On Monday, Universal Studios released The Apprentice – The Complete First Season. From the looks of the display at my local BJ’s Wholesale Club, the distributors expect this to be a very hot release.
My wife and I got into watching The Apprentice after two or three episodes had aleady aired last winter. I think I originally recorded it on my TiVo because I had heard Laura Ingraham talking about it on her radio program. I am not a regular listener to her show because it airs at an odd time in the New York market, but, she praised The Apprentice so highly that I decided to watch an episode. We were immediately struck by the intensity of the projects, the chemistry (or lack thereof) between the contestants, and the pacing of the program. We setup a TiVo Season Pass immediately.
I don’t think NBC expected this series to be such a phenomenon. But, when it was clear that the potential existed for The Apprentice to become a blockbuster, they used all of their television properties to promote it. The morning after each episode aired, Donald Trump or the latest contestant to be fired appeared on The Today Show and Imus in the Morning. This quickly resulted in crossover traffic to other radio and TV programs.
The questions I ask, whenever I consider buying a TV program season series are:
- Did I enjoy the program enough to watch most of the series a second or third time?
- Has the series got the staying power to still be interesting in a couple of years?
I think The Apprentice – The Complete First Season is a great buy from that perspective. It has a lot of extras, including the auditions of the contestants, a preview of the second season, and career tips from Trump’s advisiors.
I think that a good time to watch this series again will be the period between the end of the 2004 Summer Olympics and the debut of the second season on NBC which will air on September 9. It would be a challenge to watch all of the episodes on the DVDs in that period, unless you have lots of time on your hands. But, watching some of them would be an excellent way to get back into The Apprentice mindset.