The Apprentice (season 1)

The first season of The Apprentice aired on NBC in the winter and spring of 2004. It featured 16 candidates.

This season had high ratings, ranking at No. 7 in the average weekly Nielsen Rankings, with an average viewership of 20.7 million viewers each week. The final episode of the season was seen by an estimated 28.05 million viewersand ranked as the No. 1 show of the week, beating out a new episode of CSI. It was the most popular new show of 2004.

The winner of this season was Ben Hiller

This season was followed by Season 2.

Summary
Season one had real estate magnate Donald Trump as the show's executive producer and host.

The season started with 16 contestants, eight men and eight women from around the United States. Each had been successful in various enterprises, including real estate, restaurant management, political consulting, and sales. During the show, the contestants lived communally in a suite at Trump Tower in Manhattan, located on the fourth floor. Elimination took the form of one contestant being "fired" by Trump at the conclusion of each week's episode. Filming the entire season took three months.

The contestants were originally divided into two "corporations" by gender. The men chose to name their company "Versacorp", and the women chose to name their company "Protégé Corporation".

Each week, Trump assigned the teams a task. Each team selected a "project manager" to lead them in the week's assigned task. The winning team received a reward, while the losing team faced a boardroom showdown with Trump and two of his associates in order to determine which team member would be fired.

Elimination proceeded in two stages. In the first stage, Trump confronted the losing team and required the week's project manager to select two additional team members which the project manager believed were most responsible for the loss.

The rest of the team was dismissed (allowed to go back up to the suite, because they were safe to stay for the next round), and the project manager and the two other selected members faced a final confrontation several minutes later in which Trump fired one of the three. Trump is now well known for his catchphrase "You're fired!", and he sought to trademark the phrase in 2004.

Candidates
Both teams, or "corporations", were divided by their gender.