The genre began with our president, of course, who realized years ago that TV contests based on people’s ability to sing, dance, or get along with a houseful of losers on the CBS lot were small-time. The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004, wasn’t about winning on the dance floor; it was about winning where it counts: in business. The show, like so much of the Trump enterprise, was based largely on humiliation. In the first episode, female contestants, each of them a legitimate businesswoman in her own right, won the challenge of running a lemonade stand in Manhattan by offering to kiss customers. Their prize was a visit to Trump’s apartment, where they met Melania and told her how lucky she was.
Shark Tank, which premiered in the U.S. in 2009, offers the real deal: the opportunity to take your day job and shove it. The products that the guests present on the show are typically not medical or technological advances, which might bore the audience. Instead, they tend to be different types of highly specialized junk: peel-and-stick lapels that turn an ordinary suit into a tuxedo; an interior light for the toilet bowl; a cap that cures bed head; colored hair spray for dogs.
Many of them are silly, but they have the potential to transform the inventor’s life. A man with a new kind of sponge called the Scrub Daddy (it changes texture in warm water) became a multimillionaire as the result of the deal he made on Shark Tank.
