Well, I can see why it's called The Frontline. Within moments of the opening credits, Tom Parlon from the Construction Industry Federation and Pat Farrell from the Irish Banking Federation had the pale, shell-shocked expressions of soldiers at the D-Day landing. In the Green Room, finance minister Brian Lenihan must have heard the nearby mortar fire and prayed to Dev or Mammon or Baal or whatever deity to which Fianna Fáilers now bend the knee.

There's been a shift in the public mood since the end of Questions and Answers, and the producers of The Frontline recognise this. The people are angry. So instead of having a panel of politicians, economists and journalists pontificating about Nama with occasional input from an angry audience, The Frontline's focus was, from the start, on the views of those in the cheap seats. For most of the show, a rejuvenated Pat Kenny went from one audience member to another; an unemployed man in negative equity here, an indebted farmer there, a struggling business here-and-there. They all recounted sympathetic tales of woe and uttered variations of the phrase "where's my bailout?" Meanwhile, Parlon and Farrell stumbled around like soldiers in the opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan, gibbering incoherently, clutching their severed limbs, which in turn clutched the deeds of un-valuable properties.

"People became over-borrowed," stuttered Farrell at one point, like a damaged veteran in a sanatorium.

"Don't you mean 'the banks overlent'?" said Kenny, slapping him down like General Patton.

Essentially, The Frontline is 50% discussion programme and 50% a necessary 'Hour of Hate' for the economy-shocked masses. As Kenny said to Parlon and Farrell, with a gesture to the audience, "There's a lot of talk about 'the economy'. The people you are talking to here are 'the economy'."

Okay, it's slightly disingenuous. It's hard to see the audience as entirely representing the common folk when it's dotted with ideologues like Fintan O'Toole (armed with facts, figures and an elephantine memory) and Eamon Dunphy (similarly well informed but priapic with the heady musk of his own populist rhetoric). And it's also worth remembering that Kenny himself wasn't always so in tune with the public mood. A year ago, he was resisting a pay-cut, something Dunphy referenced when he and Pat disagreed over the money Dermot Desmond made on bank shares. "He made €20m on them, which is more than you or I made this week," said Dunphy, before pausing mischievously. "Well, it's more than I made this week".

But symbolically and theatrically, the first episode of The Frontline set itself up as 'The People versus A Bunch of Bastards' and it was very gratifying to watch. Not that it's a show trial. Parlon, Farrell and, later, finance minister Brian Lenihan looked sheepish and shiftless mainly because of the weakness of their own arguments and their sheer guilt in the face of accumulating evidence.

At one point, for example, Pat Farrell seemed to claim that the banks were lending to all viable businesses who asked, seemingly unaware that this undermined the whole argument for Nama (that it would spur banks, who supposedly weren't lending, into further lending). Later Lenihan, with his gravelly voice and thousand-yard stare, did as much as he could to salvage the situation without calling the previous guests idiots. At least he seemed competently in the wrong.

The Frontline was slick, pacy and well-researched, it returned Kenny to his comfort zone (less Adam West being Bruce Wayne and more Adam West being Batman), and it effectively channelled public anger into accurate truth-telling. If the show continues this hardline approach, PR handlers won't allow their people to appear. If so, I think there should be a stipulation in the Nama legislation that says they have to. If that doesn't happen, this fun shooting-property-developers-and-bankers-in-a-barrel format will have reverted to a regular panel show by Christmas.

A new series of The Apprentice also started this week with 14 barely-sentient suits trash-talking unpleasantly: "I'm in it to win", "I'm not interested in making friends", "I have what it takes", "I'm a business lion and profit is my prey!" (I made up the last one myself; I think it's the best). Anyway, 2,000 people applied this year, probably because being on The Apprentice is slightly less demeaning than hanging a cardboard sign around your neck saying "will offer stock-tips for food".

As has become increasingly clear with each new season, these inflated egos are the spread-sheet jockeys on the front lines of capitalism. They are cannon fodder. They are entirely expendable. Thankfully nobody has told them this. Nor has anyone explained that success is a complex coincidence of good ideas, graft, organisation, talent, team-work, demographic curves and lucky timing. Instead, shows like The Apprentice sell the notion that 'success' is a personality trait embodied in the charisma of great men like Bill Cullen. The wannabe apprentices believe these great men can transfer their business skills using black business voodoo ("mentoring" they call it). This means that when someone like Cullen, Donald Trump or Sir Alan Sugar tells one of them to snort poo, dance like a monkey, paint their bottoms green or sell heroin to babies, they go right ahead and do it... just like low-ranking Nazis.

The first episode involved a team made up of the boy suits versus a team of the girl suits in an ice-cream selling competition. The task was irrelevant really. What was most interesting was the ways in which they annoyed one another while they did it. Like the Smurfs, most of the candidates seem identical at first, but over the course of each episode they begin to differentiate themselves from one another with one irritating personality trait each.

After a while, I could discern English Smurf With a Calculator, Sneery Smurf, Annoying Arty Smurf Who Keeps Shouting Enthusiastically Into A Loudhailer, Buffoon Smurf, Smurf with Street Trading Background Similar to Bill's, and Ineffectual Smurf Who's Meant to Be Leading the Task But Whom No One Listens To (all the rest of them are like the generic, personality-less Smurfs used in crowd scenes).

In the end, the girls win, mainly because the boys can't stop being self-destructively alpha-male and getting in each other's way. Papa Bill then has to choose between firing Sneery Smurf, Buffoon Smurf or Ineffectual Smurf. Sneery Smurf almost rips his own face off with a mammoth sneer and Buffoon Smurf's head fills up with air until he looked all red and buffoony. There was no competition really. "Ineffectual Smurf has to go," said a voice in Bill's earpiece. "We'll keep the Buffoon and the Sneerer... they're going to completely wreck people's heads."

And when our heads are well and truly wrecked, we'll probably end up in a hospital not unlike the one in Nurse Jackie. This is a new drama series (they say it's a comedy but it's not really) featuring Edie Falco as a tough-as-nails but saintly emergency room nurse, the eponymous Nurse Jackie, who gives people motivational speeches like the following: "This job is wading through a shit storm of people who come into this place on the very worst day of their lives. And just so you know, doctors are here to diagnose, not to heal. We heal." Sounds a little like the speech from the intro to Fame doesn't it? Well, it's even better than that, because Jackie is 'flawed'. That's television executive-speak for either a drug problem or sexual impropriety. In Jackie's case, it's both, as she pops amphetamines and has sex with a pharmacist despite having an adorable husband-and-child-combo straight from central casting. It's intriguing enough to keep me watching but contrived enough to make me suspicious.

pfreyne@tribune.ie