I’ve been meaning - really - to write a post on NBC’s The Apprentice, and tonight’s finale seems like the time to get around to it finally. The surprise of the show has been that’s it’s made for such great television by juggling multiple dramas at once. It presented a battle of the sexes, stereotyped and tarted up to be sure, but with some oblique insight into how men and women behave differently in the workplace. It made explicit the social darwinism of just about every reality TV show following in the footsteps of Survivor. It laid bare the arriviste class aspirations of the Trump wannabe with both affection and tongue-in-cheek subversion. (The contestants’ visit to the NYSE trading floor, for example, can be read both ways.)
But most importantly, the show gleefully and uneasily straddled the contradictory ideology of American capitalism. On one hand, the wheeler-dealer salesman that Trump personifies seems to be one model for the show. I was amazed how much the lemonade stand example seemed to be taken directly from the pages of William Whyte or Kenneth Galbraith as examples of why the US is not for the most part an entrepreneurial economy. On the other hand, even the most wheeler-dealer of the candidates recognized that they we’re vying for a role in the corporation, trying to prove to Trump that they could be good Organization Men or Women.
Slate’s Daniel Gross has beaten me to the punch in writing a similar analysis:
Of course, both Kwame and Bill seem like good, capable guys. They didn’t ruffle feathers, play mind games with fellow contestants, or lie….the kinds of guys who would make fine executive vice presidents and middle managers at a Fortune 500 company. The show that was supposed to mint New York’s next brash entrepreneur has instead given us the Organization Man, 2004.
The review’s one of the smartest I’ve read on the show (and there have been many). But the dilemma Gross diagnoses for the show isn’t Trump’s alone: it’s part and parcel of an American capitalism that for the most part produces its products and organizes its markets through corporate oligopolies - yet which sees itself (sometimes to the point of desperation) as one giant lemonade stand.
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