NEW YORK (AP) — This time “you’re fired” is more than a Donald Trump catchphrase. Fox is turning the firing of real people from real jobs into prime-time entertainment starting this week.
The network on Thursday will begin airing “Does Someone Have to Go?” a series where cameras go into small businesses and employees are compelled to rat out underperforming colleagues. At the end, they choose one co-worker to recommend for firing.
“This is the thing they promise to do in retreats but nobody really does it,” said Mike Darnell, executive in charge of alternative programming for Fox.
Darnell and Fox have pushed the boundaries of reality TV since it was first recognized as a genre, from the highs of “American Idol” to the lows of “Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?” He said he sees “Does Someone Have to Go?” as a new direction for a programming form dominated by singing and dancing competitions.
It’s a revamped version of a show, then called “Someone’s Gotta Go,” that Fox had been working on with the Endemol production company four years ago. In its initial incarnation, employees were given the power to determine who should be laid off within companies that needed to shrink for economic reasons. The show drew awful advance publicity – one magazine called it a step toward public executions – and never aired.
Read more at the Associated Press.
(Photo: Chris Tomko, AP)