The Celebrity Apprentice

The Celebrity Apprentice ended its surprisingly successful season with a two-hour final that garnered huge ratings.  The Donald Trump led series had its highest rated finale since the fourth season of The Apprentice and twice the total viewers as the last season's finale for The Apprentice: Los Angeles.  This stunning rebirth of the franchise is great news for Trump and NBC, which now has a seemingly reliable reality franchise to fall back on once a year.  In his NBC upfront presentation yesterday, NBC head Ben Silverman spoke about how they resisted the temptation to air two Celebrity Apprentice editions next season (one in Fall and one in the Spring) after seeing the ratings for the finale.   Probably a good decision, but it brings up an interesting question: Does The Celebrity Apprentice have staying power?  And, how much of its success had to do with the writers' strike?

The Celebrity Apprentice premiered right as the writers' strike was taking full effect on the prime time landscape.  For much of its run, The Apprentice faced very little time slot competition.  When Lost premiered with new episodes in the same time slot, The Apprentice's ratings were negatively impacted, significantly so.  The Celebrity Apprentice will shift time slots slightly when it returns in February of 2009: instead of Thursdays at 9pm, it will air on Thursdays at 10pm.  The competition will be a little less formidable at that time, but without the other networks' Fall schedules out yet, it's tough to analyze it either way.  The main point is, whatever Apprentice goes  upagainst, it will a tougher field than what it faced this season.

I also generally worry about The Celebrity Apprentice's staying power in terms of audience fatigue.  There was a certain novelty to the first season.  Will viewers return to see the same thing again?  Perhaps the most important aspect of the show's success this season was the mix of personalities.  The casting is incredibly important, and I fear that finding another Piers Morgan or Omarosa or Trace Adkins or Stephen Baldwin will be near impossible. 

Given all of this, I'm going to bet that NBC will ultimately be disappointed in the numbers The Celebrity Apprentice 2 pulls in 2009.  There's probably a fifty-fifty shot that we'll never see a Celebrity Apprentice 3.


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of NBC)