What will Donald Trump do on The Apprentice?
The next president will also serve as an executive producer on a TV show. Does that matter?
The other day, I got a breathless call from a reporter friend of mine. He was covering the latest controversy that had erupted over the incoming United States president Donald Trump’s administration.
Say what you like about the new president-elect, but he’s clearly enacting a full-employment plan for journalists with his one-controversy-per-hour policy.
Donald Trump’s previous employment, before the one he starts next month, was as host of a popular reality game show on television, The Apprentice. But he was more than the host, as often happens with high-profile talent. He was also an executive producer of the show.
Note, though, the word choice here: he was “an” executive producer, not “the” executive producer. Those words may not seem crucial, but in Hollywood terms they make all of the difference. As a film’s credits scroll by, there are major (and contrac- tual) distinctions to be made among the various producer titles.
For instance, someone listed as a “producer” of a feature film is more responsible for the success and failure of that particular picture – and is usually compensated at a higher level – than whomever is listed as an “executive producer,” which usually indicates a lesser and more expendable role.
Executive producers of feature films are often only glancingly involved in the actual production.
They might have owned, at one time, the rights to the script or the original material on which the film is based, or they may have had something to do with the financing.
Sometimes they are merely the managers or attorneys of the stars of the picture, and were responsible for delivering the stars to the project, making the initial deals, and then retreating to their offices.
“The way you can tell that the executive producer of a movie had nothing to do with it,” a cynical friend of mine puts it, “is because the credit has the word ‘executive’ in it. When have executives of anything been useful at all?”
In the world of television, where I work – and where the next president of the United States burnished his fame – the executive producer credit is a bit more complex.
As I write this, I am serving as the executive producer of a popular new comedy on a large American television network, and though on many days I wish I could retreat to my office and collect my paycheque for being simply an executive producer, I am a “the” and not an “an”.
I also have another, more informal, title. I am known as the “show runner”, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. I “run” the show, which means, when you cut away all of the tinsel and the hype, that when the phone rings, it rings for me. When there’s a problem on the set, it’s a problem for me to solve. When a script needs to be rewritten, it’s my fingers that do the typing. When bad news comes, it comes to me first. That’s the difference between a “the” and an “an”.
There are almost half a dozen other executive producers on the project, but at least two of them aren’t even on the same side of the continent of North America as I am, and one of them I haven’t even met.
What they do all day is a mystery to me – I mean, there are plenty of headaches to go around, but they all seem to be mine to solve – but one thing I know for sure: they’re all getting paid.
So when the next president of the United States announced recently, with a casual shrug, that he would continue to serve as an executive producer of his long-running reality game show, The Apprentice, show business outsiders instantly wondered how on earth a man serving in the most taxing job in the world could also find time to guide and produce a television show.
Journalists wrote articles and editorials questioning the un- seemly relationship between a large media organisation and a political office.
Couldn’t this lead to interference with the presumed impartiality of the network’s news and programming operations? Wouldn’t this connection result in The Apprentice becoming a propaganda arm for the incoming administration? From his powerful perch as the executive producer, couldn’t the next president use his show as a personal megaphone, unmediated by any checks or guardrails?
Those fears, of course, are unnecessary. As an executive producer of The Apprentice, Mr Trump will do what he does best, which is to collect fees for doing as little as possible.
He’ll have zero to do with the content of the show, its storylines and guest cast. He’ll be as far away from the set of The Apprentice as three of the executive producers of my show are from mine.
In other words, he will be an executive producer of a television show, but he will be the showrunner of an entire country.
Many of us would dearly prefer it be the other way around.