The Apprentice was almost cancelled (Donald Trump went so far as to tell the network they couldn’t fire him because he was a quitter) as its ratings continued to slump after the network made one dumb decision after another (and this latest decision may well fall into that category), but TVWeek reports that following the success of The Celebrity Apprentice, The Celebrity Apprentice 2 will be supersized (hopefully without Trump’s ego being supersized as well).
The second season of the celebrity version of The Apprentice will now air for two hours on Sunday nights, with a February start date likely. No specific time frame has been given for the show, which struggled the last time it was on Sunday nights.
Reportedly, this was not originally planned when the show was filmed, so now the producers will need to find ways to fill the two hours, hopefully without doing things like The Biggest Loser producers do (i.e. taking an hour to weigh in four people).
“It’s great,†Mark Burnett said during a brief telephone conversation from New York. “It wasn’t a sudden call at all. During production, the people at NBC were saying the show was so great and should really be two hours.â€
“Donald has always felt the boardrooms were too short, and I think he’s right,†Mr. Burnett said. “Right now, there’s really only about nine minutes of footage that we use and the boardroom (scenes) go on for hours sometimes. The problem has been trying to squeeze it all in. Every season we go through the struggle of cutting the show down.”