NBCUniversal has a relationship with Donald Trump, the long-time performance artist and host of its NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, that’s strikingly similar to the one between the Donald and the Romney campaign McKay Coppins described in one of what will be one of many post-mortems of the campaign:

Among the savvy sophisticates who populated the campaign headquarters in Boston, Trump was viewed as a joke and a blowhard — an outrageous figure whose fixation on Obama’s birth certificate was, at once, bizarre and off-putting, according to campaign sources. But he was also popular among the very voters Romney was most concerned about winning over. And the candidate’s aides believed — perhaps naively — that if they could win his endorsement, they might be able to win the hearts of his many conservative fans. “He played very well with blue-collar-type Republicans, and the campaign saw that,” said one source in Trump’s camp. “If you have no education, and you work with your hands, you like him. It’s like, ‘Wow, if I was rich, that’s how I would live!’ The girls, the cars, the fancy suits. His ostentatiousness is appealing to them.”

For NBC, The Apprentice is a product similar to a Trump political endorsement. It’s relatively cheap to buy, in part because it’s heavily supported by product placement. It channels the things that make Trump irritating, his presumptions of expertise, his abrasiveness, and his showman’s flair, towards reasonably amusing targets. And in its Celebrity Apprentice iteration, the show pulls in stars with their own followings. For this, Trump got a $130 million contract from NBC last year. But NBC handed down that deal to Trump at the end of an awful year for the network. And now that the ratings landscape–and the political one–are very different, NBC should seriously consider if they want to stay in business with Trump, or if both he and The Apprentice have reached the end of their usefulness.

The Apprentice is probably near the end of its natural lifespan as a show anyway. Its celebrity editions are drawing fewer than 9 million viewers per episode, a figure that isn’t bad, but also isn’t strong enough to use to launch other new shows. And it pales in comparison to The Voice, which both has given NBC a platform to boost freshman success stories like Revolution and Go On, and provides an alternate revenue stream to the network in the form of music sales. As NBC solidifies its revitalized brand, and as non-musical competition shows increasingly show their age, the network should consider Trump and The Apprentice both in the context of the larger primetime environment and with an eye towards the special headaches Trump brings in his wake.
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I very much wanted to like Smash, NBC’s show about the making of a Broadway musical, and not just because I’m eager for the generally well-intentioned network to be repaid for Parks and Recreation and Community with some huge commercial successes. I’m interested in people’s artistic processes, and I adore Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing, who star as the show’s book writer and producer, respectively. But the show isn’t drawing the kind of numbers NBC would have hoped for, particularly for a show they would have loved to monetize the way Fox has turned Glee into a cash cow, with iTunes sales and a spin-off live show. And it’s not really working creatively, either.

Perhaps the central problem of Smash is that it’s predicated on a rivalry that the show is contorting itself to make plausible. There’s no question that Ivy (Megan Hilty) deserves the lead in the Marilyn musical under development over Karen (Katherine McPhee): she’s a more polished Broadway singer, a more accomplished dancer, she has much more experience on the stage, she’s a physical match for Marilyn, and she’s a more dedicated professional. So how does Smash make it seem like an emotionally engaged contest? By making Ivy a shallow bitch. While we get Karen’s home life with her devoted boyfriend and trips home to her friends and supportive family in Iowa, Ivy gets a single phone call home, where it’s clear that things aren’t all right, but we never get any details. Even though she’s clearly more qualified, we’re told Ivy only really gets the part because she slept with Derek, the director, a convenient drama-driving plot device that also happens to reduce a talented performer. Now that we’re in rehearsals, we see Ivy pushing Karen (now a member of the chorus) to the side, even though she’s not exactly doing her job. It’s contrived and irritating.

Then, there’s the show-within-a-show itself. The characters talk endlessly about Marilyn Monroe without revealing anything particularly interesting about her character. The numbers themselves are charming, but ultimately light—maybe it’s just me, but I’m not particularly moved by a faux Marilyn cooing about manipulating men with her sex appeal. The show tells us, rather than shows us, that these artists are having profound experiences with the material—though it does a nice job of showing us how sexy artists can be to non-artists when they’re in their zones.

And I wonder if that combination of material and setting is what’s preventing Smash from becoming the grown-up version of Glee—and would prevent it from being that show even if everything else was clicking. Glee is a hot mess these days, but it can be genuinely daring and moving when it takes on the subject of gay teenagers. But it does so in a setting where everything else is familiar: this is a small town populated with relatively familiar archetypes, the students attend an essentially typical high school, and they’re singing songs almost everyone in the viewing audience has heard before. The gay characters are a minority in a largely straight world. It’s a show that is sometimes about tolerance, and asking to do that from a very safe space for straight, middle-American viewers.

Smash, on the other hand, is asking viewers to come into a world where women and straight men are dominant, framed by music that’s original rather than familiar. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, per se—shows shouldn’t have to star straight dudes to be successful. But I do think that it might be a sign of NBC’s unwillingness or inability to accept that it’s going to have to make some genuinely popular entertainment to score a smash hit. What makes Glee easy to consume isn’t just the renditions of popular hits—it’s the setting. It’s not actually a natural sege from the cover extravaganza that is The Voice and its quartet of judges who represent the full spectrum of the music business to a show about the making of a Broadway musical.

NBC needs to recognize the difference between the two and decide what kind of entertainment it wants to make. If it’s going to make quirky shows or shows that imply that rivals like Glee aren’t grown-up enough, NBC may be consigning itself to a smaller but wealthier group of viewers who are desirable to advertisers. But if it’s going to make big, mass entertainment that it endeavors to make somewhat smarter than its competitors offerings, it needs to do so without giving the impression that it resents having to do it.

First day of press tour is done, and tomorrow I dive into the waters of MSNBC, Bravo, and SyFy. More to come, but here were the best and worst trends from NBC’s presentations today:

Worst: Big Scary Lesbians. NBC has two pilots where plots appear to be motivated by the presence of outsized, aggressive lesbians. After her lovely work on Glee, Dot Jones deserves far better than to be cast as a butch lesbian who sexually harasses Laura Prepon while they’re both in lockup on Are You There, Chelsea? And the heavy lesbian contractor who gets passed over in favor of a hottie love interest for the main character on Bent manages to simultaneously reinforce stereotypes about lesbians, and about women and home improvement.

Best: Support for Working Mothers. Amanda Peet mentioned at the Bent panel that NBC had been wonderful about accommodating and supporting her being a working mother during production of the show. Debra Messing says of her character on Smash, “The hero’s a woman who is very passionate about her creative life and needs that part of her life fulfilled, but also is a proud mother who has that home life and wants that part of her life fulfilled. The way Theresa writes, there’s such richness.” Not that we need aggressive emphasis of characters HAVING IT ALL constantly, but it’s nice to hear that the network practices off-set some of the better things it preaches on-screen.

Worst: Uncertainty. Bob Greenblatt doesn’t know when Community‘s coming back. No one knows when Awake will air. Scheduling’s not easy, we know, but stop torturing us here.

Meh: Alcohol: It sounds like the drinking on Are You There, Chelsea? will get tired quickly, but J.B. Smoove as an addict in recovery? That could be intriguing territory. Television’s got a lot of serious drinkers, but fewer people showing us what it’s like to live in a world where most people treat drinking as if it ranges from no big deal to the linchpin of their social lives.

Best: A lack of sniping. NBC may have to fight its way back to the top, but the network seems aware that it’s not close enough to its rivals to tear them down. The folks behind Smash acknowledge that Glee opened the door without slagging anything they don’t like about it. Bob Greenblatt was blunt about the network’s need to find its own way without complaining that his rivals are being wrongly rewarded for less risky programming. When The Voice criticized its rivals, it was on substance and format, which is fair game. NBC’s biggest asset is the fact that people want to like it. It’s clear they have no intention of relinquishing it.