NBC has had a disastrous season when it came to launching new shows, watching glossy entries like Brian Fuller’s serial killer drama Hannibal sink and canceling reality entry Ready For Love. But its fortunes have improved somewhat with the return of reality singing competition The Voice. So it’s no surprise that the network’s going back to the only thing that really seems to be working for it at the moment this fall, and launching a “trivia knowledge and endurance” show called The Million Second Quiz that will air on primetime and be broadcast digitally when it’s not on the network. And it sounds…kind of insane:

The Million Second Quiz will originate from a gigantic hourglass shaped structure built in the heart of Manhattan. Its walls will be made out of glass so the contestants and the game play is visible from the street, somewhat in the vein of David Blaine’s stunts.

The four players who have remained in the game the longest at any time serve as reigning champions and get to live in the hourglass. To avoid being unseated in the primetime show where one of the reigning champions gets challenged, the four must continue to play 24 hours a day, taking strategic breaks to rest and sleep.

Viewers will be able to play along at home in real time and sync to the live primetime broadcast in what NBC calls “the first fully convergent television experience.” Viewers playing from home who win will be flown to New York to appear on the show in primetime.

Most reality shows collect footage 24 hours a day, but then edit it down dramatically. NBC is flipping the script and hoping to generate cross-platform revenue by having actual events going 24 hours a day—or at least hoping that audiences will be interested in watching contestants not go nuts while living in an enormous transparent hourglass. And they’re doing it in a way that might let them eliminate the need for the kinds of expensive celebrity judges that are one of the primary draws to shows like The Voice. The Million Second Quiz may require a talented master of ceremonies, but it seems like an attempt to combine novelty and cheapness in a single swoop.

And that NBC is building a show that’s specifically designed to stress people’s endurance, and to do so while exposing them to the public in a very real way, should be cause for some concern. It’s one thing to test how smart your contestants are, and to give viewers at home a chance to test their wits against those contestants, and even to enter the ring themselves if they prove smart enough. It’s another to set up an incentive structure that encourages people to, say, not sleep in order to rack up points. I hope that those “strategic breaks” will be monitored by doctors who are paid independently from the network, and given some sort of authority to call time on the competition if someone suffers physical or emotional ill effects. If you’re going to ask people to put themselves through significant stress in a way that constantly exposes them both on-set and in broadcast, you owe it to them to protect them.

After Shain Gandee, one of the people who appeared on MTV reality show Buckwild, died of carbon monoxide poisoning along with his uncle and a friend after leaving a bar at three in the morning and getting their car stuck in a mud pit that appeared to have blocked the tail pipe, MTV has made the decision to cancel the show rather than continue it with a replacement for Gandee. Per the Associated Press:

MTV said Wednesday it is canceling its West Virginia-based reality TV show “BUCKWILD” a week after the accidental death of 21-year-old star Shain Gandee. Network spokesman Jake Urbanski confirmed the news, saying it was “not an easy decision.” “But given Shain’s tragic passing and essential presence on the show, we felt it was not appropriate to continue without him,” the network said. “Instead, we are working on a meaningful way to pay tribute to his memory on our air and privately.”

This comes after Koh Lanta, a French reality competition show, cancelled its upcoming season after a participant died of a heart attack while filming in Cambodia. A doctor working on the show later committed suicide.

To a certain extent, these cancellations represent progress. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills marched on even after Russell Armstrong, the husband of one of the core castmembers, committed suicide, an act reportedly motivated in part by his distress at the way he was portrayed on the show. The season of Tropika Island of Treasure that featured Oscar Pistorius’ late girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp went on air two days after he killed her. There’s something ghostly about the decision to air footage of someone who’s dead in a way that it isn’t upsetting to watch a fictional film with a performer who has died: reality television is life on a time delay, a pretense that the person who is dead is still out there, somewhere, competing in challenges on a tropical island, fighting with their wife, partying in Appalachia.

And the conundrum of whether or not to air footage of someone who has died, whether their death is related to things they did for the show, gets at one of the major problems of reality television. It’s a format that provides disincentives to taking care of castmembers. It’s one thing to prop up the mental health of an actor or actress who is struggling with the demands of portraying someone who is not at all like them. It’s another to manage the mental health of someone who is offering up their life, and more specifically, the parts of their life that are also risk factors, for consumption. If what you’ve decided you need for a show to be good is fights between friends, arguments—or even allegations of abuse—between spouses, high levels of alcohol or even drug consumption, and overconsumption, how do you manage those behaviors so they produce marketable amounts of drama without causing the people engaging in them harm? To what extent is marketable drama dependent on viewers being convinced that there is a real risk of harm to the people who are acting as characters on these shows?

I’ve written before that the diminishing rewards of reality television reflect the diminished opportunities in the American economy. But when death comes to reality television, it’s a reminder that not only is the money a step down for participants on competition and slice-of-life reality shows in comparison to their scripted peers, but the care of their persons are as well. Vulnerability is a very dangerous commodity to ask people to offer up for sale, no matter the remunerative possibilities.

Over at Press Play, Drew Gardner has written one of the best pieces I’ve ever read about reality television. Focusing on a new show called Killer Karaoke, in which contestants are required to sing while being plunged into ice water, shocked with electric collars, or covered in bugs, he argues that reality television, an innovation in programming is cheaper in part because participants don’t have to be paid anything, has begun driving even the rewards offered to the successful contestant who makes it all the way through to the end down—in Killer Karaoke, the most the winner can make is $10,000—but that Killer Karaoke has exposed the unpaid labor in poor conditions that undirgird the industry as part of its very schtick:

Killer Karaoke breaks with this tradition. There is no panel. The contestants are judged only by the audience, according to whatever criteria they please, probably a mix of singing talent, courage, and how entertainingly they flip out. But winning is not exactly the point of the show. Something of an afterhtought, the anti-climactic final challenge involves singing while remaining balanced on a giant rotating turntable with two other remaining contestants. The point of the show is to see how winningly contestants can suffer humiliation and pain under objectionable working conditions. In contrast with American Idol, Killer Karaoke encourages the audience to sympathize with all the contestants from the beginning: though we’re amused by their suffering, we’re also rooting for them. We want everyone to succeed, in a situation where success comes down to freaking out in the most hilarious way…

Steve-O is very much a traditional game show host in this role on Killer Karaoke, an updated Bud Collyer. He stays out of the action and keeps to the role of explaining the stunts and drawing comments out of the contestants. In a recent interview about the show, he said, “Breaking bones and sticking things up my ass was not getting any easier.” It’s clear that he has a strong grasp of the economy of the show, and perhaps about reality TV in general: “It’s about the misfortune of others and exploiting people’s willingness to sacrifice their dignity and well being just to be on TV for a brief moment.” Steve-O’s host character is an expert on ill-advised activities who has happily gotten himself promoted to a upper management position.

The show sounds horrifying, but it’s a fascinating point. And given what seems like the sudden implosion of the television business model, a heavy reliance on reality television, likely with diminished rewards, seems likely to continue. What’s interesting is whether this particular subset of the industry will reach a point where what’s on offer, be it financial or the chance for exposure, is so minimal, and the challenges or humiliations involved are so great, that reality television will stop finding takers. Hotels, big-box stores, and other employers that rely heavily on low-wage workers increasingly seem to have tested, and found, the floor for what they can ask employees to do and still find a steady stream of labor without provoking union organizing drives. But unlike reality television, low-wage American jobs were never going to offer massive prizes to a few workers to defuse more general discontent about compensation and working conditions. In the lottery that is the American economy, if you promise millions of dollars to a single person, you’ll be able to take many millions more from even those who know they’re getting played for suckers—particularly if you’re asking them to participate in one bad subset of the economy because the one they long to escape is worse.

At the New York Times, cable news chronicler Brian Stelter has the story that Sarah Palin’s original contract with Fox News will not be renewed:

Yes, Ms. Palin’s contract with Fox News has ended, and no, it is not being renewed. A Fox spokeswoman confirmed Friday that Fox had parted ways with the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee, effectively reducing her exposure to the channel’s millions of loyal viewers.

It was unclear whether the parting was Ms. Palin’s choice. Bill Shine, an executive vice president at Fox, said in a statement, “We have thoroughly enjoyed our association with Governor Palin. We wish her the best in her future endeavors.”

As of last week, Ms. Palin remained in negotiations with Fox News about a new contract. Her original contract with the network started in January 2010 and ended this month.

This makes a lot of sense. As I’ve written before, Fox News’ schtick has always been to hire intensely polarizing figures, from Dr. Keith Ablow, who spends most of his time making outrageous statements about gay and transgender people, to former Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman who, tragically and hilariously, comments on criminal justice issues, despite having plead no contest to charges he perjured himself in the O.J. Simpson case. Palin would seem to be in that tradition: since she stepped on the national stage at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Palin’s primary talent has been for incendiary rhetoric.

But Palin’s not rooted in any particular extreme viewpoint. Her policy perspectives have always been too squishy for her to represent much in the way of an particular constituency or any cause other than herself and her own fans. She was never particularly a ratings hit on Fox—a special planned around her turned out not to be the sort of draw the network hoped for. And unlike Ablow and his ilk, Palin was never even particularly successful at tweaking liberals in her appearance on the network, ginning up the kind of publicity that could have made her a worthwhile investment even if she wasn’t particularly popular with the network’s core audience.

The Palin family as a whole seems to hope for careers in show business, but this is only the latest in a string of failures for them. The TLC show Sarah Palin’s Alaska saw declining ratings and wasn’t renewed for a second season. Bristol Palin’s Lifetime show was yanked from the network for lower viewership, but not before landing $354,348 in tax subsidies from the state of Alaska. Todd Palin was reduced to appearing as one of many celebrities on NBC’s military reality show Stars Earned Stripes.

Maybe now that Fox News has cut ties with Palin, the rest of the television industry will follow suit. Sarah Palin long ago proved she had no real aptitude for governance when she quit her job as governor as Alaska. Her time on Fox proved she didn’t have much spark as a source of news or opinion. And the rest of her family’s efforts suggest that as entertainment, the Palins have nothing to offer us but diminishing returns.

This truly is a new standard in sublime ridiculousness: one of the stars of Bravo’s reality show Shahs of Sunset, about well-to-do members of Los Angeles’ Persian community, has decided she’s a civil rights icon:

“It took someone like Rosa Parks to say, ‘I’m not getting on the back of the bus,’ to start a movement,” cast member Golnesa “GG” Gharachedaghi told The Huffington Post. “She got a lot of drama for it, but at the end of the day it started something so revolutionary and I feel like we are doing the same in respect of the entertainment industry.

“Knowing we are the first doing this so our egos are a little bit bigger than should be,” Gharachedaghi continued. “We are paving the way. It’s been difficult being Persian on TV. I don’t think anyone has given us as much drama and bullshit as the Persian community. There has never been anything out there about Persians before.”

Now, I’m not one to suggest that we’ve achieved all of our diversity goals in popular culture, by any means. But there’s a lot of evidence that Iranian-American actors—as well as South Asian actors—have broken into television quite successfully. And their successes raise interesting questions about why they’ve succeeded where African-American characters have actually lost ground on television.

In between Fairly Legal and Life, Iranian-American actress Sarah Shahi alone has two-thirds as many starring or co-headlining roles in television series in the past decade than African-American actresses have had collectively. Nazanin Boniadi (Tom Cruise’s pre-Katie Holmes girlfriend) did 119 episodes on General Hospital between 2007 and 2009, and had a fairly long arc on How I Met Your Mother, in addition to her recurring work on other television series. Maz Jobrani hasn’t had as steady a role as he did on Better Off Ted in some time, but he also recurs regularly. Shaun Toub, who also appeared in Iron Man works regularly in television, including in HBO’s Luck. Adrian Pasdar even played the President of the United States in Political Animals.

Not all of the reasons for these successes are particularly comfortable or helpful. I’d be willing to bet that most people who see Shahi on screen assume that she’s Caucasian rather than that she has Iranian heritage. And the rise of terrorism as a significant subject for television has created work for actors of Middle Eastern origin, like Navid Negahban, who played super-terrorist Abu Nazir on Showtime’s Homeland. But it’s absolutely significant that television feels comfortable casting Middle Eastern and South Asian actors as a lot of different kinds of professionals, from research scientists in Better Off Ted to white-collar legal mediators in Fairly Legal, while African-American actors still often end up breaking into heroic television professions as cops partnered with white counterparts, or as military officers like Andre Braugher in Last Resort.

Gharachedaghi’s comments aren’t offensive just because they trivialize the risk that Rosa Parks too, and the basic liberties African-Americans were denied, though of course they do that. They’re frustrating because she’s failing to acknowledge the work that Iranian and Iranian-American actors have already done to blow open opportunities in the industry for their counterparts.

It’s easy to dismiss reality television as a table-flipping, backbiting, redneck-baiting mess, to judge by some of the shows that top the ratings and garner press that ranges from clucking disapproval to horrified fascination. But one of the best things about the cable presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour, which I’ll be at until January 16, is a reminder of just how big the landscape is, and how much fascinating, substantive reality and documentary programming is coming up over the next six months. These are the five shows and documentaries that I’m most looking forward to after hearing their creators and casts talk to us in Pasadena:

1. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God, HBO, February 4: Alex Gibney’s documentaries are always fierce and compelling. But he’s found a particularly enraging and moving subject in this novel take on the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church: the attacks on a group of boys at a Catholic school for the deaf, by a priest who was the rare hearing person at the time to speak American Sign Language, an ability that enhanced his sense of priestly authority. Watching the men talk about their experiences as children, and what it meant to them to gather the courage to write to the Vatican to testify to their abuse, to find each other and learn they weren’t alone, and even to confront Father Murphy, who managed to convince the Vatican to let him stay a priest by arguing that he’d repented, is shattering and triumphant. They are, as Gibney put it during the panel for the movie, “people who were voiceless in the hearing world, who nevertheless had their voices heard.”

2. The President’s Gatekeepers, Discovery, July TBD: From Jules and Gédéon Naudet, brothers who were working on a documentary about New York firefighters on September 11 and ended up making 9/11, an insider perspective on the tragedy instead, this documentary includes interviews with all 19 living White House Chiefs of Staff. Executive producer Chris Whipple said it was fascinating to see how, despite the extreme partisan reputations of Chiefs ranging from Dick Cheney, who worked for President Ford, to Rahm Emanuel, the job itself, which most of the Chiefs described as the hardest they’d ever had, involved intense bipartisan cooperation. And the Naudets promise fascinating inside stories, like Bill Daley’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Apparently, Daley asked Obama to postpone the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner, but Obama demurred, insisting that everything proceed as normal. During the dinner, Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet got an email that his White House tour had been cancelled, and started asking Daley if something momentous was underfoot. Daley told him a pipe had burst in the White House and promised to personally conduct the tour at a later date. The rest is history.

3. March To Justice, Investigation Discovery, February TBD: I’ll be fascinated to see this movie, if only to see more of Carolyn McKinstry, a survivor of the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing—and a subsequent bombing of her home. At the panel on Saturday, she spoke about the psychological toll of the bombing, and changes in trauma treatment for children in the years since, where early psychological intervention has become the norm. “There was not that type of opportunity for us back then. In fact, we didn’t even talk about this bombing in my home. The only people I talked with were the FBI. They came through regularly, asked questions, and recorded your answers,” she explained. “But my parents didn’t talk about — they didn’t say, ‘Are you afraid? Do you want to talk about what happened? Do you miss your friends?’ We didn’t talk about it at home. I went to school Monday morning at 8:00. No one said anything. It wasn’t mentioned ever at church, at home, or at school.” She’s a powerful reminder that the past isn’t really past, and that we’re grappling not just with the policy implications of the Civil Rights movement, but with the direct and personal memories of people who lived through it.

4. Inside Combat Rescue, Nat Geo, February TBD: One of the aspects of war that’s least reflected in popular culture is the logistics it takes to wage one, whether it’s the actual size and complexity of American forward operating bases, or the supply chains it takes to keep soldiers armed, fed, rested, and protected. For that reason alone, I’m fascinated by Inside Combat Rescue, which documents the efforts of the medical teams who head out in helicopters, retrieve, stabilize, and bring American soldiers back from the front lines of our current conflicts. I’ll be curious to learn more about how Nat Geo worked out the ethics of filming wounded subjects. But it’s a powerful illustration of the cost of war.

The continuing move of the entire Palin family into reality television careers is an amusing downfall story, but it took a serious turn today with the news that the state of Alaska had provided $354,348 in subsidies to Bristol Palin’s most recent venture into the genre, her Lifetime show Bristol Palin: Life’s A Tripp, which had such dreadful ratings it was yanked from its slot after two episodes. It’s one thing for the entertainment industry to effectively subsidize the Palins’ careers, given the relatively limited appeal they have in the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s political career. But it’s another for Alaska to spend money to attract a show to the state that probably would have filmed there anyway.

If the purpose of film and television production credits is to keep jobs in-state or to convince companies that otherwise might not have produced shows in a state to consider filming there, it’s not remotely clear why Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp would have been a good candidate for those credits. Alaska is Palin’s childhood home. It’s where her parents continue to live, though Todd Palin’s stint in reality television this fall might mean that the family is gravitating more towards Los Angeles. And it’s where Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol’s child, continues to live. If she was retreating from an attempt at a career in California and reestablishing her life near her support system, Alaska was the most logical place for her to do it, even absent a subsidy program. That the show got tax credits from the state suggests more an eagerness to distribute them to whatever project came along than a real effort to attract new and unexpected business to the state.

It’s true that the show generated some revenue for the state, though it’s hard to tell if it was enough to justify spending those subsidies on this particular program, rather than attempting to attract another show to Alaska, or holding off on spending it at all. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, which broke the story of the tax subsidy, notes that the production reported spending $995,275 in Alaska, though not all of that money went to people who live in Alaska, and about $500,000 of that spending went to on-camera talent for the show. The benefits of the program were not exactly broad, or oriented towards creating a lot of new, long-term Alaska jobs.

I understand why states try to lure away productions from California, and to get some of those jobs for their own citizens. But with almost every state offering some form of incentives, it’s easy for productions to shop for the best deal and to pit those subsidy programs against each other in a way that could minimize the economic benefits the states receive from hosting those productions. And if one of the marks of a viable industry is that it can survive without being subsidized, some states are finding it difficult to get their film programs truly off the ground—after Michigan cut its incentives, a new and expensive studio in Pontiac is finding itself without clients. If states are going to pony up to attract film and television productions, they should be clear about what kind of benefits make the programs worth it for them, or they should consider orienting those credits programs to ends beyond economic ones, like improving the numbers of contracts going to women and minority-owned businesses or projects in the industry. The welfare of Bristol Palin and the future of Alaska’s film and television industry are not one and the same.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is displeased that, in the wake of the end of Jersey Shore, in part because some of that show’s stars started doing things like having babies and acquiring responsibilities other than partying, MTV is coming to his state with a show that will start airing next year called Buckwild. The program will follow the antics of a group of twenty-somethings who live in a 4,000-person town. The Washington Post reports on his letter to MTV:

“As a U.S. Senator, I am repulsed at this business venture, where some Americans are making money off of the poor decisions of our youth,” Manchin wrote. “I cannot imagine that anyone who loves this country would feel proud profiting off of ‘Buckwild.’”

“Instead of showcasing the beauty of our people and our state, you preyed on young people, coaxed them into displaying shameful behavior — and now you are profiting from it. That is just wrong.”
In an interview Thursday before sending the letter, Manchin repeatedly called MTV’s decision “just awful.”

“I have no problem with people in this country trying to earn a profit, but I would ask them: Would they do this to their own children, in their own neighborhood, in their own home state?” Manchin said.

It would be nice of Manchin, in the course of defending the innocent young people of his state, would recognize that his own constituents are among the people who “are making money off of the poor decisions of our youth.” There are definitely reality television programs that can be exploitative. Scenes can be cut to be misleading. Producers can be less than honest with participants about their intentions for a project. And no matter how much anyone does to prepare the subjects of a reality show for the limelight, there’s no way to predict what the reaction to a program will be until it airs, or how people who haven’t previously broadcast their lives will react to being characters, as opposed to actual humans.

But we’re also at a point in the development of reality television where many, many people who agree to participate in it are aware of the genre’s conventions, and go into the process with open eyes and a clear sense of how they can leverage the process to their own advantage. The subjects of Breaking Amish appear to have given the producers what they wanted, no matter the facts of their actual lives. I have qualms about making very young children the main characters of reality shows, but the adults who are participating in a program like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo seem self-aware and happy, and rather than becoming objects of pure ridicule, there are a lot of people who have found them rather likable. Jersey Shore‘s stars showed a determined willingness to make fools of themselves, but in a way that was mostly calculated, rather than desperate.

If I were Manchin, I might have a little more respect for my constituents. The only real argument I can see making is that rather than setting the show in Sissonville, which is in Kanawha County in West Virginia, which has 6.1 percent unemployment, down from 6.7 percent last year, MTV might have considered going to Clay County, where the unemployment rate is 13.5 percent, up from 10.6 percent last year.

I wrote earlier this year that The Hour, the BBC’s period drama about the producers, reporters, and anchor on a show of the same title trying to break through the BBC’s strictures and the stifling social environment of the late 1950s, was the show that Aaron Sorkin wanted his HBO drama The Newsroom to be. It was attuned to the actual rhythms and difficulties of reporting, the stories are legitimately revealing rather than pontificating, and the characters face genuine obstacles to getting those stories on the air. And in the second season of the show, which began its run on BBC America last night, I think that’s become even more true, particularly in the way that The Hour is handling the rise of a phenomenon that The Newsroom tried to critique decades later: the rise of commercial television programming aimed at women.

I talked to Abi Morgan, The Hour‘s creator, about the show’s approach to gender in general, and about the kind of programming aimed at women like Marnie (Oona Chaplin), the upper-class wife of The Hour anchor Hector (Dominic West), who begins exploring a career as the host of a cooking show. She explained:

I think if you look at the women, the on-screen talent at that time, on the whole they were either singing along to a puppet, or they were presenting the kind of soft magazine programs that were just starting to come up through the ’50s. I liked the idea of Marnie almost becoming quite literally this professional housewife. She’s this Fanny Cradock-esque character. It also felt like a kind of brilliant, brittle metaphor for this kind of life Marnie finds herself encased in. You’ll see that marriage really is tested through the course of the series….

The mainstay of commercials of that time was the great British housewife. Marnie is very much the consumer of her time. On the wider level, the show is about the birth of capitalism in the ’50s and into the ’60s. The warmongers were finding a way of making money out of nuclear paranoia, [and there was a] global desire to be part of the arms and space race. This parallels what’s going on with Marnie. She’s someone who aspires to a bigger life. When you write a drama set in this era, you have a whole period where if your characters have any gumption or charisma, they have to break away from this suppressive ’50s world.

Where The Newsroom could be viciously dismissive of mass culture aimed at women—Will McAvoy ran himself into trouble in part by insulting a gossip columnist for covering the Real Housewives, and declaring that he’d fix another woman whose primary flaw included consuming that kind of show—The Hour doesn’t try to make judgements about whether it’s bad or not that programming aimed by women exists. Instead, it tries to reckon with what it means that this kind of programming speaks powerfully to the ennui of post-war women like Marnie, who aren’t working, and how their power as consumers affects the entire media landscape. When Bel debates whether or not to run a segment about Christian Dior, she’s also trying to figure out where fashion fits in the hierarchy of news and human interest.

And the show never presents Marnie as stupid for being entranced by a commercial, or seeking out a career using the skills that she has, even if they’re feminine ones. Of course she’s bored! She was bred for a specific role, to be a good wife to a man like Hector, who was expected to play a corresponding part, but instead cheats on her, pursues entertainment in nightclubs where she is not invited, and treats her as if she couldn’t possibly be interested in his career. Marnie is an intelligent, capable woman, but no one asks anything of her, not even that she be available for sex and housekeeping. Even if she’s only valuable to television as a consumer, at least it’s a form of being valued.

The thing that Will McAvoy, and that by extension The Newsroom, never seemed to get, is that consuming frivolous things doesn’t make you a frivolous person. Everyone I know who watches Real Housewives does so because they recognize the show as a social critique folded into a trainwreck like a pill into applesauce. It’s possible to even consume things that you know are bad for you, or that have no redeeming social value whatsoever, to recognize them as such, and to enjoy them anyway. The question is not whether or not someone is a good person for watching certain things. It’s what need they speak to, what itch they scratch.

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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