As Keefe reported in The New Yorker, Kwame Jackson, a Harvard MBA who was a contestant on the first season, “was struck, when the show aired, by the extent to which Americans fell for the ruse. ‘Main Street America saw all those glittery things, the helicopter and the gold-plated sinks, and saw the most successful person in the universe.’ ” The flimflam succeeded, in part, because of Burnett’s genius,
