‘Big league’: Trump swears he got higher TV ratings than ‘Friends’

The new book "Apprentice in Wonderland" is an exploration of the television show that took already famous businessman Donald Trump and made him a TV celebrity despite six bankruptcies in five of his companies, an excerpt in Vanity Fair revealed.

After six interviews with Trump personally, author and co-editor Ramin Setoodeh, the editor-in-chief of Variety, wrote that after the first season of "The Apprentice," Trump thought he should combine the salaries of all of the stars on "Friends" — and that should be what he would make per episode.

"Friends" almost didn't have a final season because some co-stars negotiated a $1 million per episode fee, Setoodeh wrote.

At that time in the early 2000s, it was more money than usual for actors on sitcoms. However, Trump thought producers of The Apprentice could afford to give him $1 million per episode too.

But, as Trump was the sole star and there were no other co-stars to share the limelight, he believed he was due $6 million per episode.

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“Friends had six people,” Trump told Setoodeh for the book. “They’re getting $1 million an episode each. That’s $6 million. So if they’re getting $6 million, and I have higher ratings than they do — because this is the end of Friends, and they were fading out — I said, ‘You should pay me $6 million an episode.’”

According to Trump, his show actually got more viewers than "Friends," a total that takes some fuzzy math to calculate.

“They were really in the basement, and we brought them back — big league!” Trump said about the show. He claimed there were some weeks where he did better.

"This wasn’t a fair comparison: the final season of 'Friends' was only eighteen episodes — six episodes fewer than the previous few seasons had been," the book said.

"As a result, NBC aired 'Friends' reruns for seven weeks in the spring of 2004 in the lead-up to the show’s grand finale, while 'The Apprentice' was new each week. In other words, new episodes of 'The Apprentice' outperformed reruns of 'Friends.' But for Trump, a win is a win, no matter what the circumstances."

It didn't work out for Trump.

"They went f---ing crazy!" Trump exclaimed.

The man he was arguing with on behalf of NBC was Jeff Zucker, the man who ultimately was in charge of CNN during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“And they said, ‘We’re not going to do it. It’s over,'" Trump recalled in the book.

The two went back and forth, with Zucker claiming they were going with someone else and Trump claiming he didn't care. But the reality is Trump came back saying, "Give me something less than six ... I'm reasonable."

What they ultimately agreed to is the network wouldn't take any of the product placement cash. It was the early days of the marketing tactic, and Setoodeh explained that the networks weren't yet hip to the new cash cow. Trump's producer, Mark Burnett, was.

The Apprentice ultimately evolved into giving an hour to every product it could, with challenges involving generating marketing plans for a product or creating a new product for another company. Millons of dollars was brought in as Trump and Burnett effectively sold the hour to the highest bidder.

“It’s got to be over $500 million,” Trump swears he earned from product placement in his 14 seasons, the book claims.

1. Setoodeh wrote, "In 2015, in a filing with the Federal Election Commission, Trump self-disclosed his total income from the show to be $213,606,575, which includes both his hosting salary and his product placement checks."