BOARDROOM junkies take note: “The Apprentice” has more of what you’re looking for on Saturday nights.
This season, as ABC, NBC and CBS pack their Saturday-night lineups with repeats of shows that aired first just days earlier, NBC has been experimenting with an “Apprentice” repeat that isn’t exactly a repeat at all.
What’s the difference? The answer comes down to two words: “More boardroom.”
“Everyone who has ever watched [“The Apprentice”] from the first season kept [saying], ‘We love the boardroom, we want to see more boardroom,’ ” explains Craig Plestis, senior vice president of alternative programming and development for NBC.
For its one-hour weekend edition airing Saturday nights at 9, NBC is altering the “Apprentice” episode from the previous Thursday.
The shows both end the same way – with someone being fired by Donald Trump, who is flanked by henchman George Ross and henchwoman Carolyn Kepcher in the show’s famous boardroom.
But on Saturday night’s edition, the boardroom scene is expanded by as much as 15 minutes, using footage culled from the hours of videotape that wind up on the cutting room floor. At the same time, the minutes devoted to the weekly task undertaken by the show’s two teams are reduced.
“It’s just an opportunity to make a repeat episode that’s a lot more exciting,” Plestis says, “and in fact, it’s not even a repeat; it becomes almost a new episode.”
The expanded boardroom edition of “The Apprentice” is drawing raves from “Apprentice” fans who are grateful for the opportunity to see more of what went on in the boardroom meeting with Trump.
That reception thrills NBC, which is hoping that its partially altered repeat episode will draw not only viewers who missed “The Apprentice” on Thursday, but others who will want to watch both shows.
NBC has not yet conducted any research to learn how many of its Saturday “Apprentice” viewers are watching the weekend episodes for the second time.
And, like the repeat episodes of other series airing on NBC and the other networks on Saturday nights, the weekend “Apprentice” draws just a fraction of the number of viewers as the Thursday show.
Last week, for example, “The Apprentice” on Thursday attracted 16.2 million viewers (its highest total-viewer count of the season) to rank 12th out of all prime-time shows, according to Nielsen.
Last Saturday’s “Apprentice” was ranked 78th with 4.5 million viewers.