Mark Burnett

After spending his life bouncing from one adventure to the next, it was natural for Mark Burnett to turn his experiences into successful reality television, even if he did take a circuitous route to fame and fortune. Originally born in the east end of London, England to factory worker parents, Burnett was raised in Essex and at 17, enlisted in the British Army. He became a Section Commander in the elite Parachute Regiment and was a member of the invasion force in the undeclared Falkland War in 1982. Later that year, he left the military and decided to become an advisor in Central America, but instead he took a detour to Los Angeles and remained there ever since.

After arriving in Los Angeles, an old mate from England found him a job as a live-in nanny for the Jaeger family. A year later, he went to Malibu to take care of two boys for a different family, and from there he moved on to work for an insurance company. With his girlfriend in tow, Burnett sold T-shirts on Venice Beach in his spare time. After making enough money hocking shirts, he left the insurance industry and entered the credit card marketing business. Then in 1991, he read a Los Angeles Times article by John Markman about the Raid Gauloises—a French outdoor adventure race considered to be the world’s toughest competition. Determined to not only do the race himself, but to bring it to the United States, Burnett—a certified scuba diver and “A”-level skydiver—joined the competition with four friends, naming his team American Pride. Though failing to win, Burnett came away from the experience with a grand idea.

In 1995, he joined Brian Terkelsen, a former investment banker from New York, and formed the Eco-Challenge—a series of extreme sporting events spanning a 300-mile course that aired as a documentary special on MTV and later the Discovery Channel. Following several four-man teams traversing the tough course, the special was interspersed with personal tales of glorious victory and tragic defeat. The race quickly became a phenomenon and soon branched out to Morocco, Patagonia, British Columbia and Australia. Realizing he had tapped into an undiscovered market, Burnett used his newfound capital and produced one of the first and most successful primetime reality shows, “Survivor” (CBS, 1999- ). Pitting sixteen contestants against each other on a remote island off the coast of Borneo, the show awarded the survivor of the physically and mentally rigorous 39-day competition a cash prize of $1 million. The show was an immediate hit and presented with each new season a fresh set of contestants in a different exotic locale.

Hot off the heels of “Survivor,” Burnett went on to produce several more reality series including “The Restaurant” (NBC, 2003-2004), which followed the rise and fall of a Manhattan eatery run by chef Rocco DiSpirito, and “Boarding House: North Shore” (WB, 2002-2003), which documented the lives of several renowned surfers who live together, but compete against each other in the Vans Triple Crown of surfing. Though both series failed to match the success of “Survivor,” Burnett found a huge hit with “The Apprentice” (NBC, 2003- ), which pitted a group of wanna-be moguls against each other for a $250,000 per year job running one of Donald Trump’s companies. Each episode began with two teams contesting against each other in specific business tasks and ended in The Donald’s boardroom where a member of the losing team was summarily fired. The show was a hit its first season, as Trump’s tagline, “You’re fired,” entered the cultural zeitgeist.

Burnett continued the reality craze with “The Casino” (Fox, 2004- ), an inside look at a Las Vegas casino, starring entrepreneurs Tim Breitling and Tom Poster, two Internet movers-and-shakers who acquired the Golden Nugget. The series focused beyond the doings of the two businessmen to explore the personal dramas of guests and the casino’s 3000 employees. Unable to attract an audience, the show was canceled after three months. Even less successful was "Commando Nanny," a UPN sitcom based on Burnett's early life experiences that was canceled before its scheduled 2004 airdate due to behind the scenes problems including health issues for the initial leading man and his subsequent replacement. Then, in “The Contender” (NBC, 2005 - ), Burnett gave 16 amateur prize fighters the chance to fight their way to a final match with $1 million purse, the winner of which gets a shot to participate in a startup boxing league formed by the producers.Meanwhile, Burnett sought to capitalize on the hysteria surrounding Martha Stewart and her criminal shenanigans with two new shows: “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart”, a spin-off of Trump’s show that offers challengers a job at Martha Stewart Omnimedia, and “Martha”, a syndicated series where the homemaking maven offers her advice to a live audience. Both series were slated for the 2005-2006 season.