Donald Trump wants to be in your home for a significant block of time every week. Trump wants it, Mark Burnett wants it, and so does NBC. It was revealed recently that when the second season of
The Celebrity Apprentice premieres (supposedly in March, though nothing is yet official), it will air in two-hour installments. Not double episodes, if that's what you were thinking. Each individual episode will be expanded into two hours, which means more airtime for the tasks and a lot more airtime for the boardrooms. This decision comes during a ratings nadir for NBC, a time when filling out the prime-time schedule with low-cost productions is a necessity.
The Apprentice will almost certainly air on Sunday nights when it does return, likely from 8-10pm.
The Celebrity Apprentice premiered last season in the middle of the writers' strike, and was thus competing against a sparse playing field. The ratings were good, better than expected, especially given the fact that
The Apprentice was all but dead until then-new NBC President Ben Silverman resurrected the reality series, this time in Celebrity form. The new crop of celebrity contestants in the upcoming season include Khloe Kardashian, Joan Rivers, Tom Green, Clint Black and Dennis Rodman, among others.
The two-hour format is definitely an experiment. Donald Trump and former contestants have long lamented the lack of boardroom footage in every episode. Boardrooms, though only receiving ten or so minutes of air time, are known to actually last for hours. With the episodes expanding to two hours, viewers will be treated to much longer and intense boardrooms. Will the general public enjoy the long boardrooms? The hardcore fans, the business people of the world, should have a very good time with it, though I wonder about typical reality fans and their notoriously short attention spans.
Again – there is no official word yet on when and where
The Celebrity Apprentice 2 will premiere. The earliest, due to a busy January, that the series could air is the first week of February, but it could move into March. It's probable that even NBC hasn't made up their minds yet.
-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
Source: TVWeek
(Image Courtesy of NBC)