy as a leonine captain of industry. He had the brand; he looked the part.
TV had changed in the twenty-four years since Trump charmed Brokaw on Today—become brasher, more confrontational, less soothing. In a fragmented media market, TV shows didn’t aim to be “for everyone”; to stand out, they had to be willing to alienate someone.
TV, in other words, was ready for the 100-proof version of Donald Trump. His character was, essentially, an antihero: the blunt, impolite apex predator who knew how to get things done. And he was—because the show’s format required it—instinctive and quick and a shrewd judge of character.
His catchphrase, that curt “You’re fired,” combined the ethos of reality TV and Trump’s mythmaking as the man with the golden gut who cut through the crap in his drive to have the best. Maybe it wasn’t nice, maybe he wasn’t nice, but then, success wasn’t nice. Was being nice going to get you a job in the miserable post-9/11 economy? Were we going to whip al-Qaeda’s asses by being nice? No; we had to choose. With every firing, the show’s premise told us, we got closer to perfection, closer to Trump.
Was his instinct actually that unerring? The producers—mindful of how the season’s story arc and logic would play on TV—consulted with Trump on who did well and poorly in the challenges. Still, editors on the early seasons told the journal Cinemontage that Trump would often make “arbitrary decisions which had nothing to do with people’s merit . . . based on whom he liked or disliked personally, whether it be for looks or lifestyle.” The producers would then have to go to the tape and edit the episode to rationalize his decision. Clay Aiken, a former American Idol finalist who appeared on a later Celebrity Apprentice season, claimed that Trump would get firing instructions from producers through a device disguised to look like a phone.
For The Apprentice to sell itself as the best reality show, its contestants had to be competing for the best prize. That meant Trump had to be the best businessman. Jonathan Braun, a supervising editor on the early seasons, described the show’s mission as “Make Trump look good, make him look wealthy, legitimate.” Mark Burnett was as invested as Trump’s 1990s creditors in maintaining his façade.
So the crew constructed that majestic boardroom set, bypassing the shabby rooms and “chipped furniture” of the actual Trump Organization offices. Episode after episode staged visits to Trump-branded enterprises, where lackeys reported good news and swollen coffers. Some of his associates were famous in their own right, like Jean-Georges Vongerichten, chef at the four-star restaurant Jean-Georges at the Trump International Hotel. Business is “amazing,” Vongerichten says, “everybody’s coming in, all the stars, everybody.”
Trump’s portrayal also borrowed from a less-conventional business archetype. Braun described the music the editors played when Trump would be shown riding down the Trump Tower escalator as “this funk, pimp-walk . . . like the head pimp in charge.” When winners of a season 1 challenge stay in the penthouse of the Trump Taj Mahal, gorging on caviar and shrimp, contestant Kwame Jackson marvels, “This is some pimped-out, rap-video shit.”†
What is a pimp? In pop culture, going back to 1970s blaxploitation movies like Super Fly and The Mack, with their richly begarbed heroes—and more broadly, to Hugh Hefner and his celebritized harem keeping—he’s a man defined by sexual potency, mastery of women, a hint of danger, and a shit-ton of flash. He may not be a role model, but he lives large in such an entertaining manner that the audience accepts him. He doesn’t hide his fortune, he displays it—he even wears it. That strut, that vicarious spectacle, is his kickback. He gives us a show.
Mack daddy Trump, in The Apprentice, is an object of fear and desire. He’s shown in power positions: riding in a helicopter, working the phones in his limo, announcing a challenge by video from his private plane like a spymaster in a secret-agent movie. He’s shot from below, to appear larger. He announces the first episode’s challenge—running a lemonade stand—from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange, like the Pope delivering the urbi et orbi at St. Peter’s. A visit to Trump Model Management shows him surrounded by beautiful women who must cater to him. (“Are you doing well?” he asks one. “Yes, I’m really, really happy,” she says.)
He must be courted, appeased, emulated. He is spoken of and worried about even when he’s not around. Contestant Tammy Lee says that she’s doesn’t care whether the other candidates like her, because “the only person I really need to be concerned with liking me, ostracizing me, is Donald Trump.” A candidate lunching with Trump takes care not to touch her shrimp cocktail “until Mr. Trump does.” When he arrives at the Taj to oversee a challenge, he glides stone-faced down the escalator like a golden god, as guests crane their necks for a glimpse. The Apprentice used a version of this shot over and over, and then he heisted it for his campaign announcement in Trump Tower.
As edited for TV, Trump does everything better. No: Trump does everything the best. (Trump is never accompanied by a comparative when a superlative is available.) His preferred method of self-promotion—the un-checkable brag—is perfect for the stage-crafted exaggerations of reality TV. The Taj, he says in an episode, is “the number one hotel in Atlantic City.” Well, sure . . . maybe. What does “number one” mean, exactly?
When he and the week’s winning team visit the New York Mets at Shea Stadium, he throws a baseball, and there’s an editing cut to a fielder catching a ball with a satisfying smack, as if Trump had thrown a perfect clothesline. Did he? Was that even the same ball that Trump threw? It must have been. Trump succeeds. Trump is success.
Above all, there is the name, everywhere. “TRUMP” is in giant gleaming letters outside the boardroom where candidates enter to answer for their sins. “Trump” is a noun (“They like Trump”) and adjective (“This is Trump luxury”). Sometimes it’s both in the same sentence (“Largest windows. Highest ceilings. You see why Trump is Trump.”). Watching The Apprentice is like watching the scene in Being John Malkovich where the title actor goes inside his own consciousness and every phoneme in the language is replaced by his name. (“Malkovich?” “Malkovich!” “Malkovich.”)
The show builds on Trump’s media character—braggart, shark, showboat—but expands it. Now, Donald Trump is fun! “Where else do you get a good time like with Trump?” Trump asks an employee, a female lawyer he’s just introduced to America with, “There’s Miss Universe, right there!” He pokes fun at his multiple marriages, like Johnny Carson did: “I know a lot about weddings—unfortunately.” He jokes about his impossible floof of hair, inviting players to pull it to prove it’s not a wig.
He even plays Cupid, spiriting Nick and Amy off to Mar-a-Lago late in season 1 with their parents, as on an episode of The Bachelor. They eat caviar and goggle at the surroundings, including an oversized Trump portrait hanging in the library bar. This romantic-getaway segment is opulent and frankly bewitching. The message, repeated over and over on the show: Some day, you could live like this, if you follow the way of Trump.
Trump is luxury. Trump is love. Trump is what every parent wants for their children.
(Trump would deploy the same props as president. Mar-a-Lago, the “Winter White House,” became a symbol for a kind of privatized public sphere, the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by Third World kleptocrats, where Trump would hobnob with the president of China or order military strikes over a fat slab of chocolate cake while the members of his private club snapped selfies. As he prepared for his inauguration, he posed for a Twitter photo “Writing my inaugural address” at the Mar-a-Lago concierge desk in front of a wall of Spanish tile—Sharpie in hand, staring into the middle distance, corner of his notepad pulled up so we couldn’t see if it was blank or not. It was a picture of statesmanship as Mark Burnett might stage it for B-roll footage; it looked like “writing” the same way a scowling man at a boardroom table looked like “business.”)
The Apprentice also casts Trump as magnanimous and selfless, qualities he has rarely been accused of. When contestant Heidi Bressler learns that her mother is sick, Trump offers her permission to quit and go home. “I felt like I was talking to a friend,” she says in a sit-down with the camera.
In season 3, a contestant asks Trump if it’s true that he once paid a New Jersey couple’s mortgage after his limousine broke down and they assisted him. This is an ancient, apocryphal tale, told about celebrities from Nat King Cole to Perry Como. Trump’s office had denied it to the press years ago. But this time, after a pause, Trump says, “That’s true.” (Or, at least, the editors intercut Trump saying, “That’s true” after footage of the question. Either way, “Never happened” would not have made good TV.)
In the boardroom, he’s witty, with a cutting sense of humor and quick ripostes to the candidates’ excuses. He’s meritocratic, despite having been handed a business—and hundreds of millions of dollars—by his father. Season 3 divides the candidates between a highly educated “book smarts” team and a “street smarts” team of high-school grads, burnishing the “blue-collar billionaire” image of a man who, in real life, referenced his bachelor’s degree from Wharton business school almost as often as his surname. (“I love the poorly educated!” he crowed on the campaign trail, referencing his poll numbers among that demographic.)
All the theatrical power of TV is invested in making one aging man look desirable, one skinflint look generous, one lucky rich boy look self-made, one checkered business career look flawless, one accumulation of set dressing look like reality.
DO AUDIENCES BUY IT? The common slur on reality-TV fans is that they’re suckers who watch uncritically. But that misses a key point: no one more strongly believes that “reality TV isn’t reality” than its fans. Part of the pleasure of watching a reality show is looking out for the artifice. How is the editing trying to fake you out—building tension, leading you to believe that one player is going to be voted off instead of another? Are the American Idol producers trying to give a singer a boost by giving her a better performance slot? The true connoisseur of reality shows knows how to look for the “loser edit”—that is, to judge, from how a contestant’s story is framed, whether he or she is about to get the boot.
If anything, dedicated reality fans may watch more skeptically than most TV viewers. A 2006 Time magazine poll, taken in The Apprentice’s heyday, found that only 30 percent of respondents believed that reality shows largely reflect what actually happened. A quarter of them believed the shows were almost totally fabricated. But they still watched and enjoyed. Arguably, they were attracted by the appeal to their savviness. Other people are suckered by the editing, you tell yourself, whereas you see through it. Trump would rely on this same dynamic as a candidate and president: His devoted followers would write off his obvious, provable lies as “jokes” they could see through, or as empty rhetoric that only their enemies were uptight enough to care about.
But The Apprentice also performs a kind of magician’s misdirection for Trump. As a reality viewer, you’re trained to look for artifice when it comes to the contestants, not him. Is Omarosa really crazy, or crazy like a fox? Are the producers showing you the screw-ups by the men’s team so you’ll be surprised when they win the challenge?
You’re looking, in other words, for deception and sleight-of-hand on the part of the game. But in The Apprentice, Trump isn’t the game. He’s the game board, the premise. His success, his wealth, his celebrity are all presented as a given, manifest in all those weeping chandeliers in his triplex. As a viewer, you don’t question the extent of his business holdings, because they’re what gives the game the idea that contestants are competing for a prize of value. If The Apprentice is Survivor for the business world, then Trump is the island.
AND WHAT IS THE GAME? Ostensibly, it’s about business. But as the season goes on, boardroom after boardroom, it becomes clear that it is mostly about the ability to sell one’s self.
The challenges, which take up most of the episode, determine which team goes into the boardroom. But once the doors shut, it’s often as if the challenge never happened. The boardroom becomes a pressure-cooker game in itself, where the object is to please the boss, undermine your colleagues, and find a more vulnerable teammate to sacrifice.
Facing Trump in the boardroom is like being trapped in a cage with a capricious monster. You don’t know what he wants, what will anger him, or why, but it’s your job to make sure he eats your adversary instead of you.
The boardroom is like a platonic visualization of Trump’s mindset. There is the idea, which he practiced in business and politics, that conflict, especially among teammates, is the most productive state of humanity. He loves to put contestants in prisoner’s-dilemma situations, asking them in turn, “Who should go?” You could get in trouble for naming your opponent simply because they named you. You could get in trouble for not doing it.
But it is important to fight. Boardroom Trump loves a fighter. “I know a lot of people who are overly aggressive,” Trump says in one episode. “But they do very well.”
In season 1, he fires a player for turning the other cheek toward Omarosa, who’d attacked her: “To me, that was a form of weakness,” he says. Ceding a personal advantage, whether out of confidence or principle, is stupid and he hates it: he fires a season 2 contestant for giving up the immunity he’d gained by winning a challenge.
Over and over, candidates seal their fate simply by saying one damn thing too many. In the season 5 premiere, he’s lengthily dressing down a player who failed at a challenge, when a seemingly safe candidate, Summer Zervos, interjects. “Why should you interrupt me when I’m knocking the hell out of him?” Trump says. “How stupid is that?” He fires Zervos instead. (Years later, Zervos would accuse Trump of sexual harassment and sue him for defamation, claiming that he groped her when she approached him about job opportunities after the season ended.)
There is always a wrong thing to say to Trump, and that thing changes every episode. A candidate who compliments an opponent is “not very smart.” A candidate who criticizes an opponent is “nasty.” He criticizes even-keeled competitors for lacking fire in the belly. He criticizes others, especially women, for losing control of their emotions. Women who use sexuality to win challenges are undignified. But when a candidate says she thought it would be undignified to wear a chicken suit for a fast-food promotion, Trump takes offense: “I wore a chicken suit on Saturday Night Live. Did anybody see Saturday Night Live?” What, are you too goddam good to wear a chicken suit like Donald J. Trump?
You get the sense that the boardroom is the real game for Trump. The challenges are a formality—blah blah salesmanship, blah blah teamwork. In the boardroom, there is no team. There is only the self. There is you in relation to Trump, attempting to commune with the mind of Trump, to anticipate his moods and needs. There is no long-term strategy, only the moment. It is a dark vortex of chaos and opportunity. Everything is situational—you must react in the moment and be attuned to sudden, microscopic shifts in the mood of the boss. There is no being happy for your teammates. The success of another is a wound to be nursed and avenged.
The boardroom would be a direct blueprint for Trump’s administration, a dogpile of competitors, cronies, and relatives throttling one another daily for survival. During one astounding week in summer 2017, he brought in communications director Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci—the East Coast loudmouth, a favorite reality-show type—who promptly precipitated the resignation of press secretary Sean Spicer and the ouster of chief of staff Reince Priebus, then denigrated top adviser Steve Bannon to The New Yorker as an egomaniac who was constantly “trying to suck [his] own cock.” Scaramucci was gone ten days after he was named to the job, and Bannon left a few weeks later, the White House equivalent of a special quadruple-elimination episode of The Apprentice. What seemed like bedlam from the outside—because it was—invigorated Trump, who believed, like a born reality-TV producer, that warfare and distrust were the most productive and entertaining modes of existence. If his team of suck-ups, throat-cutters, and toadies were constantly fighting among themselves, it meant that they were fighting for his favor—and that meant that he was the one who mattered, he was the sun who gave every flower life, and every day would be the Who Loves Father Best contest that he craved.
Above all, the Apprentice boardroom embodies the highest value of reality TV and a key to Trump’s persona: being “real,” which is different from being honest. To be real is to be the most entertaining form of your self; he encouraged people, Omarosa later wrote, “to exaggerate the unique part of themselves.” To be real is to be willing to offend, to tell someone off to their face, to “say what’s on your mind,” even if what’s on your mind happens to be a lie.
This code of conduct is crystallized in an exchange in a season one boardroom. When a contestant accuses a teammate of acting unethically, she turns to Trump: you wouldn’t want to work with an unethical person, would you? “I would like to tell you the answer is no,” he says, “but it doesn’t always work out, because you don’t know.”
Trump isn’t really answering the question. To the extent that he’s implying an answer, it’s that if his colleagues are shady—his construction associates, say, or Russian partners on a development deal—he doesn’t want to know about it. But in the framing of The Apprentice, Trump has the high ground. He’s the one being real.
THE APPRENTICE ENDED its first season with its finale atop the week’s Nielsen ratings, a one-week accomplishment that led Trump, for years after, to call the series “the number-one show on TV.” That claim was a lie, but his gifts as a reality host were real enough. He had a genuine ability to improvise—in the live finale as well as the taped episodes. He knew instinctually what the camera wanted, the kind of conflicts and drama that hook an audience. And he showed that he could maintain this kind of performance for an extended run rather than a single TV appearance here and there.
Donald Trump, the boy with one of the first color television sets in Queens, the young man who dreamed of running off to LA to go into the movie business, was finally a star.
NBC, which had envisioned The Apprentice with different businesspeople hosting each season, changed its mind. It wanted more Trump, and so, as always, did Trump. He threw himself into the performance. He had been notorious in the media for decades, but this was different. Said Jim Dowd, NBC’s public-relations rep for The Apprentice, “He was a hero, and he had not been one before.”
The show’s fans especially loved his catchphrase, “You’re fired.” Which is to say, they loved the antihero who embodied the dream of living like a king and telling people that they sucked without worrying about hurt feelings or repercussions. This was always a key part of the Donald Trump character. Now it defined him.
Trump took to the publicity circuit like a Hollywood ingenue. He swelled with the attention. The man who was once Tom Brokaw’s soft-spoken guest now went on the Today show weekly, holding forth on that week’s Apprentice and on topics in the news. He ate up his celebrity, launching short-lived brand extensions—Trump University, Trump Steaks—and hanging up a fake cover of Time magazine (“Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ Is a Television Smash!”) in his golf clubs. He did skits on Saturday Night Live and at the Emmys. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He tried to develop a scripted TV drama, The Tower, about a ruthless businessman loosely based on him—basically Fox’s Profit, this time as autobiography.
He had a character he was expected to produce—the You’re Fired Guy—and he obliged. He developed a go-to pose for publicity stills: eyes furiously narrowed, mouth opened as if in mid-scream, thumb cocked and index finger pointing straight at the camera. On red carpets, he would wheel around and shoot the pose at camera after camera: You’re fired you’re fired you’re fired. He was a “You’re fired” delivery machine.
You can see this in the second season of The Apprentice. Like a breakout sitcom character, the Trump character becomes exaggerated: tougher, more insulting, determined to give the crowds twice as much of what they wanted, twice as hard. The general tone is harsher, sharper-edged. Speaking to Bill Rancic, the season 1 winner now assigned to a Trump Organization project in Chicago, he signs off, “You’d better do a good job, Bill, or your ass is grass.” A poor team performance in a challenge is “disgusting.” When he reshuffles the team rosters at the beginning of an episode, he wraps up: “That’s life. And that’s business. So deal with it.”
Trump’s season-3 Apprentice introduction begins: “My name is Donald Trump. You know everything about me.” The show was, at this point, still lucrative for NBC, partly because of its aggressive product placements. (The challenges were by now almost exclusively built around non-Trump brands: Best Buy, Pepsi, Mattel, UPS, QVC, M&M/Mars.)
The ratings, however, never matched their season-1 peak. One problem may have been burnout. Most reality competitions spotlighted their contestants rather than the host, so they generated new stars and new stories every season. Some, like American Idol, aired only once a year, the better to make their seasons seem like an event. The Apprentice lived and died by Trump, and NBC ran two seasons a year.
On average, 20.7 million people watched the first season. That number drifted down steadily to 9.7 million by season 5. Trump—always one to fixate on numeric measures of worth—obsessed over the ratings and lied about them to reporters. (He would carry this numbers fixation to the presidency, lying about his popular-vote loss and the size of his inauguration crowds. He would even taunt action-movie star and former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger on Twitter for the weak ratings of his brief-lived revival of The Celebrity Apprentice: “Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got swamped [or destroyed] by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT.”)
Trump blamed NBC’s scheduling for the ratings drop; he blamed the network’s decision to air a spin-off, starring lifestyle magnate Martha Stewart, concurrently with season 4. He did not, heaven forbid, blame himself; he just made his performance shoutier and more belligerent. NBC and the producers tried various twists to revive interest. There was another men vs. women season; there was the book smarts vs. street smarts season; the episodes focused more on the emotional backstories of contestants. Finally, for the sixth season in 2007, The Apprentice did what so many flagging TV series do: it took the show on the road.
The Apprentice: Los Angeles is a magnificent work of tacky desperation, an attempt to salvage a lucrative franchise with gimmicks. It opens with Trump riding in his limo through rainy New York City, talking on the phone to his third wife, Melania, who’s with their baby son Barron in California, where, Trump announces, he’s decided to build a house. Cut to a Tonight-show style big-band theme and Trump driving a sun-kissed freeway in a convertible (“I love L.A.!”) and pulling up to the mansion that will double as his Los Angeles office. Melania—the most Trump-like of Trump’s wives, with a model’s glower that matches his own—joins him in the driveway with baby Barron, and the Trumps fix the camera with a dead-eyed stare.
The season lards up the game with twists and clichés, the biggest being a Survivor-style gimmick in which the losing team sleeps outside in a tent encampment, drawing water from hoses and cooking over a fire, filmed with night-vision cameras. The vibe is chintzy and mean; despite the glitzy setting, the season misses the aspirational glamor of the New York edition.‡ Trump, meanwhile, has gone from tough to grumpy, barking at contestants to “shut up” and snapping when a team walks into the boardroom wearing promotional caps that they were given for the challenge: “Take your hats off. You’re inside. Take ’em off.”
No one was having any fun, on that side of the screen or this one. The viewership dropped to 7.5 million, making it the seventy-fifth-most-watched show on network TV.
THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN it for The Apprentice, if Ben Silverman—a producer who made the short-lived culinary-world reality show The Restaurant with Burnett—had not become programming chief of NBC and been strapped for content by the 2007–08 TV writers’ strike. The strike took sitcoms, dramas, and late-night comedy shows off the air—but not reality shows, whose story editors (writers in all but name) were not covered by the union. Silverman scheduled the revival of The Apprentice, with another gimmick that would prove permanent.
The Celebrity Apprentice was a shadow of the original phenomenon. Many of the celebrities were barely recognizable, and they were competing for charity rather than for a job, which diminished the stakes. In the arc of Trump’s career, however, Celebrity Apprentice is a fascinating document. It is to the original The Apprentice as 1990s Trump was to 1980s Trump: a diminished, winking self-parody of something that used to be a mass phenomenon.
Like the Trump of his sitcom-cameo years, his show turns into a metafictional construct, a simulacrum of itself. The theme of the show becomes, like the theme of Trump’s career, less about business acumen and more about how to monetize celebrity. The contestants are encouraged to “use your star power” and to call in their famous friends to lend publicity to their business challenges. In the first episode, former Playboy Playmate of the Year Tiffany Fallon gets a scolding for not phoning Hugh Hefner.
Because the celebrities are playing for charity, Celebrity Apprentice also becomes less cutthroat and more sentimental. Not all of the contestants play the game sweetly, however, which sets up an angel-vs.-devil first-season finale between country star Trace Adkins, who exudes aw-shucks humility, and British journalist turned American newscaster/reality host Piers Morgan, who plays the sneering heavy. (Both stars, of course, are playing roles that benefit them in their real, off-show careers.) Morgan’s charity is the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which provides treatment to wounded soldiers, allowing Trump to appear somberly on stage in the finale with decorated veterans—looking very much like a president—an American flag billowing on a giant flat-screen TV behind him.
The finale builds to a strikingly meta finish, an interrogation of the very values of television that’s simultaneously moralistic and cynical in a way that only reality TV can be. Morgan, making his case, demands that Trump make a decision, not just as to whom to hire, but about what the core priorities of his show are.
“It would be very helpful to all of us, Mr. Trump, if you would just clarify absolutely what the purpose of this game was,” Morgan asks. “Was it to be the nicest guy in the boardroom, or was it to be the most efficient, effective businessman-stroke-charity fundraiser?”
For the first four decades of American television, the answer would have been: nice guy. The era of Tony Soprano and Richard Hatch said otherwise, and Piers Morgan walked away the winner.
THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE did its job well enough. About 11 million people watched that first season, and the later seasons stabilized in the high seven figures. It was, for NBC, OK—not a top-40 show, but a decent performer that didn’t cost too much and had a nice income stream of product placements.
But for Trump, it meant, again, having had a taste of being a phenomenon and looking forward to a lifetime being . . . just OK: the guy who used to be the You’re Fired Guy hauling out his shtick with a cast of other used-to-bes. He would be the broken statue of Ozymandias in the pop-culture desert, his once-towering ratings clipped off at the shins.
It was about this time that Trump revived his old interest, as a political gadfly. But this time—in a fragmented media age, with specialty audiences looking for personalities who superserved their interests—he did not position himself as a moderate appealing to a bipartisan audience who wanted to hear from a no-nonsense businessman. Instead, he found a receptive audience for his angry, abrasive character in the angry, abrasive sphere of conservative media, especially Fox News.
There, he was a hit. In March 2011, Fox’s morning show, Fox & Friends, aired an ad for a new regular segment: “Mondays with Trump.” It plugged the weekly call-in guest as “Bold, brash, and never bashful,” with an interview clip of him declaring, “My message is a better message than anybody else.” Against a bright blue background with “TRUMP” in capital letters, he stood, eyes narrowed, teeth bared, pointing his finger-gun dead at the viewer.
The You’re Fired Guy was back.
* In The Truth About Trump, Michael D’Antonio writes that the Trump family believes in “racehorse theory,” the notion—a form of eugenics, the quack theory embraced by pseudoscientific racists and the Nazis—that a talented father and mother will produce genetically superior offspring. The belief in “good genes” recurs on The Apprentice. “Negotiation,” Trump says in the third episode, is “almost innate. It’s in the genes. A negotiator is born.”
† Jackson, the other African American in the first season’s cast, would lose in the finale; Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, later told Vanity Fair that Trump had said, “There’s no way I can let this black fag win.” Randal Pinkett, the first black contestant to win an Apprentice season, told The New Yorker that Trump asked him if he would share the title with another contestant, a white woman.
‡ The visit to L.A. did allow Trump to come full circle on his teenage worship of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, hosting a reward party at the Playboy Mansion for the team that won a challenge to design and market bathing suits, with the contestants as models. One player on the winning team, Surya Yalamanchili, recalled Trump telling Hefner, “It’s hard for me to tell which of these girls are yours, and which ones are mine.”