On top of everything else, today’s installment provides a useful way to think of characters in reality shows.

“Mr Trump” at the staple-gunned mahogany-veneered desk on “The Apprentice” was the “fictional alter ego” of washed-up failure Donald Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/28/us/donald-trump-taxes-apprentice.html

When millions of Americans stopped watching union primetime TV programs (w/full-fledged scripts, directors, show runners, & accomplished actors), they turned to cheaply-made game shows.

But they lost the capacity to enjoy fiction as fiction.

Since the quiz show scandals, game shows had started amping up the backstories of the contestants.

As with the Olympics and other sports coverage, some people didn’t want the formal contest of skill, they wanted the “offstage” grudge match and the melodrama.

The Apprentice had a nominal “competition” that let Mark Burnett underpay everyone—they were runaways, kids & pharma reps, not actors— while he forced them to abase themselves for camera time.

Trump was used to abasing himself for airtime — as part of Howard Stern’s Wack Pack.

But Stern was an auteur who kept Trump the butt of the joke.

Burnett must’ve been overjoyed that Trump was willing to do the heavy lifting for him, by being so absurd that he no one had to write or stage drama. Producers just had to make things roughly add up in the edit.

I love Survivor and I hoped the Apprentice would be an actual GAME.

But when it was just Trump’s mental illness on display as people bowed & scraped before him, there was no strategy or skill.

I interviewed Burnett about a short-lived reality show he did (called “Casino”). He believed that if you could persuade people that being assholes on camera was good for their “brand” or “exposure,” they’d do it for no money and in perpetuity.

As for audiences, instead of reading “Soap Digest”—that amazing magazine about daytime dramas that *kind of* acts like Erica Kane is a real person?—they grabbed Us Weekly, InTouch, etc, which acted like “Mr Trump” was a real person.

And we lost our capacity to watch fiction as fiction, to understand, as viewers of Dallas did, that you love to hate JR Ewing — but he’s not going to show up on the BALLOT, because he is a character played by an actor.

Maybe there’s a way to think of a figure in a reality show as the “alter ego” of someone else. Which is why I wish people still hired actual trained actors, & paid them well, to entertain us. Watching a performance is one thing. Watching an “alter ego” is just watching pathology.