NBC has announced that the sixth edition of its Donald Trump The Apprentice reality series will premiere on Sunday, January 7 at 9:30PM ET/PT with a special 90-minute episode.
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As the network announced back in May, The Apprentice 6 will air regularly on Sundays at 9PM ET/PT (against CBS and ABC's strong Cold Case and Desperate Housewives competition) and serve as the anchor of NBC's post-Sunday Night Football lineup. The rest of NBC's new midseason Sunday night lineup will not be the same as originally announced in May however.
A second edition of America's Got Talent, originally scheduled to air as The Apprentice's 8PM lead-in, has been replaced by Grease: You're the One That I Want, a new previously announced reality talent competition series that will allow America to choose the Sandy and Danny leads for a new Broadway production of "Grease." America's Got Talent, which aired its first edition this past summer, is now expected to air its second edition in Summer 2007. Raines, a quirky new Jeff Goldblum police drama that was originally supposed to air as The Apprentice's 10PM lead-out, has been replaced by the return of the network's Crossing Jordan drama. Raines will instead take over Las Vegas' Friday night time period sometime in the spring.
Both Grease: You're the One That I Want and The Apprentice will air special 90-minute episodes during their first two broadcast weeks, which means that The Apprentice won't settle into its 9PM ET/PT regular time period until January 21.
As previously announced, The Apprentice 6 was filmed in Los Angeles, a move that made it the first The Apprentice edition to not film in the New York City area. While NBC has not yet disclosed the identities of the eighteen "candidates" who will be competing on the show's sixth edition, one of them will be Angela Ruggerio, the three-time U.S. Women's Ice Hockey Olympian who won last February's stunt casting promotion that allowed viewers to vote a member of Team USA's 2006 Torino Winter Olympics squad into the season's group of candidates.
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According to NBC's The Apprentice 6 scheduling announcement, announced as part of Wednesday's announcement of the network's entire 2006-2007 midseason schedule, the move to Los Angeles will also introduce "a whole new series of surprising twists and turn."
Since The Apprentice 6 wasn't filmed in New York, previous The Apprentice advisors George Ross and Carolyn Kepcher -- who Trump fired shortly after The Apprentice 6 finished production -- won't serve as The Donald's regular advisors in The Apprentice 6. Instead, Trump children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., both of whom previously served as substitute advisors on some of the show's earlier editions, will serve as Trump's regular The Apprentice 6 advisors.