Vying for a job, they do it with style

It's not enough to be a top anything anymore. If you're the head of a clothing conglomerate, the overlord of an airline-music-mobile empire, or even the king of freaking New York City, you may still feel the need to have a reality TV show of your very own. Nothing else, not even a celebrity blog featuring your truest feelings about yourself, will quite satisfy your hunger to usher your brand name into the future. When Martha Stewart presides over ''The Apprentice" this fall, she and her company will have officially regained status quo.

Tonight on ''The Cut," at 8 on Channel 4, clothing mogul Tommy Hilfiger makes his move on prime time by hosting a contest in which 16 designers compete for a job with him. And he probably could not have come up with a smarter and more contemporary way to plug both his company and himself. Tonight's hour is all about his label, as the wannabes feverishly design Times Square billboards to promote it. And it's all about the health of his ego, as he continually boasts about his uncanny success in the proudly immodest manner of Donald Trump. ''From a dream in a basement, I have built a multibillion-dollar fashion empire," he announces stiffly.

Not surprisingly, ''The Cut" isn't very original. But to say the CBS series is a flagrant rip-off of NBC's ''The Apprentice" and Bravo's ''Project Runway" is not to condemn it. After all, reality TV is a long line of rip-offs, each one only slightly altering its predecessor. For reality producers, being derivative is a way of life. ''The Cut" does have its small unscripted charms, as its artsy types get down and dirty trying to out-create one another. When being functionally offbeat is the goal, colorful TV sometimes ensues.

The show's structure very closely mirrors ''The Apprentice." The players live together in a fabulous SoHo loft, and each week Hilfiger eliminates one of them based on his or her performance in the most recent task. There's a ''style forum" at the end of each episode, during which Hilfiger provokes the teams before naming the unlucky loser.

But the contestants are more unbuttoned than those on ''The Apprentice," as they eagerly express themselves through their clothing and attitude. They're more like the footloose freelance types from ''Project Runway," if not as handy. When Hilfiger first greets the gang, he immediately assesses what they chose to wear to meet him, dissing anyone who's too casual. He wants to set an aesthetically competitive mood, even if the cast members also need to be market-minded to win. It's one thing to see Trump's business people getting sharklike with one another and quite another to see fashion geeks going head-to-head and talking trash.

Watching ''The Cut," you may once again find yourself asking, ''Where do they come up with these people?" It's not that they're a particularly loony bunch, although lunacy does rear its head in the heat of tonight's task, as the men and women on one team lock horns. It's just that they all so willingly reduce themselves to ''characters" for the show. ''All I want to do is wear suits and boss people around," says Princess. ''I hope Tommy sees me as the all-American boy with a twist," says Wes. And Chris C. can't help himself from continually reminding us that he is from ''the ghetto."

We can be pretty sure that whichever one ultimately wins ''The Cut," he or she will already have an instinct for the marketing end of things.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.