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By Gary Levin, USA TODAY
Mark Burnett, one of reality TV's biggest producers, is having one of the busiest weeks in his career.
He's producing Sunday's live MTV Movie Awards, his first awards show. His new CBS series, Pirate Master, a wrinkle on Survivor with costumed contestants on a ship, premieres tonight (8 ET/PT). He's recruiting a new crop of 11-year-olds for 32 new episodes of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? (tonight, 8 ET/PT), Fox's spring-hit quiz show, for next season. And last month, he married actress Roma Downey (Touched By an Angel). Yet Burnett, 46, has hit a few speed bumps along the way. His filmmaker competition series, On the Lot (Monday and Tuesday, 8 ET/PT, Fox), is struggling mightily despite its Steven Spielberg pedigree, a victim of narrow appeal among the competition reality shows that are Burnett's specialty. Premiering after Tuesday's American Idol, the show lost two-thirds of Idol's audience, and Monday's two-hour episode averaged a measly 2.9 million viewers. Fox is now weighing options such as combining the Monday screening and Tuesday results episodes into a single weekly hour. Also on the ropes: The Apprentice, the Donald Trump-hosted business competition that soared, then sunk in the ratings. NBC declined to renew the show but contractually has until Friday to do so. Burnett says Trump "truly felt disrespected" by the network, but the producer "feels sure" the show will continue on another network if NBC passes. "We've had plenty of discussions." With Survivor, Burnett was an innovator of the modern-day vote-off reality show, with its ritualistic eviction, moody music and lush cinematography. Other examples: boxing series The Contender, dropped by NBC, which plans a third season on ESPN; and Idol-like Rock Star, canceled by CBS after two seasons. Survivor's 14th edition, which ended this month, marked its least-watched yet, with 14.2 million viewers. But the show easily wins its Thursday time slot, and it begins filming its next edition soon in China, marking the first major U.S. TV show to be filmed there. Asked about similarities among his shows, Burnett is unapologetic. "It's me! There's a commonality in my company of how we shoot things. If it ends up doing (as well as) Survivor, I'll be happy." What's different with Pirate, which arrives a week after the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie? "It's high adventure that they're on this pirate ship, and there's actual money being discovered in the form of gold every week," as opposed to a single winner-take-all payout, Burnett says. Using maps, 16 contestants compete in physical challenges in search of hidden coins around Dominica, the Caribbean island where the show was filmed. A "captain," elected by the group, takes half of each week's booty and lives large in a fancier cabin with better food and no deck-scrubbing. But "if he doesn't handle it right, if he (ticks) them off, there can be a mutiny." In a reversal of Survivor's immunity idol, Pirate's captain marks three crewmembers as potential plank-walkers; one is voted off. As for On the Lot, Burnett says remaining episodes veer away from the "pitch meetings" that dominated last week's episodes and will focus on the 15 remaining contestants and the short films they'll make with limited resources. Viewers vote for their favorite, and a filmmaker is eliminated each week. "Conceptually, with the prevalence of YouTube, this should do well," he says. "It's not doing as well as we'd hoped." 
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