Donald Trump Is Losing His Touch. So Is the TV Producer Who Shaped His Image

Did you catch Steve Harvey’s “Funderdome” on ABC? And the man behind the string of flops is Mark Burnett, the legendary TV producer who shaped Donald Trump’s image from “The Apprentice” through his 2016 inauguration. “The level of production coming out of the White House is something we would have appreciated having,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the “The Apprentice,” said of the video’s specific camera angles and its particular obsession with helicopters, a longtime favorite prop of Burnett’s dating back to “Survivor.” “As is customary for this, the reality TV version of a presidential campaign, it seems they’re not striving as much for ‘four more years’ as they are ‘Season 2.’ ” But that style may have fallen out of fashion. “If that’s your main mission and your legacy is Trump and maybe the failure of the next MGM — that’s not a good chapter in his life.” The current chapter of Burnett’s career began in earnest when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the once-great studio that had recently emerged from bankruptcy, bought out Burnett’s production company in 2015 for $120 million, consummating an earlier $400 million deal. But the best move of Trump’s career, tax returns obtained by The Times showed, was in reality, not news — his partnership with Burnett in “The Apprentice.” My colleague James Poniewozik wrote once that Trump’s problem is that “now there’s no Mark Burnett to impose retroactive logic on the chaos.” People who have worked with Burnett say they can’t help imagining that he’s working all the angles on the final, realest reality show of all, following a former president back into the real world.