This reality isn't business as usual
You don't need to go into the closet to follow "The Apprentice." It's the reality show you don't have to be ashamed to watch.
Sure, the hit series genuflects to that 1980s icon of American greed, Donald Trump, the original Master of the Universe for whom modesty and temperance are dirty words. In its many airings each week on NBC and CNBC, the show hoists Trump's gold-plated ego and plush lifestyle onto a high-rise pedestal.
But Trump has emerged in the early 2000s as something of a cultural good guy. To enjoy him isn't the same as enjoying our newly minted corporate figures, notably
He's almost a throwback to more innocent times, before today's nefarious looters and before the dot-com boom and bust. Some of the tasks he assigns his contestants -- selling lemonade, for example, or mining flea markets -- have an almost "Little Rascals"-like old-fashioned simplicity. With his tough-loving-mentor affect, he's a sort of fantasy boss who wants to take someone under his wing. In tonight's "Apprentice" finale at 9, he'll finally tell one of his ambitious wannabes, "You're hired."
Trump's growing popularity as a kitsch figure also makes it easy for TV viewers to distance him from today's corporate antiheroes, the impersonal ones whose parties feature ice sculptures of Michelangelo's David urinating vodka. He has always held comic cred as "the Donald," but "The Apprentice" has lifted him to a new level of light-hearted self-caricature. Recently he hosted "Saturday Night Live" for the first time, and he has been having regular fun at his own expense on the talk-show circuit. And Trump-sanctioned cleverness regarding the billionaire's hair has become a media fine art, peaking, perhaps, with David Letterman's "The Taj-ma-helmet."
"The Apprentice" is also socially acceptable because it's a reality show that doesn't delve into Trump's personal life or that of his girlfriend, model Melania Knauss. It's not a celebrity reality show created to spy on the mundane lives of the exhibitionistic rich and famous, such as "Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica" or "The Anna Nicole Show." We never feel the voyeuristic ick that we feel looking into that fishbowl called "The Surreal Life," for example, where the likes of Ron Jeremy and Corey Feldman mug for us. There are flashes of Trump's private excesses in "The Apprentice," from his helicopter to his 24-karat toilet flushers, but this is a show primarily about being scrappy in the world of business. It's about the ethics of selling and selling oneself, not about the Osbournes' dog's poop.
Relatively speaking, "The Apprentice" isn't gratuitously mean. While many viewers recoil at the humiliation contestants meet on shows such as "The Swan," "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance," or "Fear Factor," they know they won't find contrived psychic violence and trickery on "The Apprentice." The show's producer, Mark Burnett, doesn't set up reality-style screamfests. Trump is cold-eyed, but he's not insulting like Simon Cowell on "American Idol." The players certainly bicker and back-stab, but their competition has an air of capitalist laboratory about it. It bears the legitimacy of a professional contest, even when it gets personal.
And so, many reality-phobic viewers have found an unscripted TV contest that doesn't give them the willies. In the process, they're giving NBC a potential Thursday night anchor now that "Friends" is leaving. Reality shows often peak after their first seasons, but NBC executives are expecting "The Apprentice" to continue to protect the network against CBS's insurgent Thursday lineup. They're hoping it will have the legs of CBS's "Survivor." They're hoping we won't rush to say "You're fired" to their most competitive new player. They may get their wish.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. 
