In 2004, the year The Apprentice debuted, Patric Verrone, a writer for the animated series Futurama, was the secretary treasurer of the Writers Guild of America West, part of a cadre of radicals who called for more aggressive tactics, including swelling the union’s ranks by showing solidarity with writers from game shows and animated shows. Reality workers were a harder sell, he knew. The way most WGA writers saw it, the genre was the enemy—a wedge networks used to resist union demands, first in 1988, when the WGA struck for twenty-two weeks, and then again in 2001.
