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What's in it for Trump? We're in a bull market for reality TV about rich people (Rich Girls, The Simple Life), but most of the silver-spooners on those shows have not come off well. (An exception was Trump's daughter Ivanka in HBO's documentary Born Rich. Amid a cast of upper-class twits worthy of Monty Python, she seemed refreshingly level-headed. "I was very proud," her dad says. "She came off like a member of society, as opposed to somebody from Mars.") And he's a busy enough man as it is, which he happily underscores by handing me a copy of a Crain's New York Business article listing the Trump Organization as by far the largest privately held company in the metro area. He keeps a stack of the articles on his desk as you might a dish of mints. Long before Paris Hilton was a gleam in an infrared camera's eye, Trump lived by the dictum that you can never be too rich or too exposed to the media. And, he says, he was attracted by the "educational" aspects of The Apprentice.
Educational? Trump and his colleagues do offer the candidates such eye-opening nuggets as "Swing for the fences" and "Location, location, location." But the primary educational element is how fan-damn-tastic it is to be Donald Trump. And really, this is all most of us have ever wanted to learn from him. We first see him soaring over Manhattan in his private helicopter; the team that wins one challenge gets a tour of his Versailles-like penthouse (guided by his girlfriend Melania Knauss). Trump is the rich guy so many nonwealthy Americans love because he lives like a lottery winner. Enviable yet accessible, neither shy nor subtle, he was reality TV before reality TV was. In Trump's world, as on Survivor, success is its own justification. His detractors can say that he's a better self-promoter than businessman, but all those chandeliers and sheets of brass are real and inarguable. Likewise, when a conniver like Richard Hatch reaches the finals of Survivor, the fact that he has made it proves--to the audience and his opponents--that he deserved to, whether or not they like the way he did it.
As 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 hot to supermodel hot (and flash more leg and navel than in most staff meetings not held at Hooters), whereas most of the men would only be among the better-looking guys on Average Joe.
And it's fascinating, if not heartening, to see how the sexes wittingly embrace their stereotypes. The men (competing under the testosterone-y name Versacorp) exude enough arrogance and aggression to fill a trading pit. The women (doing business as Protege Corp.) don sexy stewardess outfits to pitch an ad campaign for a jet-leasing company. Their "manager"--advertising executive Donny Deutsch--sounds both appalled and impressed as he says, "You've set the women's movement back 70 years."