Word: burnette
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...entertainment, The Apprentice is not quite Survivor--hype aside, Manhattan can't out-jungle the jungle--but it's much more exciting than Burnett's take on the dining business in The Restaurant. The challenges, which make up the bulk of the episodes, are cleverly designed and guarantee dramatic sparks. Above all, it was smart to borrow the provocative battle-of-the-sexes motif from Survivor: Amazon, even if the casting questions Burnett and Trump's claim that the contestants were chosen (from 215,000 applicants) mainly for brains. The women range from hottest-woman-in-your-office...
Sixteen contestants? Two teams? Cut-throat competition? On an island? Any resemblance to Survivor is intentional. The Apprentice is produced by Survivor's Mark Burnett, who met Trump in 2002 when he leased Central Park's skating rink from Trump for the show's live finale. "He told me all the right things," says Trump--among them, that the tycoon had been Burnett's idol ever since Burnett read Trump's The Art of the Deal when the then aspiring producer was selling T shirts in Venice Beach, Calif...
...Burnett's fandom is apt. As much salesman as entertainer, he turned reality-TV product placements into an art form (there are, he says, some 40 in The Apprentice). At heart, The Apprentice is a love letter from Burnett--a naturalized American from Britain--to Yankee capitalism. "The whole world takes America's charity," he says, "and that money is created through entrepreneurs." Survivor, with its tension between group effort and look-out-for-number-onemanship, has always been a metaphor for the corporate jungle. The Apprentice uses the business world as a metaphor for that metaphor. (Lest anyone miss...
...time to the camera. A little jowlier than you may remember from his '80s heyday yet still imposing, he's a stiff narrator but comes alive in the "boardroom," site of the climactic firing meetings, charming his candidates one minute, curtly smacking them down the next. Trump and Burnett, trying to distinguish The Apprentice as the brainy reality alternative, like to say there is "no dating" on it. That's not true. The men and women alike try to win Trump's heart, to learn what moves him, to find the je ne sais quoi that will make Trump...
...that an inaccurate reflection of the corporate world? If only. The Apprentice is about cunning and sales savvy, yes, but even more about who can--like Burnett did--learn how to say "all the right things" to a man of great accomplishment and greater ego. That person will walk away not with an engagement but--perhaps sexier in a still tight employment market--a job. And if really lucky, maybe even a handshake...