Television Review: On ‘The Profit,’ Marcus Lemonis Rescues Small Businesses

Maybe it was the recession, but that tale has changed. The new American dream begins with a failure, a humbling in the face of a circumstance in which your eyes were bigger than your stomach. The new fantasy is that in your darkest hour, a white knight might come to rescue you from the thing you strove for but did not know how to execute properly. This is a story that celebrates the big guy.

That version, at least, has a reliable narrative, which means that it can make for reliable television, the latest example of which is “The Profit,” which begins on Tuesday night on CNBC.

What Gordon Ramsay is to floundering restaurants, what Tabatha Coffey is to hair salons on the fritz — that’s what Marcus Lemonis aspires to be for any number of small businesses. Mr. Lemonis is the chairman and chief executive of Camping World, but also a jack-of-all-enterprises, spotting and stomping out inefficiencies in pursuit of profit.

Profit that Mr. Lemonis shares, naturally. “The Profit” is an extension of reality television’s long-running charitable impulse, but like the cheery moguls on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” Mr. Lemonis has skin in the game. He writes checks and takes temporary control, makes significant changes, then hopes his new partners can make him money.

His practices are politely predatory, feasting on small businesses that don’t have the resources to advance or to save themselves from eventual collapse. In the first two episodes, there’s an additional twist: the companies are run by the founders’ children, who are finding it hard to continue their parents’ legacies. These are enterprises ripe for takeover, and owners looking to fill an authority vacuum.

The full extent of the business relationship between Mr. Lemonis and his targets is left vague. He offers cash infusions in amounts that are, to an extent, meaningful — $100,000 here, $200,000 there. For businesses on the precipice of significant debt, that matters, but those numbers probably pale in comparison to the sheer value of the airtime. The conclusion of the premiere, which focuses on Car Cash, a Manhattan-based used-car purchaser, helpfully reminds the viewer that since Mr. Lemonis entered into partnership with the owners, several new licensees have opened in places like Columbia, S.C.; and Buffalo.

Even though the premiere focuses on the tension between two brothers who inherited the business from their father — Jon, the older, is moody and authoritarian; Andrew, the younger, is creative and constantly holding a tiny dog — Mr. Lemonis is more interested in the potency of the brand name and the easy exportability of the concept. The family trauma is a speed bump.

Perhaps Mr. Lemonis is just heartless, though he was the subject of a particularly hokey charity-themed episode of ABC’s kind-capitalist reality show, “Secret Millionaire.” But this being CNBC, which is making its programming increasingly narrative-driven, it’s just business. There are PowerPoint-ready tips in each episode. Watch the premiere, and when Car Cash is lowballing your estimate, you’ll know why. You’ll also see a truTV-worthy staged encounter in which one brother cuts ties with wholesaler middlemen, who look like central-casting henchmen from a third-tier Mafia film.

There’s a warmth to Mr. Lemonis’s sternness: invariably he’s the voice of reason, though there’s little competition. That’s especially true in the second episode, which focuses on Jacob Maarse Florists, in Pasadena, Calif., which is lagging under the leadership of the founder’s son, Hank, who still borrows money from his mother to keep the business afloat. The store is cluttered, there’s no inventory tracking system, and the delivery drivers still use paper maps.

Mr. Lemonis calmly runs roughshod over the place, even going so far as to suggest to Hank that perhaps he doesn’t want to run the business anymore. It’s a sly and disturbing scene, and perhaps a step too far. Whether from resentment or self-doubt, Hank says he’s possibly reneging on the deal, which may leave Mr. Lemonis, and his token investment, in the wind.

But Mr. Lemonis has his handshake deal, and whatever contracts may have been signed off camera will not go quietly. Through a representative, Mr. Lemonis said he has filed a lien on the property. “I always gear my offers toward minimizing my risk,” he says — that’s big-guy stuff, the new American dream.

The Profit

CNBC, Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.

Produced and created for CNBC by the Hochberg Ebersol Company in association with Machete Productions. Justin W. Hochberg, Charlie Ebersol and Amber Mazzola, executive producers for the Hochberg Ebersol Company. Jim Ackerman and James Bolosh, executive producers for CNBC.

Frequent Flier: The Drama of Travel, Made Into Television

Elise Doganieri is a creator of "The Amazing Race." She rode a yak in Lijiang, China.

MY very first international trip was on TWA back in 1990. I went to Madrid and went backpacking with my college roommate for about five weeks. I went with $1,000, and we lived on wine, cheese, bread and chocolate. That trip changed my life.

Q. How often do you fly for business?

A. I used to fly all the time, probably about six months out of the year. Now, it’s about twice a month. When we’re filming I can fly every other day and go to nine or 10 countries in three weeks.

Q. What’s your least favorite airport?

A. Heathrow. If you’re switching planes, it can take forever to get to your gate.

Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?

A. I love Asia, especially Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Asia is just very culturally rich, and anyplace I go on the continent is fascinating.

Q. What’s your secret airport vice?

A. I catch up on movies. I think my record is four movies during one flight.

I met my husband, Bertram van Munster, about five years later, and we both loved travel. I remember talking about how travel always has a lot of drama and how you can build relationships. I still keep in touch with people I met on my first trip abroad. So long story short, “The Amazing Race” was born somewhat from our own real love of going places.

I do talk to seatmates on occasion during my trips for the show, but I don’t really tell them exactly what I do. All I will say is that I work in television and I’m traveling for business. Even that takes a while for me to admit. First, I’m very private and where we travel for the show is a secret until it airs. Even my parents have to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Traveling for the show is a lot of fun. It’s also a lot of work since the logistics are crazy.

But I’m privileged in that my business trips are really out of the norm. My husband and I have a lot of maps of the world in the office, and we try to pick places to film that may not be travel destinations for most Americans.

I’ve had some amazing experiences.

I remember flying from Adelaide to Coober Pedy, Australia, which is the opal capital of the world. I was on this tiny Cessna with four other passengers and one pilot. I decided to take flying lessons when I got home because I couldn’t help thinking what would happen if this one pilot passed out. Fortunately, he didn’t and we wound up filming for one week in underground homes called dugouts, which really are a lot nicer than the name implies.

I was in Botswana in a plane called a Caravan. We were flying over the Okavango Delta while herds of elephants ran throughout the bush. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Flying into Reykjavik, Iceland, was like landing on the moon. Even though it’s only five hours from J.F.K., it’s like no other place on earth.

We took off at night and arrived in the morning to the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen. I’ve also flown apparently to the end of the world when I flew to Punta Arenas, Chile and then onto Ushuaia, Argentina, where I had my passport stamped “The End of the World” on Isla Redonda Tierra del Fuego. That was very cool.

Aside from finding places that are not usual destinations for many Americans, we try to keep things local or culturally significant regarding the challenges that our contestant teams have to perform.

People really seem to enjoy sky diving and bungee-jumping. I went bungee-jumping for the first time in New Zealand during season two. It’s called the Nevis Bungee Jump and you drop about 440 feet. I must have stood on the ledge over the gorge for about five minutes. I knew if I didn’t do it I would regret it. So I did it. I couldn’t even catch my breath to scream. I was out of my mind, but I would do it again.

Sky diving is another story. I told myself I would do it once, and now it’s off my to do list, but more power to our teams and every other person out there who thinks that it’s fun. Jumping out of a perfectly good plane makes absolutely no sense to me.

By Elise Doganieri, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com.

Advertising: Sophomore Slump Afflicts Once-Promising TV ShowsDarren Michaels/Warner Brothers Television

Even with increased competition from cable television and online entertainment, networks could always count on new hits to be their strongest line of defense. And for decades the best thing about these new shows was that they continued to get stronger in their second season.

But in the television season about to end, some of the most popular new shows from a year ago have not built on their initial success — and in fact have wound up in premature decline.

The excitement that surrounded the introduction, in fall 2011, of comedies like “New Girl” on the Fox network, “Two Broke Girls” on CBS, and “Last Man Standing” on ABC, and the family-friendly drama “Once Upon a Time” on ABC, largely fizzled in season two, as their ratings fell.

That does not include the calamitous plunge for more marginal shows, like NBC’s “Smash,” which lost half its audience this year and was canceled last Friday.

“It’s something new for breakout hit shows to be down in their second year,” said Warren Littlefield, who put a generation of hits, including “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” on NBC when he led its entertainment division in the 1990s. “And yes, it’s alarming.”

Monday is the start of what is known as upfront week in New York, when the networks show off their new programming to advertisers. In the last few days, the networks announced the new shows they have ordered, and their message was unmistakable: We need new hits — a lot of them.

The four major networks will present a total of at least 41 new series next season, surely among the most to be introduced in one season. And they are not finished; other shows are expected to be announced within weeks.

Hit shows that gather momentum in their second seasons can create a cash cow that will produce revenue for years, even decades. Many shows that later emerged as cultural touchstones were helped by a jump in ratings in their second seasons, including “The X-Files,” “C.S.I.” and “The Simpsons.”

Not every new show last season faltered. The CBS drama “Person of Interest” grew, and ABC’s “Scandal” has caught fire this season. But most have skidded, for a variety of reasons.

Executives say one factor in the downturn for second-year shows has been the across-the-board ratings drop afflicting the industry. Every network is down in the category most closely watched by advertisers — viewers ages 18 through 49 — by margins ranging from 3 percent for CBS to 21 percent for Fox.

“Obviously, this has just been a terrible year for network television,” said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying company. “And it means this pilot season is the most important for the networks that I can remember.”

But there are other reasons. Anne Sweeney, the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, pointed to changes in the content. “Each of those shows had different issues,” she said, referring to the slumping series. “Creative choices were made that impacted how viewers felt about them.”

Mr. Adgate said too much was asked of some of the new hits, such as counting on them to prop up whole nights. “In the case of ‘Two Broke Girls,’ I think CBS asked it to be a linchpin show,” he said. “It’s not a linchpin show yet, like ‘Big Bang Theory.’ ”

This season CBS moved “Two Broke Girls” to Mondays at 9 p.m., the so called tent-pole spot for that night. Even with delayed viewing counted, it is down almost a million viewers among the 18-to-49 group.

Mr. Adgate also cited the sweeping, often disruptive, issues network programmers face. “You have the competition from cable,” he said. “And now streaming video. And you have young people turning off their TVs. How can a show grow in that environment?”