This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

It may have been a moment in television history: Bill Kristol was right about something.

It happened last week, when the famously wrong conservative pundit appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," reacting to the final presidential debate — and, as Kristol has done from early in the campaign, deriding the Republican Party's presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump.

In his complaining about Trump, Kristol let loose a sarcastic aside aimed at the show's hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

"Oh, this show was really tough on Trump in late 2015 and early 2016," Kristol said, dredging up the months when Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, lofted softballs over the phone to Trump.

Scarborough and Brzezinski tried to shout down Kristol's argument that "a lot of people accommodated Donald Trump at different times," and that the "Morning Joe" coffee-sippers were among those doing the accommodating. But Kristol had drawn blood and made Scarborough wince.

But if Scarborough's show was a welcoming environment for Trump in his campaign's early days — back when everyone thought it was a novelty, rather than the harrowing vision of a dystopian future we've seen lately — they're not the only ones in 30 Rockefeller Plaza who gave The Donald a comfy media home.

It was in January 2004 — after Trump had declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice, and a few months before his third — that NBC debuted "The Apprentice." This was, of course, the reality competition where Trump played the role of the ultimate CEO, telling would-be executives "You're fired!" at the end of every episode.

The show, more so than any of the businesses he actually owned, is what cemented Trump's reputation as a savvy businessman. Never mind that his business career included failures running casinos (a business where people were literally giving him money) and running an entire football league, the USFL, into the ground. Trump looked like a success because a TV show told the audience that he was.

"The Apprentice" was a hit for NBC, and the network tried to make Trump's gold-plated success rub off on other shows. Remember that it was on an NBC-owned property, the entertainment-news show "Access Hollywood," for which Trump boarded that bus with a hot microphone and a container of Tic Tacs in 2005, in part so Trump could help promote NBC's daytime soap "Days of Our Lives."

Remember, too, that the guy who put "The Apprentice" on the air was Jeff Zucker, who ran NBC until 2010. In 2013, Zucker became president of CNN Worldwide, where this election year he made one of the most journalistically indefensible decisions of the year: Hiring Corey Lewandowski, former manager of Trump's presidential campaign, to spout the Trump line as a CNN pundit while still receiving severance checks from Trump and being bound by a non-disclosure agreement to not speak ill of Trump.

Trump stayed on as host of "The Apprentice" until June 2015. That was when Trump launched his presidential bid, with a string of vile comments about Mexicans: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." NBCUniversal severed business ties with Trump after that.

It is noteworthy that NBC did not sever those ties four years earlier, when Trump started in on his "birther" crusade, perpetuating the false accusations that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. Why NBC found the bigotry against America's first black president acceptable is a question that remains unanswered.

The severing of ties between Trump and NBC lasted less than five months, though. In November 2015, Trump was back at 30 Rock to host "Saturday Night Live."

It was a memorably unfunny show, largely because the chief requirement of an "SNL" host is an ability to laugh at himself — something Trump, time and again, has shown he is incapable of doing. It also damaged the credibility of "SNL" as a lampooner of political figures, by rendering its own Trump criticisms toothless.

For toothless comedy, though, it was a former "SNL" cast member, now working in another 30 Rock studio, who earned top marks. That would be Jimmy Fallon, who had Trump on NBC's "The Tonight Show" in September — and the hardest question Fallon asked was "Can I mess up your hair?" One tries to imagine what Johnny Carson, who didn't shy away from controversy, would have done with Trump on the other side of the desk.

To be fair, Fallon had Hillary Clinton on "The Tonight Show" a week later, and the questioning was similarly tame. And Clinton beat Trump onto "SNL" last season by a month, though not as host. (She appeared briefly as a bartender giving advice to Kate McKinnon's fake Hillary.)

"Saturday Night Live" has tried to atone for its Trump-related sins in this season's first four episodes. It has done so with its best weapon: Lacerating humor.

The highlight each week has been the series of opening sketches, which mocked Clinton and Trump for their performances in the presidential debates — and roasted Trump for that "Access Hollywood" bus incident. The stars of these sketches have been McKinnon, precisely capturing Clinton's inability to look spontaneous, and Alec Baldwin as a preening Trump, one self-regarding New York celebrity taking down another.

The way you know it's working is that Trump tweeted Oct. 16 that the show did a "hit job" on him, and that "Baldwin's portrayal stinks. Media rigged election!" When a comedy show can reduce its target to incomplete sentence fragments, it's doing its job.

NBC is continuing with "The Apprentice," with a celebrity edition expected in early 2017, with action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the big chair. Meanwhile, NBC's long-running cop show "Law & Order: SVU" has a Trump-inspired episode in the can — though, as one last favor to the network's former business partner, NBC is delaying the airdate until after the election. That's showbiz.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.