#I was busy when gravity falls was airing and also super young but I found the show and the concept so exciting and cool

[thestrangestwatermelonofall]

so like... journal 3 has just been out there since 2017??? And it's this good??? And I had no idea???? Geez

[alarawriting]

52 Project #11: Selkie

This is the closest I’ve come so far to this not happening at all. I’ve been insanely busy this week and I almost forgot about doing this, which is why it’s about 2 hours late, but better late than to miss the date.

----

Now I don’t know if any of this is true enough, and a lot of it sounds crazy, but this is what my best friend Stella told me, right before she and her mom disappeared. And I tried to tell the cops, but they didn’t listen, and I can’t blame them, because seriously, this story is totally cray-cray. It doesn’t help that her dad kept saying “They’re gone, they’ve gone and they’re never coming back.” I mean, officially he’s a “person of interest” but we all know the cops think he killed them and hid the bodies and they’re just waiting to have enough evidence that they can actually charge him. And maybe that is what happened. Maybe this was just a fantasy Stella came up with because she knew her dad was a crazy ax murderer and she was scared.

But I don’t think so. Stella wasn’t the kind of girl who stuck her fingers in her ears and went “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” when things were bad. She confronted bad stuff. She tried to solve problems. So I don’t think she would have told me some weird made up story and then by total coincidence her dad killed her the day after, and I don’t think she would have done it because she thought he was gonna kill her. If that was what she’d thought she’d have told me, and we’d have told the cops.

I think what she told me was the truth. And I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to believe my friend is dead. I’m a Christian; I believe in Heaven, and God. If my friend was dead, then someday I’d see her again in Heaven. That’s what I believe. But if her story is true, then I have no idea if she’s gonna go to the same Heaven, or if like God has different Heavens for different planets, so I have no idea if I’m ever going to see her again, and probably not. Like, people have come back from near-death experiences and none of them ever reported seeing aliens in Heaven, so I think God must have different ones for people like Stella and her mom. So in some ways it’d be better if she was dead, because then I’d see her again someday, and this way, I never will.

But I still believe it’s the truth. And I’m still glad for her, even though I miss her every day and I cry because I know I’ll never see her again. But I know she’s going somewhere where her mom, at least, will be happy. And maybe Stella can be happy too.

So here’s the story.

It starts with her dad, who once upon a time, was hot. Or so I’m told. I find this really hard to believe. My mom says I’m being a ridiculous teenager when I say that Stella’s dad looks like he was always ugly, because she says that if I was middle-aged I’d think he was rugged and manly, like Sean Connery, except Sean Connery has a nice accent and doesn’t look like he fell out of an ugly tree and hit his face on every ugly branch there was until he landed at the bottom and hit his head on the ugly root. But apparently, once upon a time, long, long ago in a galaxy far far away… wait, I can’t tell that joke anymore. It means something now. Dammit, this whole thing has even taken Star Wars jokes away from me.

Anyway, once upon a time, Stella’s dad was ruggedly handsome, when he was young. And maybe when he wasn’t too super old. I don’t know, because if he was so hot, how did he get to be 30, with a house, and land, without getting married or even having a serious girlfriend? But anyway, he was single, and he was walking around on his property when he met Stella’s mom, who was a total stranger at the time, and she was on his property collecting leaves and grass for some reason.

Now the thing about Stella’s mom. Her dad might be ugly, but her mom… well, I’m straight, but if I was an adult and I was going to go lez for anyone, I would totally go lez for Stella’s mom. When I was a kid I thought there was no one more beautiful in the world, even my own mom, and I wanted to grow up to look like her, but I knew I never would. No one gets to grow up looking like Stella’s mom, which is another reason why I think Stella’s story is true. She has, like, skin that’s like golden, like we say about Asian people except hers is even more golden than that, and fluffy curly red hair that falls down straight instead of making a bell around her head which is what Stella’s curly hair does, and I don’t even know how curly hair can fall straight but it does. Except when it practically floats like a cloud around her head because it’s so light. And she’s tall, and thin, and her fingers are super long and look like she ought to be a surgeon, or maybe an expert piano player, or something.

When I was a kid, she was really, really graceful. Like, she looked like she was gliding everywhere, anytime she walked. When she turned around, it was like, I don’t know, like a wheel turning instead of a person, like there was no jerk to it, it was just completely smooth. But then she started getting pain in her back and her joints, and it got worse, and she started to have to walk with a cane and spend all her time on the sofa, using a laptop or watching TV or knitting. And then there were the medical problems because apparently she wasn’t eating right or something and she was too thin, only she wouldn’t go to the hospital so Stella wouldn’t be able to go over my house because she had to take care of her mom. So I’d go over her house instead, and we’d try to get her mom to take her pills, or eat, but some days she’d just ignore us and stare out at the sky. Other times, she told us to tell her stories, or she’d tell them to us. The stories she told us were all like science fiction stuff, which was pretty awesome. I mean, my mom can’t make up stories off the top of her head and I’m pretty sure that if she did, they wouldn’t be about other planets and weird alien creatures and stuff.

According to Stella, there was a really good reason for that, that she just found out.

Anyway. So her dad, who was rugged, met her mom, who was beautiful, and it was love at first sight. He went everywhere with her. He took her to the movies, and museums, and out into the woods, and she loved everything. Especially going to the woods, or the beach, or the mountains… anywhere in nature, and she’d collect things, like leaves, and rocks, and when he asked, she’d say “Don’t you think this is a beautiful world we’re on?”

He asked her to get married, and she said no. She had a job, she said, and her job was going to take her out of the area and she’d probably never see him again, so she just wanted to enjoy the time together that they had. He didn’t like that answer, but she was pretty firm on it. He suggested getting a different job, where they could be together, and she laughed at him. But she never actually talked about her job. So one day, he spied on her.

She had a house she was renting, a small shack out by the ocean. One day he snuck into it, and poked around, and found what looked like a weird metal hula hoop in a room next to what looked like a ham radio. (My grandfather had a ham radio. When I was a kid every time it was mentioned I thought it was a ham that had one of those speaker grilles in it. I was really disappointed when I found out what it really was.) And then she came back to her house while he was there, so he hid in a closet and he watched.

He watched her take the hula hoop and make it light up. She put it over her head, and it floated there, and then it went down her body and up again and she looked completely different. She was blue, and even taller, and really spindly, and her skin shone kind of like it was the outside of a bug or something, like a shiny blue beetle, and she moved like she was in pain, like she was all bent over. Then she turned on the ham radio, and a hologram of another blue creature floated in the air above her desk, and she said things to the hologram that sounded all clicky and hissy, and the blue creature said things back. Then she did the hula hoop thing again, turned back into a human, and left.

So there are a lot of guys who, if they saw their girlfriend turn into an alien, would decide they never wanted to see her again, or maybe even try to kill her, and I guess I’ve gotta give Stella’s dad that, he wasn’t one of those guys. But he also wasn’t one of the kind of guys who’d go to her and say “I know you’re really an alien but I love you and I wanna go to space with you and can you turn me into a bug thing?” or even “I know you’re really an alien and I love you and I accept that you’re gonna have to go back to the mothership or wherever.”

No, he was the kind of guy who took the hula hoop, and unplugged the ham radio, and took them on his boat, and went out into the ocean and threw them in.

Of course she figured out it was him; no one else would have known where she lived. I mean maybe some random burglar, but why is a random burglar going to go out to a little shack in the middle of nowhere and take the alien technology but not the computer or the TV? She screamed at him, and raged, and said that now she could never go home again. She hit him, but she wasn’t really very strong, because it turns out, she comes from a planet where the gravity is lower than Earth and even when the hula hoop thing turned her into a human, she was still a pretty weak human who wasn’t used to our gravity. She said that when the ship couldn’t raise her again, her family would assume the worst, and they would wait for her at the rendezvous point but there was like this stellar cycle they needed to follow to get to the next planet they were studying and they couldn’t come back here for 18 years and she was stuck all alone on this planet until then. And he said that she had him, and he loved her, and eventually she started crying and he held her and she let him do it, because sometimes something is so bad that you need comfort even if it comes from the guy who did it to you in the first place.

A year later they got married. Three years after that, Stella was born.

As far as I know Stella was 100% human. She was very pretty, but not like almost inhumanly pretty like her mom, just like normal human pretty. Her mom kept up the collecting Earth specimens and Stella particularly liked the rocks; she and I used to go climbing up hills and cliff faces looking for nice rocks together. I never cared about the rocks, but Stella was always the one in charge of what we did, because whatever she came up with was gonna be fun, so I always let her do it. My ideas were like, stay at home and play video games or get on the computer or something, but Stella said, her mom used to take her around everywhere and now that she was getting sicker and weaker and she was stuck on a sofa all day with nothing to do but be on the computer, she complained all the time about how she didn’t get to do things with Stella anymore and would always ask Stella about what cool things did she find today, or what did she do, so Stella didn’t want to be on a computer all the time because what if she grew up and got to be like her mom?  So we would go on adventures together, exploring the woods, and sometimes we were fairy princesses in exile plotting to discover the magic gems that would give us the power to take our kingdom back, and sometimes we were filming super important documentaries that we were going to put on YouTube and get to be rich and internet-famous, which maybe would even have worked if we weren’t 8 and the things we were filming weren’t like rocks and geese. And sometimes we were space explorers.

Kind of ironic. But we didn’t know. Stella’s mom told us all those stories, but we thought she was making it all up.

Anyway. What Stella told me is that they came back. Her mom’s people. They weren’t sure she was dead, so they set out to find her. And she used to put stuff on the Internet with the alien writing on it. You remember I said she knits, right? So she’d knit things, and take pictures, and put them on Deviantart or Tumblr or whatever, and the stuff she knitted had alien symbols on it but everyone thought they were just weird designs. So the aliens, when they came back, they searched the Internet for any signs that Stella’s mom was still alive, and they found them.

Stella’s mom has been in crippling pain for years because she wasn’t ever meant to live in our gravity, and she doesn’t get the nutrients she needs because her human body can’t digest things that her alien body really needed, and she’s been getting sicker and sicker, and more and more depressed. But when her people came for her and they brought her a new hula hoop, it was like all that melted away, and Stella said, for the first time she can remember in years, her mother looked joyful. And her mom told her the story, and now Stella hates her dad, because if you love someone why would you ruin their life so that you could be with them? She says, the only reason her mom must’ve stayed with her dad was Stockholm Syndrome or something, but I read stuff, so I don’t think that’s the whole reason. I think maybe she wanted to stay with someone who knew who and what she really was, even if that was the person who took that identity away from her, because it was so important for her to have just one person who she could share the truth with.

Well, she shared the truth with Stella. And Stella made her decision. She wasn’t going to stay on Earth, with her dad, who is the kind of jerk who cripples people he loves so they’ll stay with him. She was going to the alien ship with her mom. They’ll hula hoop her and make her an alien, and maybe it’s going to hurt and maybe in 18 years she’ll have to come back to Earth because maybe her body can’t handle it, but she’s half alien, so maybe she can. Maybe she’ll never have to come back.

Neither of us are even 18 years old yet. 18 years feels like forever. If Stella ever comes back, I feel like I’ll be so old I’m a completely different person, and so will she, and I don’t know if we could get our friendship back if that happens, because when I was in kindergarten I was best friends with Monique Stiles, and then we moved away, and I saw Monique again when I was in 5th grade and it was like we were total strangers and it was so totally awkward, and I hope that never happens with me and Stella but honestly I don’t even think she’s coming back, because why would she? If you could be a real life space explorer why would you ever come back to Earth?

So now Stella’s gone, and her mom, and I kinda feel like maybe her dad should go to jail because he made Stella’s mom suffer and be lonely for 18 years, even if he was there to love her, because she didn’t have her family or her friends or her work or even her own body, and it must have really, really hurt. There were days she just stared out at the sky and ignored us, and now I know why. Now I know what she must have been missing. But I guess 18 years after it happened you can’t arrest a guy for throwing someone’s stuff in the ocean even if it was really important stuff, and she did marry him and have a kid and I’m not sure that anyone who didn’t know her would understand that that didn’t mean much. That she needed someone, so she had to pick the guy who’d hurt her because there wasn’t anyone else who’d understand why she was hurting.

Anyway, my point is, he didn’t kill them. They went home to Stella’s mom’s ship, with Stella’s mom’s family. And I don’t know if Stella is ever coming back, but I know for a fact, her mom never will.

[milky-mochi]

eclipse | pjm

pairing: jimin × oc

genre: coffeeshop!au, forgotten first kiss!au

word count: 1.7k

summmary: he glowed like the moon, she burned like the sun; the night they collided was an eclipse neither of them were ready for.

---

today was a terrible day for jimin.

okay, maybe not the whole day. but the day at the coffeeshop had been so busy that jimin didn't have any time for a break. he got yelled at for a bit for being too soft (by a thirty-year-old woman, dressed in fur in the middle of autumn, so he really didn't know whether to laugh or to cry). he didn't have time to sit on the rocks behind the shop which led out into a small garden that only the employees knew about and only he used. he only got a two dollar tip the whole day, although it did make him smile that the tip was from the daughter of the lady who screamed at him.

it really, really, didn't help that there was a girl sitting at the bay window drawing to her heart's content by the window and the store was about to close. and that jimin couldn't hide behind jungkook and tell him to chase her out. jimin was going to have to chase her out himself.

he didn't want to. she looked peaceful. a girl around his age with long, chestnut hair draped over her white fuzzy sweater with black jeans. her sketchbook perched on top of her knees and a pencil clasped in her slim fingers, white earbuds in her ears. she had been sitting there the whole day. every day this whole week, actually. that night, she was probably waiting for the eclipse. she was drawing for hours on end, occupying that same bay window for the whole day. they couldn't chase her out because she did buy a caramel macchiato every hour. she even had 13 empty mugs on the table beside her bag (jimin counted).

literally, all jimin could do was hide behind the counter like a scared kitten, garnering the courage to ask this artistic lady to leave.

maybe i could show her my poetry. it's so bad it will make her scream and run away, jimin thought as he put away a mug. you know what, just do it jimin. just ask her to leave. you've been waiting for 30 minutes anyway, and your 21-year-old self still needs to catch gravity falls on Disney channel in an hour.

jimin inhaled, as quietly as he could, and put down the rag he was wiping the table with. his feet glided over the parquet floor and he ended up beside the girl.

"excuse me," he said.

the girl didn't look up from her drawing. jimin tapped her on the shoulders. "excuse me, miss?"

only when he tapped her shoulders did the girl look at jimin's bespectacled face and did jimin look at hers. and dear god, she was freakin' pretty. she had a button nose and eyes that glittered with moonlight fire, concealed by round spectacles that framed her face. she spoke in a cheery way after pulling her earbuds out of her ears, as if her art hadn't pulled her into a twelve-hour long daze. "sorry sir, did you need something?"

"i'm so sorry miss, i'm afraid it's past closing time- "

"oh my, how long have I made you wait?"

"20 minutes."

"oh my gosh i'm so sorry," she paused to look at his nametag, "jimin."

"i-it's no problem, miss. thank you for understanding." jimin nodded his head before walking towards the counter.

the girl started packing her things into her backpack before she stopped, hand about to stuff her pencils into her bag, and spun around to jimin. "wait, what did you say your name was?"

"jimin."

"in full?"

"park jimin."

"oh my gosh, jimin?" she gasped as she stood up. "like, from alexandria high?"

"yeah? wait how do you know- "

"jimin, it's me! chaeyoung! remember?"

"o-oh yeah, of course i do!"

of course he did. how could he forget park chaeyoung?

she was like the sun of alexandria high. everyone gravitated towards her. she radiated light whenever she opened her mouth. the girl who would give you her lunch money if you had none. the one who was greeted every 5 seconds when she walked down the halls. class president, leader of sport teams, head of every comittee she was in. the one who was homecoming queen every year. boys flocked to her but she always turned them down, the reason remaining unknown to this day. she seemed too perfect to be true.

she also happened to be jimin's crush of three years. must be exciting to be jimin.

they used to sit next to each other in math. they were partners for everything. it was pretty cliché; the guy who nobody knew falling for the girl who was essentially the centre of the school.

chaeyoung nudged jimin's shoulder. "how've you been?"

"take a guess," jimin retorted, gesturing to the cafe.

"shut up," chaeyoung rolled her eyes. "i read your poetry. you're doing pretty well."

oh no, jimin thought.

she read my poetry.

she. read. my. poetry.

yikes.

"oh haha, really?"

"yeah, i have your book at home. I thought your name looked familiar."

she bought my book? why?

"oh wow what's a huge compliment!" jimin rushed, trying to move on from the subject of his poetry. "you've been good, i'm guessing? your exhibit just opened."

chaeyoung chuckled. "yeah it's been great. a lot of alexandrians came. you should have come!"

"doubt it. no one knows me," jimin laughed. "plus i was working a shift that night. i have gone, though. your work was amazing."

"thank you, jimin," chaeyoung said. jimin swore her eyes twinkled in her words, and he felt the lovesick teenager in him threaten to reveal himself. "you should have called though. to meet for coffee or something? i could've shown you around."

"well," jimin picked at the sleeve of his sweater, "i didn't think you would remember me. no one did."

chaeyoung's eyes softened. "of course i remember you, jimin."

"didn't seem likely that you would. i only went to one party in my whole high school career."

"yeah i remember that party," chaeyoung said before looking out the window. "you kissed me that night."

hold up, i WHAT.

chaeyoung's eyes searched jimin's face but only found confusion. "you don't remember?"

i was obsessed with this girl for three years, and you're telling me I don't remember the night i kissed my crush? what drama is this?

"that night, i was drunk. shitless. it was the first time i had taken a drink, and i was wasted. that one guy whose name I can't seem to remember decided that he would take this chance to- god, i don't know what he was trying to do. probably like force himself on to me or something. anyway, i was walking away from him really fast, and suddenly you pulled me into this hallway which was out of sight- i also realise that is so you- and he walked right by. and... i think our faces were super close so, i don't know. you just kissed me."

god, i was SO dumb.

"oh wow."

"funny how the drunk one remembered, but not the sober one," chaeyoung laughed.

"maybe i can say this now that we're older," chaeyoung started hesitantly, "but that kiss meant a lot to me. i mean, i did- i had a- i liked you? a lot back then."

jimin almost choked on air. and before his brain could register the stupid words he was about to say, the words tumbled out of his mouth. "i liked you too."

for the first time, park jimin saw chaeyoung shocked. "you did? wow, and i thought i didn't have a chance with you."

jimin was in disbelief. "you? not have a chance? chaeyoung, you were like- you were the sun-girl. the girl who radiated light when her footsteps touched the ground, the center of alexandria high, the light of everyone's world, not have a chance with- "

"- the moon-boy." chaeyoung sighed. "you were different, jimin. you were the shy boy who radiated a different type of light, soft like the moon. you weren't an admirer or a suitor, you were a friend to me."

"maybe that's why i liked you so much," chaeyoung continued. "everyone saw me as something else: class president, head of comittee, the girl they wanted to date. everyone had expectations anytime they looked at me. but you, you saw me as chaeyoung, as myself. there were no expectations from you. it was, freeing to be with you."

silence fell as the two exchanged glances in the empty coffeeshop.

"i guess this is fate, huh chaeyoung."

"i guess so."

just then, jimin did the bravest thing he'd done in a long time. he pulled chaeyoung into a hug for the first time in 7 years. as chaeyoung's arms slowly snaked across his body to hug him back, jimin realised that this was all too familiar to him. chaeyoung still used the same cherry blossom detergent, and the same coconut and vanilla perfume. for a while, it felt like they were teenagers again: hanging out after school after doing their math project, enduring the work solely for each other's company.

after a while, when they finally pulled away, they stopped to look at each other before jimin's alarm for 9 o'clock went off. "hey, it's getting late. want me to walk you home?" jimin offered, accepting that we was just going to have to miss his dose of gravity falls tonight in favour of a much better time.

when chaeyoung nodded her head, jimin gathered his things off the counter top. chaeyoung began to pack her things as well. ten minutes later, when the shop had been closed, they were on the streets. they walked and reminisced about the times when they were young and foolish in high school. they revealed all the stupid things they did that because of their infatuation with one another. they talked about their interests, their family, their jobs, and all that had, have, and will be in their life. all the puzzle pieces fell into place in time with their footsteps in the night. fate smiled on them that night, glad that his laid out, intertwined ribbons of plans had finally made their way to jimin and chaeyoung.

"you didn't manage to catch the eclipse tonight, did you?" jimin asked with a frown in his voice as they arrived at chaeyoung's apartment door.

chaeyoung smiled and pushed a piece of paper into his hand. "i think, moon-boy," she said, kissing him on the cheek, "that this is eclipse enough."

---

[yobaba30]

trump’s reality TV gig

Expedition: Robinson,” a Swedish reality-television program, premièred in the summer of 1997, with a tantalizing premise: sixteen strangers are deposited on a small island off the coast of Malaysia and forced to fend for themselves. To survive, they must coöperate, but they are also competing: each week, a member of the ensemble is voted off the island, and the final contestant wins a grand prize. The show’s title alluded to both “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but a more apt literary reference might have been “Lord of the Flies.” The first contestant who was kicked off was a young man named Sinisa Savija. Upon returning to Sweden, he was morose, complaining to his wife that the show’s editors would “cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool.” Nine weeks before the show aired, he stepped in front of a speeding train.

The producers dealt with this tragedy by suggesting that Savija’s turmoil was unrelated to the series—and by editing him virtually out of the show. Even so, there was a backlash, with one critic asserting that a program based on such merciless competition was “fascist television.” But everyone watched the show anyway, and Savija was soon forgotten. “We had never seen anything like it,” Svante Stockselius, the chief of the network that produced the program, told the Los Angeles Times, in 2000. “Expedition: Robinson” offered a potent cocktail of repulsion and attraction. You felt embarrassed watching it, Stockselius said, but “you couldn’t stop.”

In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show “Survivor.”

The first season was set in Borneo, and from the moment it aired, on CBS, in 2000, “Survivor” was a ratings juggernaut: according to the network, a hundred and twenty-five million Americans—more than a third of the population—tuned in for some portion of the season finale. The catchphrase delivered by the host, Jeff Probst, at the end of each elimination ceremony, “The tribe has spoken,” entered the lexicon. Burnett had been a marginal figure in Hollywood, but after this triumph he, too, was rebranded, as an oracle of spectacle. Les Moonves, then the chairman of CBS, arranged for the delivery of a token of thanks—a champagne-colored Mercedes. To Burnett, the meaning of this gesture was unmistakable: “I had arrived.” The only question was what he might do next.

A few years later, Burnett was in Brazil, filming “Survivor: The Amazon.” His second marriage was falling apart, and he was staying in a corporate apartment with a girlfriend. One day, they were watching TV and happened across a BBC documentary series called “Trouble at the Top,” about the corporate rat race. The girlfriend found the show boring and suggested changing the station, but Burnett was transfixed. He called his business partner in L.A. and said, “I’ve got a new idea.” Burnett would not discuss the concept over the phone—one of his rules for success was to always pitch in person—but he was certain that the premise had the contours of a hit: “Survivor” in the city. Contestants competing for a corporate job. The urban jungle!

He needed someone to play the role of heavyweight tycoon. Burnett, who tends to narrate stories from his own life in the bravura language of a Hollywood pitch, once said of the show, “It’s got to have a hook to it, right? They’ve got to be working for someone big and special and important. Cut to: I’ve rented this skating rink.”

In 2002, Burnett rented Wollman Rink, in Central Park, for a live broadcast of the Season 4 finale of “Survivor.” The property was controlled by Donald Trump, who had obtained the lease to operate the rink in 1986, and had plastered his name on it. Before the segment started, Burnett addressed fifteen hundred spectators who had been corralled for the occasion, and noticed Trump sitting with Melania Knauss, then his girlfriend, in the front row. Burnett prides himself on his ability to “read the room”: to size up the personalities in his audience, suss out what they want, and then give it to them.

“I need to show respect to Mr. Trump,” Burnett recounted, in a 2013 speech in Vancouver. “I said, ‘Welcome, everybody, to Trump Wollman skating rink. The Trump Wollman skating rink is a fine facility, built by Mr. Donald Trump. Thank you, Mr. Trump. Because the Trump Wollman skating rink is the place we are tonight and we love being at the Trump Wollman skating rink, Mr. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.” As Burnett told the story, he had scarcely got offstage before Trump was shaking his hand, proclaiming, “You’re a genius!”

Cut to: June, 2015. After starring in fourteen seasons of “The Apprentice,” all executive-produced by Burnett, Trump appeared in the gilded atrium of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, to announce that he was running for President. Only someone “really rich,” Trump declared, could “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.” He also made racist remarks about Mexicans, prompting NBC, which had broadcast “The Apprentice,” to fire him. Burnett, however, did not sever his relationship with his star. He and Trump had been equal partners in “The Apprentice,” and the show had made each of them hundreds of millions of dollars. They were also close friends: Burnett liked to tell people that when Trump married Knauss, in 2005, Burnett’s son Cameron was the ring bearer. 

Trump had been a celebrity since the eighties, his persona shaped by the best-selling book “The Art of the Deal.” But his business had foundered, and by 2003 he had become a garish figure of local interest—a punch line on Page Six. “The Apprentice” mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success. Jay Bienstock, a longtime collaborator of Burnett’s, and the showrunner on “The Apprentice,” told me, “Mark always likes to compare his shows to great films or novels. All of Mark’s shows feel bigger than life, and this is by design.” Burnett has made many programs since “The Apprentice,” among them “Shark Tank,” a startup competition based on a Japanese show, and “The Voice,” a singing contest adapted from a Dutch program. In June, he became the chairman of M-G-M Television. But his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world. “I don’t think any of us could have known what this would become,” Katherine Walker, a producer on the first five seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me. “But Donald would not be President had it not been for that show.”

Tony Schwartz, who wrote “The Art of the Deal,” which falsely presented Trump as its primary author, told me that he feels some responsibility for facilitating Trump’s imposture. But, he said, “Mark Burnett’s influence was vastly greater,” adding, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.” Schwartz has publicly condemned Trump, describing him as “the monster I helped to create.” Burnett, by contrast, has refused to speak publicly about his relationship with the President or about his curious, but decisive, role in American history.

Burnett is lean and lanky, with the ageless, perpetually smiling face of Peter Pan and eyes that, in the words of one ex-wife, have “a Photoshop twinkle.” He has a high forehead and the fixed, gravity-defying hair of a nineteen-fifties film star. People often mistake Burnett for an Australian, because he has a deep tan and an outdoorsy disposition, and because his accent has been mongrelized by years of international travel. But he grew up in Dagenham, on the eastern outskirts of London, a milieu that he has recalled as “gray and grimy.” His father, Archie, was a tattooed Glaswegian who worked the night shift at a Ford automobile plant. His mother, Jean, worked there as well, pouring acid into batteries, but in Mark’s recollection she always dressed immaculately, “never letting her station in life interfere with how she presented herself.” Mark, an only child, grew up watching American television shows such as “Starsky & Hutch” and “The Rockford Files.”

At seventeen, he volunteered for the British Army’s Parachute Regiment; according to a friend who enlisted with him, he joined for “the glitz.” The Paras were an élite unit, and a soldier from his platoon, Paul Read, told me that Burnett was a particularly formidable special operator, both physically commanding and a natural leader: “He was always super keen. He always wanted to be the best, even among the best.” (Another soldier recalled that Burnett was nicknamed the Male Model, because he was reluctant to “get any dirt under his fingernails.”) Burnett served in Northern Ireland, and then in the Falklands, where he took part in the 1982 advance on Port Stanley. The experience, he later said, was “horrific, but on the other hand—in a sick way—exciting.”

When Burnett left the Army, after five years, his plan was to find work in Central America as a “weapons and tactics adviser”—not as a mercenary, he later insisted, though it is difficult to parse the distinction. Before he left, his mother told him that she’d had a premonition and implored him not to take another job that involved carrying a gun. Like Trump, Burnett trusts his impulses. “Your gut instinct is rarely wrong,” he likes to say. During a layover in Los Angeles, he decided to heed his mother’s admonition, and walked out of the airport. He later described himself as the quintessential immigrant: “I had no money, no green card, no nothing.” But the California sun was shining, and he was eager to try his luck.

Burnett is an avid raconteur, and his anecdotes about his life tend to have a three-act structure. In Act I, he is a fish out of water, guileless and naïve, with nothing but the shirt on his back and an outsized dream. Act II is the rude awakening: the world bets against him. It’s impossible! You’ll lose everything! No such thing has ever been tried! In Act III, Burnett always prevails. Not long after arriving in California, he landed his first job—as a nanny. Eyebrows were raised: a commando turned nanny? Yet Burnett thrived, working for a family in Beverly Hills, then one in Malibu. As he later observed, the experience taught him “how nice the life styles of wealthy people are.” Young, handsome, and solicitous, he discovered that successful people are often happy to talk about their path to success.

Burnett married a California woman, Kym Gold, who came from an affluent family. “Mark has always been very, very hungry,” Gold told me recently. “He’s always had a lot of drive.” For a time, he worked for Gold’s stepfather, who owned a casting agency, and for Gold, who owned an apparel business. She would buy slightly imperfect T-shirts wholesale, at two dollars apiece, and Burnett would resell them, on the Venice boardwalk, for eighteen. That was where he learned “the art of selling,” he has said. The marriage lasted only a year, by which point Burnett had obtained a green card. (Gold, who had also learned a thing or two about selling, went on to co-found the denim company True Religion, which was eventually sold for eight hundred million dollars.)

One day in the early nineties, Burnett read an article about a new kind of athletic event: a long-distance endurance race, known as the Raid Gauloises, in which teams of athletes competed in a multiday trek over harsh terrain. In 1992, Burnett organized a team and participated in a race in Oman. Noticing that he and his teammates were “walking, climbing advertisements” for gear, he signed up sponsors. He also realized that if you filmed such a race it would make for exotic and gripping viewing. Burnett launched his own race, the Eco-Challenge, which was set in such scenic locations as Utah and British Columbia, and was televised on various outlets, including the Discovery Channel. Bienstock, who first met Burnett when he worked on the “Eco-Challenge” show, in 1996, told me that Burnett was less interested in the ravishing backdrops or in the competition than he was in the intense emotional experiences of the racers: “Mark saw the drama in real people being the driving force in an unscripted show.”

By this time, Burnett had met an aspiring actress from Long Island named Dianne Minerva and married her. They became consumed with making the show a success. “When we went to bed at night, we talked about it, when we woke up in the morning, we talked about it,” Dianne Burnett told me recently. In the small world of adventure racing, Mark developed a reputation as a slick and ambitious operator. “He’s like a rattlesnake,” one of his business competitors told the New York Times in 2000. “If you’re close enough long enough, you’re going to get bit.” Mark and Dianne were doing far better than Mark’s parents ever had, but he was restless. One day, they attended a seminar by the motivational speaker Tony Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” A good technique for realizing your goals, Robbins counselled, was to write down what you wanted most on index cards, then deposit them around your house, as constant reminders. In a 2012 memoir, “The Road to Reality,” Dianne Burnett recalls that she wrote the word “FAMILY” on her index cards. Mark wrote “MORE MONEY.”

As a young man, Burnett occasionally found himself on a flight for business, looking at the other passengers and daydreaming: If this plane were to crash on a desert island, where would I fit into our new society? Who would lead and who would follow? “Nature strips away the veneer we show one another every day, at which point people become who they really are,” Burnett once wrote. He has long espoused a Hobbesian world view, and when he launched “Survivor” a zero-sum ethos was integral to the show. “It’s quite a mean game, just like life is kind of a mean game,” Burnett told CNN, in 2001. “Everyone’s out for themselves.”

On “Survivor,” the competitors were split into teams, or “tribes.” In this raw arena, Burnett suggested, viewers could glimpse the cruel essence of human nature. It was undeniably compelling to watch contestants of different ages, body types, and dispositions negotiate the primordial challenges of making fire, securing shelter, and foraging for food. At the same time, the scenario was extravagantly contrived: the castaways were shadowed by camera crews, and helicopters thundered around the island, gathering aerial shots.

Moreover, the contestants had been selected for their charisma and their combustibility. “It’s all about casting,” Burnett once observed. “As a producer, my job is to make the choices in who to work with and put on camera.” He was always searching for someone with the sort of personality that could “break through the clutter.” In casting sessions, Burnett sometimes goaded people, to see how they responded to conflict. Katherine Walker, the “Apprentice” producer, told me about an audition in which Burnett taunted a prospective cast member by insinuating that he was secretly gay. (The man, riled, threw the accusation back at Burnett, and was not cast that season.)

Richard Levak, a clinical psychologist who consulted for Burnett on “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” and worked on other reality-TV shows, told me that producers have often liked people he was uncomfortable with for psychological reasons. Emotional volatility makes for compelling television. But recruiting individuals for their instability and then subjecting them to the stress of a televised competition can be perilous. When Burnett was once asked about Sinisa Savija’s suicide, he contended that Savija had “previous psychological problems.” No “Survivor” or “Apprentice” contestants are known to have killed themselves, but in the past two decades several dozen reality-TV participants have. Levak eventually stopped consulting on such programs, in part because he feared that a contestant might harm himself. “I would think, Geez, if this should unravel, they’re going to look at the personality profile and there may have been a red flag,” he recalled.

Burnett excelled at the casting equation to the point where, on Season 2 of “Survivor,” which was shot in the Australian outback, his castaways spent so much time gossiping about the characters from the previous season that Burnett warned them, “The more time you spend talking about the first ‘Survivor,’ the less time you will have on television.” But Burnett’s real genius was in marketing. When he made the rounds in L.A. to pitch “Survivor,” he vowed that it would become a cultural phenomenon, and he presented executives with a mock issue of Newsweek featuring the show on the cover. (Later, “Survivor” did make the cover of the magazine.) Burnett devised a dizzying array of lucrative product-integration deals. In the first season, one of the teams won a care package that was attached to a parachute bearing the red-and-white logo of Target.

“I looked on ‘Survivor’ as much as a marketing vehicle as a television show,” Burnett once explained. He was creating an immersive, cinematic entertainment—and he was known for lush production values, and for paying handsomely to retain top producers and editors—but he was anything but precious about his art. Long before he met Trump, Burnett had developed a Panglossian confidence in the power of branding. “I believe we’re going to see something like the Microsoft Grand Canyon National Park,” he told the New York Times in 2001. “The government won’t take care of all that—companies will.”

Seven weeks before the 2016 election, Burnett, in a smart tux with a shawl collar, arrived with his third wife, the actress and producer Roma Downey, at the Microsoft Theatre, in Los Angeles, for the Emmy Awards. Both “Shark Tank” and “The Voice” won awards that night. But his triumphant evening was marred when the master of ceremonies, Jimmy Kimmel, took an unexpected turn during his opening monologue. “Television brings people together, but television can also tear us apart,” Kimmel mused. “I mean, if it wasn’t for television, would Donald Trump be running for President?” In the crowd, there was laughter. “Many have asked, ‘Who is to blame for Donald Trump?’ ” Kimmel continued. “I’ll tell you who, because he’s sitting right there. That guy.” Kimmel pointed into the audience, and the live feed cut to a closeup of Burnett, whose expression resolved itself into a rigid grin. “Thanks to Mark Burnett, we don’t have to watch reality shows anymore, because we’re living in one,” Kimmel said. Burnett was still smiling, but Kimmel wasn’t. He went on, “I’m going on the record right now. He’s responsible. If Donald Trump gets elected and he builds that wall, the first person we’re throwing over it is Mark Burnett. The tribe has spoken.”

Around this time, Burnett stopped giving interviews about Trump or “The Apprentice.” He continues to speak to the press to promote his shows, but he declined an interview with me. Before Trump’s Presidential run, however, Burnett told and retold the story of how the show originated. When he met Trump at Wollman Rink, Burnett told him an anecdote about how, as a young man selling T-shirts on the boardwalk on Venice Beach, he had been handed a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” by a passing rollerblader. Burnett said that he had read it, and that it had changed his life; he thought, What a legend this guy Trump is!

Anyone else hearing this tale might have found it a bit calculated, if not implausible. Kym Gold, Burnett’s first wife, told me that she has no recollection of him reading Trump’s book in this period. “He liked mystery books,” she said. But when Trump heard the story he was flattered.

Burnett has never liked the phrase “reality television.” For a time, he valiantly campaigned to rebrand his genre “dramality”—“a mixture of drama and reality.” The term never caught on, but it reflected Burnett’s forthright acknowledgment that what he creates is a highly structured, selective, and manipulated rendition of reality. Burnett has often boasted that, for each televised hour of “The Apprentice,” his crews shot as many as three hundred hours of footage. The real alchemy of reality television is the editing—sifting through a compost heap of clips and piecing together an absorbing story. Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me, “You don’t make anything up. But you accentuate things that you see as themes.” He readily conceded how distorting this process can be. Much of reality TV consists of reaction shots: one participant says something outrageous, and the camera cuts away to another participant rolling her eyes. Often, Braun said, editors lift an eye roll from an entirely different part of the conversation.

“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Such sleight of hand is the industry standard in reality television. But the entire premise of “The Apprentice” was also something of a con. When Trump and Burnett told the story of their partnership, both suggested that Trump was initially wary of committing to a TV show, because he was so busy running his flourishing real-estate empire. During a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, in Los Angeles, Trump claimed that “every network” had tried to get him to do a reality show, but he wasn’t interested: “I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters, and everyone else I have to deal with in my business. You know, mobsters don’t like, as they’re talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”

“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”

Trump maximized his profits from the start. When producers were searching for office space in which to stage the show, he vetoed every suggestion, then mentioned that he had an empty floor available in Trump Tower, which he could lease at a reasonable price. (After becoming President, he offered a similar arrangement to the Secret Service.) When the production staff tried to furnish the space, they found that local venders, stiffed by Trump in the past, refused to do business with them.

More than two hundred thousand people applied for one of the sixteen spots on Season 1, and throughout the show’s early years the candidates were conspicuously credentialled and impressive. Officially, the grand prize was what the show described as “the dream job of a lifetime”—the unfathomable privilege of being mentored by Donald Trump while working as a junior executive at the Trump Organization. All the candidates paid lip service to the notion that Trump was a peerless businessman, but not all of them believed it. A standout contestant in Season 1 was Kwame Jackson, a young African-American man with an M.B.A. from Harvard, who had worked at Goldman Sachs. Jackson told me that he did the show not out of any desire for Trump’s tutelage but because he regarded the prospect of a nationally televised business competition as “a great platform” for career advancement. “At Goldman, I was in private-wealth management, so Trump was not, by any stretch, the most financially successful person I’d ever met or managed,” Jackson told me. He was quietly amused when other contestants swooned over Trump’s deal-making prowess or his elevated tastes—when they exclaimed, on tours of tacky Trump properties, “Oh, my God, this is so rich—this is, like, really rich!” Fran Lebowitz once remarked that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” and Jackson was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. “Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe,” he recalled. “The people I knew in the world of high finance understood that it was all a joke.”

This is an oddly common refrain among people who were involved in “The Apprentice”: that the show was camp, and that the image of Trump as an avatar of prosperity was delivered with a wink. Somehow, this interpretation eluded the audience. Jonathon Braun marvelled, “People started taking it seriously!”

When I watched several dozen episodes of the show recently, I saw no hint of deliberate irony. Admittedly, it is laughable to hear the candidates, at a fancy meal, talk about watching Trump for cues on which utensil they should use for each course, as if he were Emily Post. But the show’s reverence for its pugnacious host, however credulous it might seem now, comes across as sincere.

Did Burnett believe what he was selling? Or was Trump another two-dollar T-shirt that he pawned off for eighteen? It’s difficult to say. One person who has collaborated with Burnett likened him to Harold Hill, the travelling fraudster in “The Music Man,” saying, “There’s always an angle with Mark. He’s all about selling.” Burnett is fluent in the jargon of self-help, and he has published two memoirs, both written with Bill O’Reilly’s ghostwriter, which double as manuals on how to get rich. One of them, titled “Jump In!: Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim,” now reads like an inadvertent metaphor for the Trump Presidency. “Don’t waste time on overpreparation,” the book advises.

At the 2004 panel, Burnett made it clear that, with “The Apprentice,” he was selling an archetype. “Donald is the real current-day version of a tycoon,” he said. “Donald will say whatever Donald wants to say. He takes no prisoners. If you’re Donald’s friend, he’ll defend you all day long. If you’re not, he’s going to kill you. And that’s very American. It’s like the guys who built the West.” Like Trump, Burnett seemed to have both a jaundiced impression of the gullible essence of the American people and a brazen enthusiasm for how to exploit it. “The Apprentice” was about “what makes America great,” Burnett said. “Everybody wants one of a few things in this country. They’re willing to pay to lose weight. They’re willing to pay to grow hair. They’re willing to pay to have sex. And they’re willing to pay to learn how to get rich.”

At the start of “The Apprentice,” Burnett’s intention may have been to tell a more honest story, one that acknowledged Trump’s many stumbles. Burnett surely recognized that Trump was at a low point, but, according to Walker, “Mark sensed Trump’s potential for a comeback.” Indeed, in a voice-over introduction in the show’s pilot, Trump conceded a degree of weakness that feels shockingly self-aware when you listen to it today: “I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won, big league.”

The show was an instant hit, and Trump’s public image, and the man himself, began to change. Not long after the première, Trump suggested in an Esquire article that people now liked him, “whereas before, they viewed me as a bit of an ogre.” Jim Dowd, Trump’s former publicist, told Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, the authors of the 2016 book “Trump Revealed,” that after “The Apprentice” began airing “people on the street embraced him.” Dowd noted, “All of a sudden, there was none of the old mocking,” adding, “He was a hero.” Dowd, who died in 2016, pinpointed the public’s embrace of “The Apprentice” as “the bridge” to Trump’s Presidential run.

The show’s camera operators often shot Trump from low angles, as you would a basketball pro, or Mt. Rushmore. Trump loomed over the viewer, his face in a jowly glower, his hair darker than it is now, the metallic auburn of a new penny. (“Apprentice” employees were instructed not to fiddle with Trump’s hair, which he dyed and styled himself.) Trump’s entrances were choreographed for maximum impact, and often set to a moody accompaniment of synthesized drums and cymbals. The “boardroom”—a stage set where Trump determined which candidate should be fired—had the menacing gloom of a “Godfather” movie. In one scene, Trump ushered contestants through his rococo Trump Tower aerie, and said, “I show this apartment to very few people. Presidents. Kings.” In the tabloid ecosystem in which he had long languished, Trump was always Donald, or the Donald. On “The Apprentice,” he finally became Mr. Trump.

“We have to subscribe to our own myths,” the “Apprentice” producer Bill Pruitt told me. “Mark Burnett is a great mythmaker. He blew up that balloon and he believed in it.” Burnett, preferring to spend time pitching new ideas for shows, delegated most of the daily decisions about “The Apprentice” to his team, many of them veterans of “Survivor” and “Eco-Challenge.” But he furiously promoted the show, often with Trump at his side. According to many of Burnett’s collaborators, one of his greatest skills is his handling of talent—understanding their desires and anxieties, making them feel protected and secure. On interview tours with Trump, Burnett exhibited the studied instincts of a veteran producer: anytime the spotlight strayed in his direction, he subtly redirected it at Trump.

Burnett, who was forty-three when Season 1 aired, described the fifty-seven-year-old Trump as his “soul mate.” He expressed astonishment at Trump’s “laser-like focus and retention.” He delivered flattery in the ostentatiously obsequious register that Trump prefers. Burnett said he hoped that he might someday rise to Trump’s “level” of prestige and success, adding, “I don’t know if I’ll ever make it. But you know something? If you’re not shooting for the stars, you’re not shooting!” On one occasion, Trump invited Burnett to dinner at his Trump Tower apartment; Burnett had anticipated an elegant meal, and, according to an associate, concealed his surprise when Trump handed him a burger from McDonald’s.

Trump liked to suggest that he and Burnett had come up with the show “together”; Burnett never corrected him. When Carolyn Kepcher, a Trump Organization executive who appeared alongside Trump in early seasons of “The Apprentice,” seemed to be courting her own celebrity, Trump fired her and gave on-air roles to three of his children, Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric. Burnett grasped that the best way to keep Trump satisfied was to insure that he never felt upstaged. “It’s Batman and Robin, and I’m clearly Robin,” he said.

Burnett sometimes went so far as to imply that Trump’s involvement in “The Apprentice” was a form of altruism. “This is Donald Trump giving back,” he told the Times in 2003, then offered a vague invocation of post-9/11 civic duty: “What makes the world a safe place right now? I think it’s American dollars, which come from taxes, which come because of Donald Trump.” Trump himself had been candid about his reasons for doing the show. “My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he told Jim Dowd, adding that the production would be “great for my brand.”

It was. Season 1 of “The Apprentice” flogged one Trump property after another. The contestants stayed at Trump Tower, did events at Trump National Golf Club, sold Trump Ice bottled water. “I’ve always felt that the Trump Taj Mahal should do even better,” Trump announced before sending the contestants off on a challenge to lure gamblers to his Atlantic City casino, which soon went bankrupt. The prize for the winning team was an opportunity to stay and gamble at the Taj, trailed by cameras.

“The Apprentice” was so successful that, by the time the second season launched, Trump’s lacklustre tie-in products were being edged out by blue-chip companies willing to pay handsomely to have their wares featured onscreen. In 2004, Kevin Harris, a producer who helped Burnett secure product-integration deals, sent an e-mail describing a teaser reel of Trump endorsements that would be used to attract clients: “Fast cutting of Donald—‘Crest is the biggest’ ‘I have worn Levis since I was 2’ ‘I love M&Ms’ ‘Unilever is the biggest company in the world’ all with the MONEY MONEY MONEY song over the top.”

Burnett and Trump negotiated with NBC to retain the rights to income derived from product integration, and split the fees. On set, Trump often gloated about this easy money. One producer remembered, “You’d say, ‘Hey, Donald, today we have Pepsi, and they’re paying three million to be in the show,’ and he’d say, ‘That’s great, I just made a million five!’ ”

Originally, Burnett had planned to cast a different mogul in the role of host each season. But Trump took to his part more nimbly than anyone might have predicted. He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.” Katherine Walker told me that producers often struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said, adding, “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.” However, she acknowledged, he was a natural for the medium: whereas reality-TV producers generally must amp up personalities and events, to accentuate conflict and conjure intrigue, “we didn’t have to change him—he gave us stuff to work with.” Trump improvised the tagline for which “The Apprentice” became famous: “You’re fired.”

NBC executives were so enamored of their new star that they instructed Burnett and his producers to give Trump more screen time. This is when Trump’s obsession with television ratings took hold. “I didn’t know what demographics was four weeks ago,” he told Larry King. “All of a sudden, I heard we were No. 3 in demographics. Last night, we were No. 1 in demographics. And that’s the important rating.” The ratings kept rising, and the first season’s finale was the No. 1 show of the week. For Burnett, Trump’s rehabilitation was a satisfying confirmation of a populist aesthetic. “I like it when critics slam a movie and it does massive box office,” he once said. “I love it.” Whereas others had seen in Trump only a tattered celebrity of the eighties, Burnett had glimpsed a feral charisma.

On June 26, 2018, the day the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s travel ban targeting people from several predominantly Muslim countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent out invitations to an event called a Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. If Pompeo registered any dissonance between such lofty rhetoric and Administration policies targeting certain religions, he didn’t mention it.

The event took place the next month, at the State Department, in Washington, D.C., and one of the featured speakers was Mark Burnett. In 2004, he had been getting his hair cut at a salon in Malibu when he noticed an attractive woman getting a pedicure. It was Roma Downey, the star of “Touched by an Angel,” a long-running inspirational drama on CBS. They fell in love, and married in 2007; together, they helped rear Burnett’s two sons from his second marriage and Downey’s daughter. Downey, who grew up in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, is deeply religious, and eventually Burnett, too, reoriented his life around Christianity. “Faith is a major part of our marriage,” Downey said, in 2013, adding, “We pray together.”

For people who had long known Burnett, it was an unexpected turn. This was a man who had ended his second marriage during a live interview with Howard Stern. To promote “Survivor” in 2002, Burnett called in to Stern’s radio show, and Stern asked casually if he was married. When Burnett hesitated, Stern pounced. “You didn’t survive marriage?” he asked. “You don’t want your girlfriend to know you’re married?” As Burnett dissembled, Stern kept prying, and the exchange became excruciating. Finally, Stern asked if Burnett was “a single guy,” and Burnett replied, “You know? Yeah.” This was news to Dianne, Burnett’s wife of a decade. As she subsequently wrote in her memoir, “The 18-to-34 radio demographic knew where my marriage was headed before I did.”

In 2008, Burnett’s longtime business partner, a lawyer named Conrad Riggs, filed a lawsuit alleging that Burnett had stiffed him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. According to the lawsuit, the two men had made an agreement before “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” that Riggs would own ten per cent of Burnett’s company. When Riggs got married, someone who attended the ceremony told me, Burnett was his best man, and gave a speech saying that his success would have been impossible without Riggs. Several years later, when Burnett’s company was worth half a billion dollars, he denied having made any agreement. The suit settled out of court. (Riggs declined to comment.)

Article from January 7, 2019 By Patrick Radden Keefe

Yobaba - New Yorker mag articles are LONG; I posted this mostly for my own reference so I will have a record of it; that said, I strongly urge everyone to read this. it explains a lot.

[zenosanalytic]

DS9: Season 2 Doldrums

DS9 S2E 5-7(Cardassians, Melora, Rules of Acquisition) are Infuriating.

Their Premises aren’t actually bad:

Cardassians is about Cardassian war-orphans left on Bajor because 1)Cardassian culture takes a “fuck ‘em” approach to anybody unfortunate enough to lose/get separated from their parents and presumably 2)they’re interspecies children; this doesn’t get mentioned in this ep, but I can’t imagine the Cardassians would have taken half-Bajoran kids when they withdrew

Melora is about a scientist from a “low gravity” planet(that idea bugs me because it assumes life-bearing worlds are generally earth-sized, and thus, earth gravity is “standard”, but idk what else you’d call it |:T) assigned to DS9 for a survey mission in the Delta Quadrant.

Rules of Acquisition is about a female Ferengi masquerading as a male to escape the misogyny of Ferengi society and pursue a life in business who happens to be working for Quark when the Nagus brings him a unique opportunity.

And their execution isn’t universally terribly, either, but each has something about it that’s so frustrating/off-putting that it soured whatever was enjoyable about the episodes for me.

Caradassians is probably the best of the bunch. It’s built around this Cardassian boy named Rugal, who was left during the withdrawal and adopted at a very young age(4-6 it seemed like) by Bajoran parents, who raised him as a Bajoran(aside from the obvious Talks about how he looks different and how to deal with people who are mean to him for his heritage, obvsl). In summary, Gul Dukat plots to have him brought to the station to create a diplomatic incident to be used as an excuse to repatriate the boy as a way to embarrass his Cardassian “father”, Kotan Pa’Dar, of the Civilian government, thereby short-circuiting an investigation into crimes committed during the Occupation and discrediting the Civilian government in general. The plot’s very convoluted, but Bashir and Garak get to be sleuths and that’s super-fun to watch. It ends up being the case that Rugal was kidnapped by Gul Dukat from his family’s home after a resistance attack on it(raising the question of what, exactly, Dukat knew of that attack, and if it was carried out by Bajoran resistance at all or simply made to look as such; there’s an implication that Pa’Dar was opposed to the Occupation even when he was part of the colonial government there. Questions never examined further, unfortunately) and placed in a Bajoran orphanage, leaving Pa’Dar to think he had also been killed. Since he wasn’t dead, Pa’Dar leaving without him would be considered abandonment in the eyes of the Cardassian public given how much they care about Family(who, again, don’t give a single shit about all the Cardassian kids with no living relatives willing to claim them they left on Bajor), and that’d end his political career.

What annoys me about it is the transparent insincerity of the Starfleet officers’ concern for Rugal‘s opinion about the whole thing. There’s alot of platitudinizing that what ultimately matters is what Rugal wants, regardless of what the inquiry discovers, but the ep literally ends with a voice-over of Sisko saying his Cardassian “father” is “obvsl the real victim in all this”, and Starfleet handing him over to Pa’Dar with zero input from Rugal. Rugal’s real parents, the Bajorans who raised him, are nowhere to be seen and, iirc, don’t even speak at all in the second half of the ep. The Bajor government has zero input in any of this. So yeah, it’s just really offensive.

The thing is, if this was presented as Sisko just coolly making the politically expedient and strategically correct choice(save the moderate’s career by preventing the case from going public while doubling his debt to you by handing over the son he thought was dead and wanted back) regardless of what Rugal wanted, it wouldn’t bother me as much; It’d be a good early example of the cold-blooded political and strategic savvy Sisko would become known for. What really bugs me is that the sheer duplicitous sanctimony of their protestations to care about what Rugal wants are never presented or treated as such, even as they, in the end, hand him over like a poker chip. Oh, and also there’s this scene about O’Brien’s hatred of Cardassians and Keiko’s wrong-headed awkward do-gooderism ham-fistedly squashed in there that they really didn’t need.

Melora presents Melora’s natural lower-gravity biology as a disability and illness, which right off the bat was annoying. She’s not sick, she’s just from a different density planet from everyone else. Usually she uses a servo-harness and anti-grav chair to get around that won’t work for some McGuffiny reason so they have to put her in a wheelchair instead. But here’s the thing; why wouldn’t she just be in an anti-grav harness? The Fed uses Synthetic gravity Fields, so one could imagine a harness which generates a “filter” field around her, lessening the gravitons she’s exposed to to natural levels for her and thus allowing full mobility. Hell, depending on how Synthetic Grav fields work, I wonder if one could not simply program the central computers to weaken the field as it applies to her or her surroundings, keying the reduction to her comms badge or lifesigns. Or, given that there’s at least one whole planet of Federation members for whom low-grav is natural(and realistically if there’s one there’s gotta be more low grav worlds), why don’t they, IDK, have low-grav-exclusive crews? I mean, they clearly have the tech to not have to segregate like that, but it’s another solution that the writers choose to avoid by just deciding Melora’s species generally has no desire to leave their homeworld(so how’d they become warp-capable, DS9 writers???)

The show does a good job, for it’s time, presenting ableist-induced frustrations(from Bashir modifying her chair without informing her or asking her consent, to Jadzia implying Bashir knows “her condition” better than she does, to Sisko treating her desire to have her agency and opinions respected like those of any officer as essentially ridiculous, to stupid unnecessary frames jutting out every-goddamn-where in the station due to absurd Cardassian architectural tastes in Bulkhead design, to people assuming she must be sheltered and ignorant of galactic cultures because she’s “fragile”, to people babying her for the same reason, to random do-gooders wanting to “fix” her, to ect ect ect). The problem is, almost invariably, the show comes down on the ableists’ side, presenting her objections as unwarranted acts of rudeness meant to keep the world away(again: she grew up in a frigging low-grav culture where EVERYONE IS JUST LIKE HER! YOU GUYS ARE THE WEIRDOS TO HER!!! WHY WOULD SHE HAVE THESE PERSONALITY TRAITS!X4). It even has this weird pixie-dream girl element where she’s super-agile and strong and able to “fly” in low-G(which, if everything on her planet is evolved for low-g, why would they have the muscle mass to fling themselves into the air and stuff as Earth-G people do on the moon? Idk, maybe this makes sense scientifically, but it bugged me), which she teaches Bashir how to do because, of course, he immediately starts hitting on her and she totally goes for it once he proves his “brilliance” by jerkily eviscerating her distancing techniques. So you can see why I disliked it.

Then it ends with the survey being accomplished in a single ep(like, 3 or 4 days at most), which is stupid. And there’s this sub-plot about a partner Quark betrayed seeking revenge, which inevitably ties into the main-plot and I’m meh about that. And, of course, Bashir never mentions this deeply intimate romance, for the sake of which he developed an entirely new “treatment” for gravity intolerance off the discredited theories of an obscure medical researcher -which insultingly locates her physical difficulties in her brain rather than lower-density bones and muscles, a low-grav body plan, and a metabolism, equilibrium, and body-chem adapted for lower-g- ever again. Yeah.

Rules of Acquisition, of course, makes the female Ferengi, Pel, fall in love with Quark. This is the first ep she’s ever been in, and no reason is ever given for why she’d feel this way about him. Everything she does is, of course, driven by her love for him, and not a desire to gain profit, or prove herself, or any other personal ambition. The ep is filled with lines written for Jadzia to say justifying, excusing, or treating as a joke, misogyny.

Just: either get rid of Jadzia’s excuse-making for Ferengis, or make Ferengi misogyny less pervasive, as they do in much later eps with Rom and(to a lesser extent) Quark.

Pel really should have been intro’d earlier and been a recurring character for a time, with her gender being revealed in this ep. I also don’t get why Ferengi women would have such softer, more melodious, non-scratchy, non-nasal voices compared to the men. Having her natural voice BE her Male!Pel voice, or at least very close to it, would have made the point about gender equality far better.

If there was going to be a romance in it that needed to be developed(preferably over many eps); Pel needed to have a reason for being drawn to Quark, even if it was just “I think he’s sexy”. Personally, I’d like it if -behind his sleazy bluster- Quark(and Rom) was actually less misogynistic and creepy towards women than most Ferengi men as a result of his mother(though still with lots of room to grow), and willing to take hits to his business to stand, in evasive ways, for those principles, and that this was at least in-part why Pel found him endearing.

Pel’s primary motivation ought to be that of any Ferengi -making profit to achieve social status and personal power- with any attraction to Quark coming second, though still personally important enough to prevent her from betraying him.

Pel is responsible for nearly every success they achieve in this ep and Quark really needs to be written as less hapless, which is honestly a problem with his characterization in general. In one ep, Quark is dealing hard-nosed and unflinchingly with the worst kinds of galactic scum(though he hates violence and tries to prevent it, which is a consistent characteristic I love for him, and which Shimerman does a wonderful job of both presenting, and presenting Quark’s attempts to hide and feelings of ambivalent pride/shame over it), and the next he’s grovelling and incompetent before the merest aggression and resistance. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be a physical coward(that’s an important bit of his character and it works), he just needs to have a tolerance for menace appropriate to the line of work as a black-market Fixer and Mastermind that he’s chosen for himself. Plus, I don’t really buy that Pel as presented, with her intense dedication to the Rules of Acquisition and business acumen, would find someone as out of his depth as Quark in this ep attractive. Of course she shouldn’t have to, since Quark is SUPPOSED to actually be a good entrepenuer, hampered by his occasionally quixotic bouts of ethical behavior, but the writers just can’t help writing in these “funny” scenes of Quark being useless.

The plot is actually sort of decent for this one, though Rom’s rather immediate jealousy doesn’t make any more sense than the other things which needed long-term building up to work in this ep. Maybe the discovery of her gender could be accomplished some other way? Perhaps have the Nagus screw them at the end of the deal and have Pel throw her lobes in his face out of rage as he’s compligloating at them about their acumen in realizing his true objective and brokering the meet? Or maybe have Quark accidentally discover her gender in this ep, decide to keep it quiet, then have them both present in a later ep for the Dominion negotiations and have the Dominion agents reveal it out-of-hand half-way through, without realizing the difficulties they’ve put her in(maybe as bred merchants, they have an acute sensitivity to biochemistry or something and can just smell that she’s very likely female). I really like that possibility, because it’d put the Nagus in the position of having to keep her on to finish the negotiations, both for her aptitude and the chance that kicking her off would offend the Karemma, and it’d set up an exit for the character that would be a clear step-up for her; maybe the Nagus, to avoid personal embarrassment and because the Karemma connect with her so well during the negotiations, decides to make her his Delta-quadrant-side silent factor, working through Quark; an effective exile that hides the importance of a female to one of his greatest deals, but still leads to huge profits and a notable position of importance for her. This would also give a good reason for her to pop up as a guest character in later episodes.

[sage-nebula]

Top5 shows/anime/movies you'd recommend.

Ahhhhhh, so usually I try to tailor recommendations to specific people—like, I won’t recommend things to people that I know don’t align with their tastes. The issue here is, I think most of the things I’ve seen that you would like are things that you have already seen (or played, et cetera). So that makes it a bit hard for me to tailor recommendations, hahaha.

That said! I’m going to try anyway to pick out five things that I think you haven’t seen, but that I think you would like. :3

Gravity Falls — So, you’ve probably seen me reblog a lot of Gravity Falls things, and you might even know a bunch of spoilers (in fact, I think I did tell you some things when telling you how Dipper and Mabel reminds me a lot of Jude and Leia), but I’m going to go ahead and throw this out there as a recommendation anyway.Gravity Falls is an American cartoon that spans two seasons. The main characters are twelve-year-old twins Dipper and Mabel Pines, who are sent to Gravity Falls, Oregon to spend the summer with their great-uncle (“Grunkle”) Stan. Grunkle Stan runs a tourist trap (basically a really gimmicky place designed to lure in tourists and sell them things) called the Mystery Shack, which is filled with a bunch of “supernatural” things that are really just a bunch of, well, gimmicky scams. (Like, a centaur that’s obviously fake, things like that.) He employs a young man named Jesus “Soos” Ramirez as his handyman / regular employee, as well as a teenage girl named Wendy to work the cash register (whom Dipper develops a crush on).Anyway, at first the twins aren’t too enthused about this (Dipper less than Mabel), but one day while hanging signs for the Mystery Shack up in the woods, Dipper comes across a mysterious Journal that details all of the supernatural phenomenon that occurs in Gravity Falls, as well as the “darkness” that lurks within the town. Dipper is deeply intrigued, and from there on out dedicates himself to solving the mysteries of the Journal (as well as the mysteries of the town) with Mabel’s help.The show actually has a really dedicated myth arc, so while there are episodes that feel “monster of the week” ish, the characters actually develop and grow as the show goes on. The myth arc is also hinted at as early as the very first episode, and there is no drag—it doesn’t take time for the show to get good. The focus is very much on family; while the kids do get crushes on various other characters (such as Dipper’s crush on Wendy), romance doesn’t play into the show at all, and instead the emphasis is very much on the familial bonds between the Pines family, and honorary members of the Pines family (such as Soos). Finally, though there is a real supernatural element to it, and while sometimes things can get a bit creepy, there is a lot of humor to it, too, that is very often on point. Oh! And while Disney tried to act like Beauty and the Beast featured their first gay couple, they’re wrong! Because Gravity Falls aired on Disney XD, and it has a bi-racial gay couple in the form of the police officers, Deputy Durlin and Sheriff Blubbs. They’re not canon until the last episode, but it makes all the build-up before then worth it, especially since it often seemed played for laughs. (So like, had that been it I would have been mad, but since they’re very obviously canon, it’s all good.) I feel like I’m doing a bad job recommending this, but I feel like you’d like it! And it’s only two seasons (and is now completed), so it’s not like it would take very long / you’d be left in a lurch. It’s a really good show and I think you’d like it a lot. (Fandom Safety: Ehhh, depends. There are some creepy gross ships in the fandom (BillDip being the biggest one), but for the most part there isn’t any major Discourse™ at the moment, either. Pretty chill for the most part now that the show has ended.)

Over the Garden Wall — Another American cartoon, but more of a miniseries, really. This one is only ten episodes long, and is also completed, so it would be a really quick watch if you wanted to give it a shot.Over the Garden Wall follows brothers Wirt (older) and Greg (younger) as they venture through a mysterious land / forest called The Unknown. They need to get home, but they are lost, and soon they are found by a talking bluebird named Beatrice who convinces them to follow her to a woman named Adelaide, whom she swears will be able to get them home. Though Wirt and Beatrice don’t get along well at first, the boys agree to follow her, and so the three end up venturing through The Unknown together. Along the way they meet a wide variety of beings and creatures, some friendly and some not; and they are also ever-pursued by The Beast, whom a woodsman has told Wirt and Greg will do unspeakable things to them should it catch up to them …As I said, Over the Garden Wall is only ten episodes long, and to be honest it starts off kind of slow. I wasn’t really taken in by the first episode. However, it became more interesting in the second episode, and by the third I was hooked. It has a sort of fairytale or storybook feel to it, and is actually a lot more mature than it lets on at first. There’s also a nice mystery element to it, given that Wirt and Greg don’t remember how they came to be in The Unknown at first, and the reason why they’re there (and strong hints as to what The Unknown actually is) isn’t revealed until near the end of the series. As mentioned, it’s only ten episodes long, so it’s not a very time-consuming investment. I really recommend it!(Fandom Safety: Pretty safe, I think! I haven’t looked at the tags in a long while, but I can’t remember any Discourse™, and it aired a couple years ago. I think going in the tags would probably be safe.)

Voltron: Legendary Defender — This one is on American Netflix. I don’t know if it’s on Belgian Netflix, or how easy it would be to find on other streaming sites (though knowing the internet, I’m sure it could be done), but if you can find it, I do recommend it.Voltron: Legendary Defender is an American cartoon that is the reboot of a show that … was originally an anime, and then was “dubbed” (kind of? I think it was massacred when it was dubbed, though), and then had another American cartoon made after it and was just … kind of really a mess. The original anime / cartoons aired back in the ‘80s and are So Bad It’s Good, but you don��t have to have watched those to understand Voltron: Legendary Defender (I mean, I sure haven’t).With that said, Voltron: Legendary Defender has an ensemble cast and is a futuristic sci-fi show about an intergalactic war involving many different alien races, but one primary alien threat in the Galra Empire. The primary cast is made up of two aliens (Alteans, specifically), and five humans. The Altean members are Princess Allura and her guardian / personal attendant, Coran. They are the last remaining Alteans in the galaxy, and they are the holders of the universe’s greatest super weapon, Voltron (more on that in a minute), as well as a giant space castle which also functions as a spaceship (and can open wormholes—it’s pretty neat). The humans, meanwhile, are Takashi Shirogane (most often just called Shiro), Keith Kogane, Lance McClain, Hunk Garrett, and Pidge (Pidge has a full name as well, but that’s #spoilers). Together, these five are the Paladins of Voltron, and they are the most active defenders of the universe, fighting against the evil Galra Empire.And what is Voltron, you may ask?Voltron is a giant humanoid mecha robot. More specifically, Voltron is a giant humanoid mecha robot that is comprised of five multicolored robot Lions (that are also spaceships). The Black Lion forms the head, the Red Lion forms the right arm, the Green Lion forms the left arm, the Yellow Lion forms the left leg, and the Blue Lion forms the right leg. Separately, each Lion can fly and fight, with each Paladin serving as its pilot. However, when the Paladins come together they form Voltron, the only real threat against the Galra Empire and its emperor, Zarkon.And to explain the plot a little more indepth:10,000 years before the series began, the Galra Empire was ravaging the universe, with the Altean Empire putting up a damned good fight against them. However, a wrong decision on the part of King Alfor lead to the Altean Empire’s defeat. In a last ditch effort to save her, King Alfor put Allura (and her attendant, Coran) into a 10,000 year sleep, and split up the Lions of Voltron in an effort to keep them out of Zarkon’s hands. While Zarkon did manage to recover the Red Lion, the others were scattered across the universe … and the Blue Lion was sent to Earth, where it is eventually found by Shiro, Keith, Lance, Hunk, and Pidge after they all come together by happenstance, and find the Blue Lion when Keith leads the others to it (given that it has been calling to him). The Blue Lion awakens for Lance and accepts him as her Paladin, and—while they’re investigating the Blue Lion to see what it is—it ends up taking the five of them into space and to the castle, where they awaken Allura, learn that they will be the new Paladins of Voltron, and that they have an intergalactic war to fight against Zarkon.While this probably sounds like it would be a dreary (if bizarre) war show, it really isn’t. It’s not perfect, but the character banter and dialogue is very often on point (especially since Keith, Lance, Pidge, and Hunk are all teenagers), the animation is great, the voice acting is superb, and all around it’s a very fun show to spend some time with. There are two seasons currently, and the third is set to air in September. It’s a very fun, very interesting show, and it’s very easy to get drawn into it. The characters are all great, too. And let’s put it this way: I went from, “It’s fun, but I don’t care very much about it” to one day almost missing my exit because I was too busy thinking about Voltron while driving. So, there is that. (Also, I feel I’ve done a terrible job explaining, but … it’s a fun show with robot Lions. Just trust me on this.)Also, the Lions do have some degree of sentience. The Red Lion being protective over Keith is one of the best things ever, and at one point Lance becomes very defensive when he thinks Keith is trying to take the Blue Lion from him, saying, “Blue and I are very happy together! VERY HAPPY!!” So, there is that, too.(Fandom Safety: TERRIBLE. HORRIBLE. ONE OF THE WORST FANDOMS I’VE EVER SEEN. DO NOT APPROACH. EVERY TIME I GO INTO THE TAGS TO LOOK FOR COOL FANART I LEAVE FEELING MISERABLE. ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS, WATCH THE SHOW BUT STAY FAR, FAR AWAY FROM THE FANDOM.)

The Great British Baking Show — For once, not a cartoon! And not American, either! What are the odds!! Three of the seasons are on American Netflix (seasons five, four, and six, I think, in that order). I’m not sure how to go about finding the others, but if you can, I’d highly recommend it.The Great British Baking Show (also called The Great British Bake-Off) is a reality show in which twelve (or sometimes thirteen, I think) amateur bakers compete to win a baking competition. The judges are Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood (yes, those are their real names) and the show is hosted by Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyic, a comedy duo. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Ugh, a reality show? Why would I want to watch this?”I’ll tell you why.Unlike most reality cooking shows, where there are sabotages and there is drama and a lot of nastiness, The Great British Baking Show is peaceful and sweet. It’s soothing. There is no nastiness, there is no drama; there are no sabotages to ruin anyone’s chances, and even though it is a competition, everyone is generally very supportive of each other. If they have time, they help each other out if they see one of the other bakers struggling. The hosts, Mel and Sue, often offer helping hands and encouragement as well. And even when it comes to the judges, though Paul can be rather blunt, they aren’t cruel or spiteful toward the contestants. This isn’t like cooking shows with Gordon Ramsay, where part of the appeal is him screaming insults at the contestants. There’s none of that. It’s just a very uplifting and positive show all around, even though one baker is always sent home at the end of each episode.Each episode is about an hour long, and I find that they’re very good for anxiety attacks. They’re very nice to just watch and be soothed by. A+++, highly recommended.(Fandom Safety: Very safe!! I mean, it’s a peaceful reality baking show, so I don’t think I’ve seen any Discourse™. I think the most you’d get is people not liking your favorite baker, but w/e, honestly? Pretty safe. Far better than Voltron’s fandom. Then again, so is every fandom, so like …)

And … I’m actually blanking on a fifth one that you haven’t seen, but that I think you’d like. Because like, I could recommend shows like The Office (the U.S. version), but that one can be kind of … sarcastic and realistic in tone? (Like, things often go wrong / the characters often fail at things on The Office, it has that element of realism.) And I’m not sure you’d like that. And then there’s Arrested Development, but that’s even more jaded and cynical, everyone on that show is an awful person and that’s the point. And I remember that you had trouble with Parks and Recreation because everyone talked fast and used a lot of political terms, and I feel like even though The Office and Arrested Development aren’t political, there’d be a similar issue there. I feel like they’re not easily accessible for people whose first language isn’t English (especially with all the business lingo thrown around).

But yeah, those are at least four recommendations of things I think you’d like! ^^ Let me know if you end up checking any of them out.