The Apprentice

THE APPRENTICE

Airing Thursday at 9 p.m. on NBC

I last saw Donald Trump in the pinkish flesh about five years ago at the opening of a photography show. Celebrity portraits filled a Soho gallery, and the canapés were just fine. Flanked by slabs of bodyguard, accessorized, perhaps, with the pretty woman to whom he has since sworn his immortal love, Trump made for the far wall to gaze at a photo of Donald Trump. He appraised it at length and approvingly.

Now, my editor believes that we have all heard quite enough about Mr. Trump, and of course he is correct. The current iteration, The Apprentice, his reality show, is garnering its lowest ratings yet, and any pundit or tube addict will tell you that the contest-which mingles retro greed-is-goodness with a post dot-com boom air of entrepreneurial hustle-has long since jumped the shark. To which I say, yes, of course, and confess that I cannot avert my tired eyes. The show is neither so-bad-it's-good, which would require a deranged grandiosity, nor a guilty pleasure, which implies robust qualities of cheese and froth. No, The Apprentice harbors only ambitions of regular immodesty and brandishes a merely quotidian trashiness.

Perhaps you know the drill: The show gathers earnest young sharpies into a Trump apartment in Manhattan to compete for a Trump job by executing "business projects" that double as TiVo-proof product placements, shilling sandwiches for Burger King, say, or widgets for Whatever Interntional. This season, the two teams elected to call themselves Excel Corporation and Capital Edge, and the plodding Dale Carnegie quality of the names precisely reflects the sensibilities of the assembled. The weekly climax is an unfailingly obnoxious boardroom scene in which members of the losing team plead and politic in hopes of avoiding abrupt dismissal. The loser then wheels a suitcase to the elevator and descends, cast out of Eden. The rolling luggage is central to my perverse addiction to the program and perhaps to its steadily dwindling popularity, too. It is a synechdoche for all the small sadnesses of business as usual. In the right light, The Apprentice looks like an unwitting pomo update of Death of a Salesman.

Meanwhile, Trump-however overexposed he becomes, no matter how one-dimensional he remains-endures as a weird study in pop iconography, the zillionaire as folk hero. Who else combines such theatrical pomposity with the total absence of self-knowledge? What goes on under that gleaming copper comb-over? Does he know how precisely he sounds, when saying, "hello," like Dr. Evil?