Mark Burnett: Reality TV Pioneer and King Maker
Reality Television's power to make a President.
Mark Burnett will forever be known as the man who created the groundbreaking reality TV show, Survivor. Now in its 46th season. Don’t worry, you are not as old as you think, they do two a year.
He’s created prime-time reality television.
Every week, people were glued to their television to watch what happened next. But he didn’t stop there. He brought Dragon’s Den to America with Shark Tank and is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars invested into small businesses. Without him, we probably wouldn’t have Ring, Squatty Potty, or Scrub Daddy.
But between Survivor and Shark Tank was another massive hit you might have heard of, The Apprentice. On January 8th, 2004 Donald Trump and Mark Burnett premiered something that would forever change the course of American history.
The show was a hit and went on for 14 Seasons. Ending February 16th, 2015.
Exactly 4 months later, on June 16th, 2015 Donald Trump came down the golden escalators and announced his presidency.
Reality TV usually and in some cases rightfully gets a bad rap. It is at times trash television and a modern twist on Jerry Springer. It relies on sensationalism and in most cases not as real as the name lends itself to. But its power is that it is an incredibly relatable form of storytelling. It strips everything down to the basics, and it can be enjoyed by any age group.
One evening, I was having dinner with Darren Doane, and he told me that Trump would be president. This was when people still thought the idea of it was ridiculous and late night comedians were having lots of fun every night. I asked Darren how he could be so sure.
Darren said, “You can’t have 14 seasons of a number one prime time hit and be unlikeable by the flyover states.”
It was at that moment I knew he was right.
Reality TV is not made for the elite in mind. The conversations and language are purposefully dumbed down. Just go into a real meeting with an investor, and then watch any episode of Shark Tank. You will know immediately there is a difference. There are no discussions on SAFE agreements, Donor Advisor Funds and convertible notes. There’s no boring pitch decks, with mind-numbing charts and graphs. It’s entertainment first. That stuff happens off camera.
But after 15 years of Shark Tank, what Mark Burnett has done is made the basic language of business more palatable by the masses.
But he started doing this with The Apprentice.
Every week, people learned the basics of running a business. They saw people screw up marketing, mismanage prices and get in arguments with other employees. They saw people who were weak in their leadership and others who were too aggressive.
And then we got to see the boardroom fights, and I would argue that these scenes prepared the minds of Americans to see Trump as a functioning President without them even knowing it. Here you have a billionaire real estate mogul, toning down the language of business and deals in such a way that every single person who watched NBC could understand. But no one thought they were learning anything. It was prime-time entertainment, right?
I was listening to President Trump give a speech the other day. He was talking about his negotiations with NATO and other trade agreements. Not only did I understand it, I actually cared about it. But then on TikTok I saw a clip of his meeting with the NATO leaders, the parts they showed you on camera.
There was NBC’s real estate mogul, Donald Trump sitting in a boardroom, framed exactly like the hit TV show. Him in the middle, advisors on the left and right. His opponents sitting right across from him. The only difference was the lavish plating in front of them.
Did I mention the cameras were on? He was giving us another season of The Apprentice, but this time as President. He wasn’t debating Geraldo, he was debating Stoltenberg for the cameras, so the American people could see. Furthermore, he used basic language, and said just enough that we understand what was happening. Certainly, just like in Shark Tank there are more complex discussions that happen before and after the cameras are rolling. But the cameras were rolling. That’s the point.
President Trump is very intelligent. He’s had 14 years to learn how to entertain and educate the American people. This makes him incredibly dangerous. It’s what makes SNL impressions of him being a buffoon so incapable of gaining authentic laughter.
Whether they live in a trailer in Appalachia, or in the Bayou, or the projects of Atlanta, you cannot convince these Americans that Donald Trump has low intelligence when he just taught them how to debate the Secretary General of NATO as if it was a scene right out of an episode of The Apprentice.
Conservatives think about entertainment, with education and indoctrination at the forefront. It’s why we specialize in talk radio and documentary filmmaking. We are excellent at presenting facts. What we don’t understand is the power of storytelling that focuses on entertainment first and education second.
Reality TV is low cost, and widely relatable. Whether it’s real or not, it created in the minds of the American people an image of Donald Trump running the negotiating table. It taught people to be tough in dealings. It’s perfect for conservative streamers with the need to produce rapid, lower cost content. Yet it is completely absent.
The culture of prime-time television created by Mark Burnett is single-handedly lead to the greatest societal impacts in American history.
Perhaps we should take reality television more seriously than we do.
Perhaps, we should.