The Apprentice

I'm sitting here watching the second last episode of The Apprentice. This is the first non-celebrity edition in quite a while and for that, I'm thankful. I kind of got out of the show for a while and watched last Bret Michael's dominated season, but it was enough to spark the urge to see this show again. You could say it holds a special place in my heart, although as I type that, I know how ridiculous that may sound. If the Apprentice gets a special place, so does a lot of other shows. To give you an idea, if I could only watch one show between the two, The Amazing Race would take the cake (from a reality show perspective).

The show premiered in 2004, a distant six years ago. Life was quite a bit different then, as I lived with three others in an eclectic apartment with a mix of great and more...interesting times. I could go on for a while on memories from this era, but I have to focus on my fondness for this show during that time. My one roommate and I would sit down to watch this every week, and it was fantastic.

This show was different from the others: people weren't starving, they weren't doing crazy physical challenges and to put it bluntly, the show didn't feel fixed. I'm not saying things like Survivor or The Amazing Race are, but there is a lot of magic that happens in post-production. You truly get the sense that Trump is involved and actually cares about the contestants. He will, after all, be working with them (perhaps indirectly) for the next year. Instead of giving the winner a cheque for a million dollars and being done with them, these winners got a real job. This was a real interview, and what a good way to do it. So, instead of trying to survive, everybody focuses on the tasks at hand.

And the tasks are great. I love the small, basic things like taking ice cream and trying to sell it on the streets. Running basic businesses brings things down to a level that you can relate to. And what makes it so relevant to me is that I was in my later years of business education studying at university. This show permeated so much, that one of our financial management professors told us to watch the show, to be discussed in class the next day. I'm not sure if that was real official homework but it was a great exercise in class, and I had already been watching the show anyhow.

I'm not sure how many seasons I watched while still going to school, but after I moved out of town I didn't really have motivation or somebody to which watch the show; I think the ratings dropped heavily (my bad, sorry) and it become the Celebrity Apprentice. The problem I had with that was the tasks were so grand: in one episode they are raising money to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They raise as much money in an episode or two as the winner receives on Survivor. The celebrities, while fighting nobly for their charities, really don't need to be there. Contrast that with this season's contestants who have all been "hit hard by the recession" and they fight hard.

Back in the days of the first couple seasons of The Apprentice, I had much grander dreams of what life would be like and seemingly, the drive to do it all. I'm not sure what happened to that version of myself, but while watching this show I get a gleam that he's still kicking about in there.