The Apprentice (American TV series) season 1

Summary

Candidates

Weekly results

Elimination table

Weekly summary

Week 1: "Meet the Billionaire"

• Air date: January 8, 2004
• Task: Starting with seed money of $250, purchase supplies and sell lemonade on the streets of New York.
• Judges: Donald Trump; Carolyn Kepcher; George H. Ross
• Monologue: Location, Location, Location – Any product sales depends on the location, it has to reach the right target demographic.
• Protégé project manager: Ereka
• Versacorp project manager: Troy
• Winning team: Protégé
• *Reasons for win: The women nearly quintupled their money. They stay in Midtown and use the promises of kisses to sell lemonade for five dollars a glass, giving them a total of over $1,200.
• *Reward: Visit Donald Trump in his penthouse suite, taking in the pleasures of true fortune.
• Losing team: Versacorp
• *Reasons for loss: Versacorp only doubled their money, giving them a total of $500, as they chose a bad location, by the Fulton Fish Market, and priced their lemonade too low. While they eventually found a better location and started selling the lemonade at a slightly higher price, it was far too late to have any hope of recovering the task. In addition, David and Sam proved to be extremely poor salesmen, selling less than $10 between them.
• Dramatic tension: Versacorp member Sam begins to get on the other's nerves by his crazy antics, including fruitlessly trying to sell a single glass of lemonade for $1,000, even though he nearly succeeded.
• Sent to boardroom: Troy, Sam, and David
• Fired: David Gould – for selling the least on the team, admitting in the boardroom that sales was not his forte and for not stepping up or taking initiative as Troy and Sam had. Despite criticizing Troy's leadership and his decisions along with Sam's strange behavior, Trump felt that they had at least showed some initiative, while David had been very passive and otherwise demonstrated no skills that would be of any use to Trump.
• Notes:
• *
• *Though originally 90 minutes long, the repeated airing of the episode was cut to 60 minutes.
• *18.5 million people watched this episode's initial airing, fulfilling NBC's expectations for the much-anticipated premiere. In fact, the series premiere came in 7th place for the week it aired.
• *When Versacorp enters the boardroom, Trump is already sitting in his chair. This is the only Apprentice episode ever where Trump arrives in the boardroom before the candidates.
• *While Sam's attempt to sell a glass of lemonade for $1,000 alienated his team-mates and was a big factor in his being brought back to the boardroom by Troy, such attempts to sell everyday goods for vastly inflated prices would become commonplace in the later Celebrity Apprentice editions of the show.

Week 2: "Sex, Lies and Altitude"

• Air date: January 15, 2004
• Task sponsor: Marquis Jet Card
• Task: Both teams are to design an advertising campaign to sell private jet service, which they must pitch to the owner of the company and Donny Deutsch.
• Judges: Donald Trump; Carolyn Kepcher; George H. Ross
• Monologue: Do Not Deal With Underlings – Trump learned early in his career making deals can be tough and you have to work with the boss where ever possible.
• Protégé project manager: Amy
• Versacorp project manager: Jason
• Winning team: Protégé
• *Reasons for win: Amy and Ereka personally met with Marquis Jet's president and learned that nothing was off limits for their ad. This led to Tammy headlining their campaign with heavy sexual undertones, while depicting parts of the aircraft in black and white artistic shots. The women also pitched their ads while wearing flashy flight attendant outfits.
• *Reward: A trip to Boston in a private jet and dinner at a fancy restaurant.
• Losing team: Versacorp
• *Reasons for loss: Due to Jason's decision not to meet with the president, the men chose to create a conventional campaign, complete with photos of the cockpit and passengers designed to illustrate the utility and convenience of the service. While Donny Deutsch and the Marquis Jet executives felt that the campaign was generally executed competently, they dismissed it as being completely unoriginal.
• *Dramatic tension: Sam further aggravates his team members and is excoriated for taking a nap on the floor during the task. This was a negative brought up by both Jason and Trump itself, but was also noted clearly that this was not the reason Versacorp lost the challenge.
• *Sent to boardroom: Jason, Sam, and Nick
• *Trump's Thoughts: Nick strongly defended Jason during the internal review, but was brought back into the final boardroom, in what Trump suspected was an attempt to have Nick advocate for Jason to stay. In any event, the move backfired when Nick angrily demanded to know why he was in the final boardroom, and Jason was unable to justify his decision, lamely telling Nick that it had to be "someone" alongside his clear target Sam. Trump told Sam he's been a disaster and no one on his team respects him. In the end, Trump considered Jason's failure to meet with the client too fatal an error to be ignored.
• Fired: Jason Curis – for not meeting with the president at the start of the task, which caused the team to lose. Also, Trump did not like the fact that Nick, the "one guy" that defended Jason, was brought back into the boardroom.
• Notes:
• *
• *Jason did not see the point of meeting the client for their campaign, while several of his teammates did, and Trump himself was aghast that Jason did not meet with company's owner at the beginning and thereby learn that Deutsch and the executives wanted a flashier campaign.
• *The women's reward became short-lived from a heat of tension that Omarosa instigated with Ereka. After Omarosa called Ereka emotionally unstable, Ereka stated that this was a case of "the pot calling the kettle black| calling the kettle black", which Omarosa interpreted as racism. After the season ended Omarosa tried to imply that Ereka and another candidate had used even stronger racist insults off-camera, though no evidence of this was ever found during a review of the production tapes. Vetrini has stated that contestants are almost always on camera or being audio-recorded during production, and that such an event, if it occurred, would have been aired to garner ratings.
• *This episode is the first time that the project manager has the words "Project Manager" in their name at the bottom of the screen instead of their actual occupation.
• *20.2 million people watched this episode's initial airing.