Television: Reality TV Goes To Work

On the new TLC series Now Who's Boss? Jonathan Tisch, CEO of Loews Hotels, goes to work in one of his own hotels as a room-service waiter and delivers a meal to a guest from Belgium. The Belgian is unfazed to see that he is being videotaped. In America, he must assume, you always get a reality-TV crew with dinner.

Before long, he may be right. Now that Donald Trump's The Apprentice is the season's highest-rated new show, reality TV is discovering what sitcoms have known for decades: people love to watch other people work. In the real world, workers may be worried about outsourcing, downsizing and on-the-job surveillance, but on TV, cutthroat, anxious work under surveillance is becoming big entertainment--perhaps in the same way that horror movies and roller coasters make anxiety fun. For Fox reality chief Mike Darnell (who's making Casino, about working in, you guessed it, a casino, with Apprentice producer Mark Burnett), the series also focus on timeless universals. "In our society," he says, "you get married, have babies and go to work. Those are the important moments."

But most people do not end up in their dream jobs; that is, arguably, precisely why millions of people spend long evenings escaping into TV. So one group of workplace series specializes in showing that dream jobs are not always so dreamy. ABC Family Channel's Switched Up! (Sundays, 7 p.m. E.T.)--in which two people trade jobs each week--portrays the kind of working world we would live in if we all got the jobs we wanted when we were 7: a cheerleader swaps places with a cowgirl, a fire fighter with a DJ. But the episodes generally end on an amiable, grass-is-always-greener note, as when a surfer trades with a sitcom writer and concludes, "As a writer, I'd be sad knowing that there's a lot of cool stuff going on in the world, and I'm sitting there in a room telling jokes." Likewise, Showtime's quirky Family Business (Fridays, 11 p.m. E.T.), about the family-run porn studio of Adam (Seymore Butts) Glasser, shows the sex-flick trade as a humdrum business, while UPN's America's Next Top Model (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is addictive, partly because it depicts cover-girl life as a grueling boot camp.

This being TV, the Holy Grail for several of these shows is working in front of a camera. ESPN's Dream Job (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), in a masterstroke of self-promotion, has communications students, lawyers and comedians audition to become ... an ESPN SportsCenter host. (This is the first reality show in which the ultimate praise is, "You made bowling fun.") It's surprisingly entertaining to watch pressure-stoked Dan-Patricks-in-training wrestle with TelePrompTers and try to coin catchphrases. It's also profoundly sad. Remember when a fan's fantasy job would have been playing a sport?