- Amazon Prime Video will stream Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice. This is the first time the show has been on a streaming service. Trump will likely benefit from the airing financially.
Donald Trump’s original reality TV show is coming back to people’s living rooms.
Amazon has added reruns of all seven seasons of The Apprentice to its Prime Video offering. This marks the first time the show has been offered on a streaming service and will almost certainly put more money in Trump’s pocket.
Trump is not only the star of the series, but also held an executive producer title along with Mark Burnett. The show originally aired on NBC from 2004 through 2017 and was responsible for boosting Trump’s public persona; it could have played a key role in his political ascendancy. (Trump remained an executive producer while he was in the White House during his first term.)
Amazon has been strengthening its relationship with Trump since he was elected to a second term in the White House. Prime Video, two months ago, licensed an upcoming documentary about Melania Trump. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also moved closer to Trump, contributing to the inauguration fund and radically overhauling the opinion page of the Washington Post and spiking a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris during the campaign.
“I look forward to watching this show myself—such great memories, and so much fun,” Trump said in a press release. “But most importantly, it was a learning experience for all of us!”
The show featured 16 contestants (sometimes celebrities) competing for the chance to “work” for Trump and receive a $250,000 salary. (Most non-celebrity contestants would not stay with Trump for long, if at all.) When it first aired, the series averaged 20 million viewers per week. The season one finale garnered 28 million viewers.
The show wasn’t without controversy, though. Bill Pruitt, a former producer on the show, later claimed Trump used the n-word to describe a Black contestant and openly commented on women’s appearances.
“We scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind,” Pruitt wrote in Slate.