The Apprentice; An Update on Our Family

“This episode never quite reaches the depths of sheer awfulness, and so it never quite meets the expectations of Apprentice devotees. We want a logo that looks like a wave of excrement, dammit! A food product with a brand name that suggests it might in fact be fatal to eat! A middle manager having to perform as a background actor in a problematically themed escape room!”
Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent

“The reason for The Apprentice’s popularity – and more than six million people tune in every week, including a sizeable proportion of younger viewers – is that it’s a good hate-watch. If it started presenting us with people who had a firm grasp of business and a modicum of modesty, we’d probably switch off.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“If you’re judging it as a personality-led reality show – at times even a comedy – rather than a straight business competition – it’s one of the funniest, silliest series on television. But the opening episode of this 19th series tests even my patience. Usually, I’m the first to defend The Apprentice, but this episode does nothing to help my case that it still deserves its place on TV.”
Emily Baker, The i

“Am I alone in slightly enjoying being wound up by the contestants’ narcissistic awfulness, even though I imagine they have been told to ramp it up for the cameras and are probably much nicer in real life? Don’t get me wrong: the format badly needs a refresh, which is something I say every year, but they never do it and yet somehow it still holds its own in the ratings. So what do I know? I suppose its secret is that it never fails to show us the gap between how good some people think they are and the amusing reality.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“The Apprentice is desperately outdated and has no place on primetime TV. It should have been cancelled years ago. Its format has barely changed since the Noughties.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Director Rachel Mason’s telling of the story is no hatchet job, even though it’s a fair bet that there was a fair bit of disgruntlement that the Stauffers refused to take part. If you live by the vlog you can die by the vlog and this cautionary tale brutally exposed the dangers of playing out your life in public.”
Keith Watson, The Telegraph

“The real meat of the documentary is what happens when you need to keep feeding the beast you have created. When your income depends on monetising your family, where does that lead? And can it possibly be anywhere good? Mason’s film raises questions about just about every compelling issue of the internet age.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian