The audience on the set of American Idol, the smash Fox reality talent show, in Los Angeles is cheering. The ratings-hungry executives present are particularly happy, and for them the real idol tonight is the five-foot, 93-pound man in the control room wearing cowboy boots, Shirley Temple curls, and a giant grin. His name is Mike Darnell. As Fox's executive vice president of specials and alternative programming, he is arguably the king of reality TV, buying shows from independent producers and hiring producers to execute his own ideas. Whether he's overseeing lowbrow fare such as Celebrity Boxing (in which minor stars engage in slugfests), re-creating the old-fashioned talent show with American Idol (in which homegrown talents are given makeovers and compete for a record contract), or dispatching junior socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie to live with a farm family for The Simple Life, this year's Green Acres send-up, Darnell approaches television not as a network executive but as a fan. In the case of American Idol, which was originated by a team of British producers, he has hit gold. Other networks passed on it before Darnell snapped it up for Fox.

"Did you like it?" he asks excitedly, high-fiving friends and shooting O.K. signs. Sandy Grushow, the chairman of Fox Television Entertainment Group, who is in the audience with his kids, definitely likes it. Three years ago, when scandal erupted after the revelation that the groom of the Darnell-orchestrated special Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? had been the subject of a restraining order for threatening a former fiancee, Grushow declared that "exploitative specials" were dead at Fox. Since then Darnell has re-invented himself with such mainstream reality successes as American Idol and Joe Millionaire, whose staggering 40-share finale—40 percent of all TVs turned on—whipped the Oscars and came close to the Super Bowl numbers. Fox won the February sweeps in the prized 18-49 demographic for the first time ever in 2003. Mike Darnell, according to The Washington Post, "may be the most influential person in television."

Darnell, who is 40, creates Fox's reality shows with many independent producers, but not for the moment with one named Mike Fleiss, who worked with him as executive producer of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? Though the two men are still very close friends, their shows increasingly compete in the reality sweepstakes.

Across town from the Fox studios the day after the filming of the American Idol episode, this other Mike, who is 38 and six feet four—as tall as Darnell is short—is in his office in his standard work uniform of T-shirt, swim trunks, flip-flops, and shades. He sits in an editing bay at his company, Next Entertainment, overseeing a rough cut of his ABC Bachelor series (in which 25 young women compete for the hand of a desirable male—most recently a scion of the Firestone tire dynasty) and asking for better body shots. "Can I see more sexy images of the girls?" he exhorts his production team. After being shown footage of a tipsy bachelorette, he says, "I thought we had hilarious shit of her fucked up!" Then, after being shown footage of the tipsy bachelorette retching behind a bathroom door, he says, "I would loop a couple of those barf sounds. Loop the wettest one!"

Fleiss's gonzo reality-TV shows, such as The Bachelor I, II, III, and, this fall, IV, The Bachelorette (in which 25 young guys vied in the first installment for the affection of a Miami Heat cheerleader), and the sexathon Are You Hot? (a nationwide beauty pageant of barely clad contestants), brought ABC double-digit gains in young-adult viewers in their time slots. Soon to come is The Will, in which a real family greedily wars over a benefactor's estate. A scripted sitcom is also in the works, and Fleiss's first reality movie, The Quest, about seven guys on spring break who endeavor to get their buddy laid, and his remake with producer-director Michael Bay of the bloody classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will be released this fall.

Reality TV is taking over, with two dozen major network shows this summer—twice as many as last summer—dominating the prime-time lineup. Whether reality tanks or triumphs from overexposure remains to be seen. For now, executives and producers of the genre are suddenly Hollywood's "It kids," who, according to Ben Silverman, executive producer of Nashville Star, a country-music talent search, and The Restaurant, an unscripted drama set in Lower Manhattan, are "getting haircuts, wearing Prada, and going to the Four Seasons for drinks." The two Mikes and a swarm of other reality producers and network executives have revolutionized television by laying off conventional sitcom, drama, and newsmagazine writers, directors, and producers and turning the tube over to the great unwatched horde of ordinary people, who will, it seems, do absolutely anything to get on television, and who usually deliver the goods once the cameras are on them. "Just as John Ford and Howard Hawks were two of the great auteurs of the golden age of Hollywood, Mike Fleiss and Mike Darnell are two of the great auteurs of the golden age of cheese," says Dr. Robert Thompson, Syracuse University professor of media and popular culture, who claims to have seen every episode of reality programming to date. "We watch these shows to mock them, to stick our elbows in the ribs of the people we're watching them with. Sometimes we like to wallow in the mire, and Fleiss and Darnell make very rich mire in which to wallow."

In the end, the greatest show produced by the two Mikes—who The New York Times said "are like a reality show version of the South Pole explorers Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen, fiercely competitive in their race to reach bottom"—may be their own. Darnell and Fleiss are only two players in the overcrowded reality field, but their story stands out because it possesses all three key ingredients of the reality-TV format. First, it starts with an intriguing, farout premise. In their case, who would i believe that a former sportswriter and a / child actor could reshape mainstream I television? Second, it enlists boondockers and bumpkins and thrusts them into I totally unfamiliar settings, where they are forced to compete against one another for, in the case of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, the hand of a hunk or a honey. In the case of Mike and Mike, the competition is strictly for ratings. Finally, there must be the twist, known as "the reveal," at the end, when viewers discover that things are not really what they seemed. We'll come to the reveal in the drama of the two Mikes later.

Mike Fleiss knew the legend of Mike Darnell long before he met him. He called him "the great Darnell" and "the little wizard," and he was well versed in his string of Fox shockumentaries, such as Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? (a purported autopsy of an extraterrestrial at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947), his Guinness World Records: Primetime series (more than 50 episodes, including one featuring a 303-pound tumor), and When Animals Attack! (Darnell's signature gorefest of animals ripping into humans and other beasts), all of which had huge audiences and absurdly low production costs. (Reality fare costs as little as $500,000 per hour in contrast to as much as $2 million for an hour of scripted dramatic programming.) These shows sent Fox ratings into the stratosphere.

That Fleiss would one day compete with his hero was then beyond his wildest imaginings, even though he had always had an intensely competitive streak and a willingness to do virtually anything for high ratings. "Mike, be fuckin' wild!" admonishes an autographed photo of Ozzy Osbourne in Fleiss's office.

Fleiss, who has a crew cut and eyes that swirl kaleidoscopically behind sunglasses, sits in the dark in his office, a ball of nervous energy, with, some say, precisely the same interests and attention span as his viewers. He speaks in a stream of exclamations, punctuated by countless "Dude!"s and "Hold on a minute!"s while the phone jangles incessantly and his current production team of 300 runs around his 30,000-square-foot facility. "I don't know if Mike's a creative genius or an odd person, but either way he sees things the way none of us can; he's so in touch with what television viewers want to see," says Lisa Levenson, co-executive producer of The Bachelor.

"I like to take a topic that someone says, 'You can't put that on TV,' and then I put it on TV," Fleiss says. "I want to feel a little bit dangerous, a tiny bit irresponsible probably, and that usually equals controversy, and that's sort of my stock-in-trade." His office is filled with guitars, rock posters, and slasher-film memorabilia. On top of a bookshelf is the plastic bride-and-groom statuette from the wedding cake of Rick Rockwell and Darva Conger, whose televised wedding on Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire? may have marked a low point in television but is still considered by Fleiss to be the apex of his early career.

It's been a long road for Fleiss to reach the top. When Variety recently ran one of many front-page stories about his increasing domination of reality TV, his old friend and former sportswriting colleague Michael Silver, who is now with Sports Illustrated, congratulated him. "I said, 'Dude, the word of the day is "vindication"!,' " Silver remembers. "And he said, 'No, the word of the day is "vengeance,'" and that's Mike Fleiss. There is nothing subtle about his desire to conquer, destroy, and make his enemies feel pain, and I say that as someone who loves him."

"We watch these shows to mock them, to stick our elbows in the ribs of people we're watching with."

Fleiss has one major obstacle to the summit of the reality-TV mountain: Mike Darnell. "There's a fraternity between them, but there's also a fraternal competition, which drives them both to have the top show that everybody's talking about," says Mark Thompson, the weatherman at KTTV, Fox's L.A. flagship station, and a frequent voice of Fox reality fare, who is a close friend of both Mikes. "But there's only room for one of them at the top at any one time. Underlying everything is 'I love you and respect you, but don't think I'm not going to try to beat you.' "

"No matter where they are, they're always talking to each other about both of their shows and how they rated," says Lisa Levenson. "They have that wonderful competition friendship, you know, of rooting for each other, but maybe secretly not."

Once, Mike Fleiss was just one of the boondockers who now clamor to get on his shows. His mother was a nurse, and his father owned a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor in La Habra, California. Fleiss grew up scooping ice cream and skipping school—so that he could go home and watch television. At Sunny Hills High in Fullerton, he says, the girls were "unbelievably hot," but he was not. "I was the alienated, parking-lot stoner, man," he says.

Studying journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, he became a sportswriter, then a sports editor, and eventually executive editor of The Daily Cal. After a string of internships, he got a $323-a-week job as a sportswriter at The Sacramento Union and then moved on to The Santa Rosa Press Democrat. That job imploded when the editors passed over Fleiss and bestowed the plum job of covering the San Francisco 49ers on his friend Michael Silver, whom Fleiss had mentored at The Daily Cal.

"And they give me the other, sort of hybrid job," he says, which included one night a week on the copydesk. Fleiss spent his desk time writing scripts, and to punish him, he says, his editors gave him more desk time. (The sports editor, Glen Crevier, denies this.) He sent his youthful efforts to Hollywood offices, where they went nowhere. One of his few connections to show business was his cousin Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam, who says she would have gladly given him a leg up, but he never asked. ("The name Fleiss in German means industrious and hardworking, and Mike has the same genetics that I have," says Heidi.)

One night in his apartment, with his job in jeopardy, Fleiss found himself watching the syndicated Howard Stem Show. "It was something like the lesbian Dating Game," he remembers, "and I thought, Damn! They had complete creative freedom, and I was being restricted by the facts all the time! I felt like I couldn't really do anything creative, because I was always running down what Jose Canseco said."

Shortly afterward, when his editor called him in to bawl him out, he exploded. He was sick of the "oppressive, cynical" newsroom vibe and the tired drones surrounding him ("I felt, like, if I sat there with a bunch of old men I'd become one of them"). He turned to his editor, he recalls, "flipped him the bird, and told him to fucking fire me, motherfucker!" Glen Crevier remembers the separation differently: "He spent all of his desk time watching Married ... with Children reruns, and was stunned when I told him, 'I'm going to let you go.' "

Eight months later Fleiss won an audition for a writer's slot on the Fox reality show Totally Hidden Video (the new generation's Candid Camera). "I would kill a human being for this opportunity," Fleiss told the interviewer. "I had been unemployed for almost a year at that point, and my wife was very, very pregnant, probably about seven months," he says. "He said, 'Go home, write four or five bits, and come back tomorrow.' I had been writing on deadline every day for the last 10 years, so I just stayed up all night and pounded away. I wrote close to 40 bits."

He got the call saying he was hired while he was at the hospital with his wife, Alex, who was due to deliver the first of their two children, whom they named Aaron, after Aaron Spelling and Hank Aaron. "Even though I was, like, in the total dregs of television, which I still consider myself to be in many ways, I was so happy," he says.

A year later, when Totally Hidden Video was canceled, Fleiss was unemployed again. Then he hooked up with Bruce Nash, the producer, who currently has 17 reality shows on network and cable, including Darnell's Mr. Personality, hosted by former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, on which a woman must select a suitor from a group of men in masks. Fleiss was just a behind-the-scenes guy in Nash's busy shop until Darnell hired Nash to produce a special around an idea he had called Breaking the Magician's Code: Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, which would expose how magicians do their tricks. Nash put Fleiss on the project and took him with him to his first meeting with Darnell. Even back then, Darnell's office was usually full of eager producers with their presentation boards and "leave-behinds." Darnell still hears as many as 75 pitches a week, and "producers are circling his waiting area like flights over LAX," " according to Mark Thompson.Sitting with Nash across from Darnell, Fleiss did what he does best: he rebelled, s He says Nash had told him to respect the magician's art. "So with a gun to my head I had written a terrible script for it, and then we went to see Darnell," Fleiss remembers. "His office is crazy! He's like a cross between the Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka. He has more showmanship than P. T. Barnum. I love the guy so much. So we planned a rough cut of the show with a bad script that I had been essentially forced to write. Darnell is like"—here he switches to Darnell's high-pitched rasp—"'What is this, a joke? You need to be making fun of magicians!' And I was like, 'Dude, that's exactly how I wanted to go!' So I started rifling back with him.... It was a big moment for me professionally."

"At no time did I ever ask Mike Fleiss to write a reverent script for the show," says Bruce Nash, whose many Fox/Darnell projects include last year's The Glutton Bowl (40 greedy-guts in a sloppy eatathon for prizes). "For all of us the idea and direction from inception was always to take an irreverent approach. After all, I was doing this show for Mike Darnell and Fox, and they wouldn't have wanted it any other way."

Whatever the case, Fleiss had found his creative soul mate in Mike Darnell. "They can finish each other's sentences," says Alex Fleiss.

Breaking the Magician's Code did a 26 share in the 18-to-49 demographic, Darnell's biggest number up to then. "We got sued every which way—copyright lawsuits, class action, trade secrets," he recalls. He went on to do five more Magician's Code specials.

After Fleiss left Nash, he took a job at Unapix, a small distribution company, and his friend and longtime Darnell confidant Mark Thompson went to bat for him. "Now that Mike Fleiss is out on his own, I really want you to get to know him,"

Thompson told Darnell. "I know you'll like what he has to offer."

Soon after that, Fleiss, wearing his lucky leather jacket and with Thompson at his side, made a second pilgrimage to Darnell's office. Thompson remembers Fleiss saying, "I'm nervous. I am going to see the great Mike Darnell. How do you think I should be?"

"Mike, be yourself," his friend said.

Fleiss pitched Darnell an idea so irreverent, with a premise so extreme, that Darnell and Fox couldn't help but buy it. "I wanted to do a show called The World's Meanest People Caught on Tape, where you have people doing mean stuff," says Fleiss, his voice rising. "We had a clip of a bartender who stirred a martini with his penis."

Fleiss switches into his high-pitched Darnell imitation. '"Ahhh! That's interesting! We should definitely do that!'" However, according to Fleiss, that's what Darnell always says. "He's so enthusiastic about everything, and he is such a great performer, that you always leave a meeting thinking you at least got close to making a sale. It's only when you get the callback the next day that you know. I remember when I got that call."

He was in his cramped office at Unapix. "They said, 'Mike and Tom [Darnell's lieutenant, Tom Sheets] on the phone!' and, aah, it made me dizzy."

"You're in business, buddy," Darnell told him.

Fleiss leans back at his desk and giggles at the memory. "Mike Darnell made that happen for me," he says. "Even though it was a sleazy, disgusting little show, with a bartender stirring a drink with his penis, I was proud!"

When Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape appeared on Fox in 1999, it got a commendable 19 share.

The Mike and Mike Show had begun.

"OK., what have you got?" asks Mike Darnell. He is perched on a throne-size leather chair behind a giant oak desk that's adrift in a good two inches of tapes, paper, pictures, and television-programmer paraphernalia. There is a piano with an open Barry Manilow songbook against one wall, a gumball machine, stuffed animals, dead plants, and enough toys to stock a schoolhouse. If a meeting gets boring, Darnell is known to punch a button and make the fart machine under the couch unleash a triple flutter-blast. Today he is meeting with the producers of Temptation Island, Darnell's version of CBS's Survivor series, which became Fox's highest-rated series in its 2001 debut and is now in its third American season, with 11 foreign editions.

The producers are here to screen a group of couples vying to be whisked away to Temptation Island to exhibit their infidelities on national TV. Wearing a jean jacket with rolled-up sleeves, Darnell presides over the meeting, ogling the women ("She's adorable!") and admonishing the producers to force a fit but not totally buff young buck to work out ("They're in bathing suits the entire show!"). It's impossible not to like Mike Darnell. "Here's the thing: I'm very energetic and very competitive," he says. "But I'm a very conservative guy. I go home for lunch a lot. I love my daughter. I've never driven a sports car. I don't like roller coasters. I guess I take my level of excitement and competitiveness and put it all into the TV I do."

His office is ground zero for the reality-TV revolution. "It used to be that there was a certain type of producer who would come in, but now the genre has grown to the point that everybody comes in," he says. Growing up in Philadelphia, the son of a cop and a housewife, Darnell was a remote-control addict and TV Guide junkie. "I was hypnotized by television, but at a very young age I was very serious about why things worked and why they didn't and what the ratings were," he says. His recall of shows, exact ratings, and television history is mind-boggling.

At first he just wanted to be on TV. He won the attention of a talent manager at a singing contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Police Athletic League. "I sang 'Jeremiah was a bullfrog,"' he remembers, and soon he was auditioning for commercials. "And then," he says, "the manager brought myself and, like, three other kids out here."

The family planned a vacation around the audition, and his father fell so in love with California that he decided to move his family west. When they arrived in North Hollywood, the reality hit hard. "Our vision of California was a little bit different than where we moved, an apartment on Hortense," Darnell remembers. "You know, it didn't have a California-sounding name!"

Dreaming of being another Johnny Whitaker, the redheaded, blue-eyed child star, he landed bits on Welcome Back, Kotter and Kojak and a regular slot on the series Big John, Little John. When he turned 20 and was still auditioning for children's roles, he asked an older actor, "What do you do when you're not working?" The actor replied, "I wait tables." Darnell saw himself doing that in 20 years, and it wasn't a pretty picture. That's when he had an epiphany: he didn't want to be on television; he wanted to be in television. He wanted to control the wheels and levers that made the medium work.

"I literally that day just stopped going to auditions," he says, "and I got my first real job. I worked in a bank as a teller." After graduating from Cal State Northridge, Darnell learned that his girlfriend, Carolyn Oberman, who lived across the street from him and his family and who is now his wife, had won a job at the Emmy Awards. "I remember being jealous," he says. "I remember saying, 'The only thing I want to do is just have a job in TV!'"

He finagled an internship in the news division at KTTV, doing grunt work until he graduated to the lowest position in the newsroom. "Basically a script ripper," says Darnell. That meant ripping bound copies of scripts and distributing them to anchors and production personnel. His persistence won him the job of video librarian, and that was where he found his future medium: clip shows, composed mostly of leftover free footage of car wrecks, police chases, and outlandish animal and human behavior. His first real production was called Life After Reruns. With the help of a cameraman and an editor, he compiled, without permission, footage of Burt Ward, who had played Robin on TV's original Batman series, and created what he described as "a cute little minute-and-a-half piece and showed it to literally everyone at KTTV."

With the 1989 release of Tim Burton's Batman movie, every station was desperate for Batman-themed programming. "Bill Redeker, a correspondent for ABC now, who was an anchor at the time, said, 'Well, what about that piece of crap Darnell did?"' Late that night Fox chairman Barry Diller was watching when Darnell's "piece of crap" aired. "I found an incredibly energized and whip-smart young guy and gave him an opportunity to move forward, which he has ever since at an alarming rate," says Diller.

Diller had Darnell promoted to a field-producer position, and the two met soon after in the KTTV newsroom, where they discussed an idea: Overheard, for which Darnell and a camera crew would surreptitiously tape conversations at Hollywood celebrity parties. "Go do it," Diller told him.

"I was at the premiere of L.A. Story, and I had my big boom microphone," remembers Darnell. "I was sort of hiding underneath the escalator." Diller spotted him and told him, Darnell says, slipping into a deep Diller whisper, "You're shameless. But you're doing a very good job."

By 1994 he had been promoted to executive in charge of special programming, and he began resuscitating the network's ratings with what became known as MDTV (Mike Darnell TV): high-testosterone specials which began with Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? Since the autopsy looked like a hoax, Darnell thought up a new special called World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed. He has overseen several hundred blood-guts-and-nutty-people specials, including smashes such as When Animals Attack!, Busted on the Job! (hidden-camera surveillance of strange acts in the workplace—for example, a woman taking revenge on her boss by urinating on his office furniture), and When Good Pets Go Bad! (Rover turning psycho on-camera), which, Mark Thompson says, "weren't getting headlines, so everybody was apologizing. 'Can you believe what Fox is doing?' We used to hear that all the time. 'Can you believe When Animals Attack!?' Well, all of America watched it. They watched When Animals Attack! 1, 2, 3, and 4."

"I wish I could tell you that there was some overriding philosophy," Darnell says. "There isn't. I just thought instinctively, I like this, and it is something I would watch. Those shows, for lack of a better way to say it, were like car accidents: you can't turn away."

I mention the 300-pound tumor in one of the Guinness specials and his eyes light up. "When I was a kid, I liked biggest, fattest, shortest, longest," he says. "And I said [to Eric Schotz, who produced the Guinness shows], 'Let's look for something like that!' And they came in with the biggest tumor. I said, 'Great! I would watch that!' And it was great! People were talking about it for weeks!"

By 1999, almost two years before CBS's Survivor series was launched, Darnell was the undisputed champ of reality TV. But that summer ABC began airing a British-born game show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Once again the landscape shifted, and Mike Darnell suddenly felt he was behind the curve. "A game show!," Darnell exclaims, still flinching today. "I was frustrated. I was calling for the numbers every day in the summer and watching this game show go up every week."

The entrance hall of ABC's administration building is lined with photographs of its signature shows—Ozzie and Harriet, Dick Clark's American Bandstand, The Wonderful World of Disney, The Lone Ranger, Happy Days. But at the end of the hallway is a shot of Regis Philbin holding a fan of $100 bills and leering like the Devil in church, to represent Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The show not only became ABC's monster hit of 1999 but also threw down a new gauntlet for Mike Darnell.

That summer, watching the show's ratings rise every morning, he summoned to his office producer Dick Clark, with whom he had worked on Fox specials such as Beyond Belief (where viewers guess whether outlandish happenings are real or not). They came out with a game show called Greed and aimed it right at Regis Philbin's throat. But it was no Millionaire, and Darnell's ire grew as Millionaire continued to skyrocket.

On the evening of the aforementioned taping of American Idol, Darnell sits in the empty bleachers with his creative team, discussing how the success of Millionaire drove him to re-create reality TV.

"Mike never takes vacations," says Tom Sheets. "The only time he ever went anywhere was when he went to Carolyn's cousin's wedding in Parsippany, New Jersey. He called me from there every morning, saying, 'Are the Millionaire numbers going down?' And I'd say, 'No, they're going up!"

"He was watching the wedding and the numbers on the show," remembers Carolyn Darnell. "It was driving him crazy not being in L.A

Sheets says, "If he's thinking about something—"

"You can't talk to him about anything else, even if his house is burning down," continues Sabrina Bonet IsHak, a bright young woman who began as a temp in Darnell's office, quickly became his assistant, and now is Fox's director of specials.

Darnell leaps to his feet and begins pacing, and I see him as he must have been back then, stuck at the wedding in Parsippany while Regis Philbin was whipping his 93-pound ass. His thoughts bounced between two topics: wedding, Millionaire, wedding, Millionaire, wedding, Millionaire. And suddenly an idea bubbled up, beautiful in its simplicity and audacious in its premise.

Sheets remembers Darnell's frantic voice on the phone. "He said, 'We'll have all these women come out! Fifty women! ... We'll find a millionaire! He'll propose on-screen! They'll get married right there!' ... And I think I said, 'All in two hours?'"

Darnell called in several possible producers, including Dick Clark and Mike Fleiss. When Mike Fleiss's turn to pitch came, he said, "We go Miss America on this thing!" Because Darnell liked the pageant approach—50 women auditioning to marry a millionaire, who would be hidden from them in a "pod" before emerging to meet and wed his bride on national television— he went with Fleiss. He gave him about 10 weeks to get the show ready for the February 2000 sweeps.

In November, Fleiss sent out an E-mail: "A television production company in Los Angeles is looking for a millionaire who's ready to get married on national TV!" Reminded of that E-mail and the misadventures that followed, Fleiss exhales a lungful of air. "Mike and I call it Black Sunday," he says.

The men who responded to Fleiss's E-mail were an odd bunch. Some of them were too old and doddering for national television. Some of them were advised not to participate by lawyers, family, or friends. "A couple of the guys we interviewed were probably gay," Fleiss remembers. "You get that on these shows—some guys who might have some homosexual tendencies who feel this is the ultimate way to prove their masculinity." He switches into a faux European accent: "I vill be the millionaire! That will prove I'm not gay!" He shakes his head. "Imagine what kind of self-respecting multi-millionaire would want to marry a woman sight unseen." After a pause he says, "Thank God for Rick Rockwell."

"I was a naive fool," professional public speaker, comedian, and real-estate investor Rick Rockwell tells me in a coffee shop near his home in Encinitas, California, referring to his long-shattered delusion that he could find his soulmate on a television show. He still bears the strafe marks of the debacle and calls himself "the man who stood at the epicenter of reality programming's de facto birth." The bad omens began moments after his televised wedding, when his wallet and traveler's checks were stolen. Then he was humiliated on his Caribbean-cruise honeymoon when, he says, his wife, Darva Conger, told him she was only in it for the vacation. She filed for annulment as soon as they got home. Since then, he says, there has been a major decline in his annual speaking engagements because his jobs, which once included speeches to Fortune 500 companies, have been reduced to a string of appearances where he's advertised as "Rick Rockwell of Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire?" To top the indignities, he says, two years after his televised wedding, Fox "had the nerve to ask me to do the Celebrity Boxing show. And against who? Joey Buttafuoco."

Rockwell has written a book, What Was I Thinking? The Truth About Reality TV and Modern Media, about his experience, which began when he answered Fleiss's E-mail in November 1999 with a message beginning, "Well, I'm worth about $1.5 ... ," thus forcing the "Millionaire" in the show's title to be changed to "Multi-millionaire."

"It's quite possible he was the only person on the planet who was willing to do it," says Fleiss. "Our backup millionaire basically wanted me to buy him a Mercedes 500E free and clear."

On the morning of February 16, 2000, after the special appeared, Darnell and Fleiss began a daily routine they continue to the present: dissecting the Nielsen ratings. "The morning ritual between us is ridiculous," says Fleiss.

In his wife's office in their house in Calabasas, Darnell will be sitting by the phone with his pens and Post-it notes when the ratings lines open at six A.M. He'll punch the phone numbers with his tiny hands, nails bitten to the quick, then scrawl the ratings for his and his competitors' shows on the Post-its. Then he'll call Fleiss, if Fleiss hasn't already called him.

Whenever a show is debuting, neither one of them can sleep, and both are haunted by superstitions. "No matter how much I drink at the premiere party, I can never fall asleep," says Fleiss. "Mike is equally superstitious about getting the numbers and getting the numbers first and which line you get the numbers from. You don't want to get the numbers from the Warner Bros, line, because it's bad luck. Why? It just is! It is always bad luck if I have managed to fall asleep and someone calls me with the numbers."

Like who?, I ask. "Like Darnell! He'll say [assuming a conciliatory tone], 'Hey, not so bad!' We're competitive. But he'll help me stay positive, or I'll help him stay positive."

The morning after the Multi-millionaire X debut, they were on the phone with each other as the ratings bolted up the Nielsen scale. "The numbers were incredible!" says Fleiss. "It started at a 13 share, which meant, ehhh, some people watched it. By the end of the two hours it was a 28 share! It more than doubled its audience. Which meant that people all over the country were calling their friends saying, 'Hey! There is something crazy on TV right now. Are you watching this? If you want a trip, switch over to Fox!"'

For Fleiss it remains a supreme moment, with Darnell cooing, "Best show ever!," his agent calling with offers of major money for shows Fleiss hadn't yet dreamed up, reporters begging for interviews, and all of Hollywood singing his praises. "This was incredible intensity!" he says. "Mike and I knew this show was going to be a crazy public-relations nightmare. We knew that the National Organization for Women would hate us. That this would be the most controversial show ever! We thought it was all good, but it got so hot, so crazy red-hot. They said it was the most talked-about show since Roots! It was the lead sketch on Saturday Night Live."

When they whisked the bride and groom out of the country, on a honeymoon cruise to Barbados, the roar grew even louder. Milking the moment, Darnell commissioned Fleiss to produce a special called Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire: A Television Phenomenon, featuring the first postmarital interview with the newlyweds. On Sunday, February 20, they flew Rick and Darva back to the States, avoiding the press by landing them at the Santa Barbara airport. Mark Thompson interviewed them for the special. Then Rick and Darva separated forever. Rockwell went with Fleiss in a limo to a postproduction facility, where they planned to edit the special, which would air in 36 hours.

Fleiss grins as he pantomimes the scene. They were all in the limo, hoisting mimosas. Rockwell was on the phone with his father. "Everything was good!" But then the show's director's cell phone rang. Imitating the director, Fleiss switches into a pinched whine and spits out his words. "He said, 'Mike, it's for you!'"

"I thought, What the fuck? We're euphoric! We have the No. 1 show in the country. Pretty damned good, right? I get the telephone, and I hear my good friend Mark Thompson. He's the voice of Fox, so his voice is distinctive. I'll never forget what he said." He switches to Thompson's basso profundo: '"Mike, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but we have a potentially devastating situation on our hands!'"

"Potentially devastating?," Fleiss recalls saying. "How could that possibly be?"

He says Thompson told him there had been a report on the Internet, on Smokinggun .com, entitled "Millionaire Groom's Dirty Secret," saying that a former fiancee of Rockwell's had filed a temporary restraining order against him, claiming he had assaulted and threatened her. Sandy Grushow immediately pulled the follow-up special and demanded an explanation.

"I said, 'What's going on with Mikey?' And Thompson said, 'He's hyperventilating.' So I call Mike, and he is hyperventilating. He says, 'Is this true?"'

Fleiss turned to Rockwell, he says, and pleaded, " 'That's not true, right? That's not true, right?' Rockwell tried to explain [that it was a nine-year-old case, blown out of proportion, and that the worst thing he had done was let the air out of the woman's tires], but it was too late. I'm like ..." Fleiss pantomimes passing out. "I was laying down. I was so upset. I said, 'Yeah, Rick is saying that it's true.' "

He shakes his head and says, "If Mike and I were destined to be brothers forever, that bonded us."

Their first reaction, says Fleiss, was "Great! More publicity! Mike said, 'We gotta get out in front of this!' I'm like, 'Absolutely! Fuck! It's a restraining order! Let's get an interview with the girl! We'll put it on as part of the special!' We had a whole plan, because that's the way we like it!"

Today, only three years later, Fleiss says, the bigger the scandal, the higher the ratings. He mentions Brooke Smith, the runner-up on Bachelor II, who revealed on the show that her father was serving a prison sentence. "Mike called me, totally green with envy. You know: 'Ahhhh! That's going to help you now! That's good shit!' And on Joe Millionaire, when one of the final girls had like done fetish films? I called him and said, 'Ahhhh! You lucky bastard!' ... In retrospect, I don't feel like we did anything wrong on that Multimillionaire show, when you see that, hey, on Married by America they had somebody who was already married.... We were just there First.... Three years later and it's like, 'Ahhh, you got me this time. You got a person with a restraining order and an illegitimate child!' It's like the more publicity, the better. But back then it ruined your life."

Once the Rockwell restraining order became public knowledge, the troubles began. "They wanted to lynch somebody," says Mark Thompson. The main target was naturally Rockwell, who says he returned home to Find an armada of media vehicles in his driveway. In the industry, the bull'seye was the show's producer, Mike Fleiss. "Who wants to marry a battering, thrashing mini-millionaire, give or take a few hundred thousand, with a personality disorder?" read a typical story in The Boston Globe on February 22, 2000, topped by the headline, THINGS SMELLED ROTTEN ON THIS CHEESY SHOW.

On Larry King Live, Rick Rockwell was interviewed with a panel that included TV talk-show host Leeza Gibbons, who said the incident had "caused us to examine who is in charge of television."

"They're gone, they're over," Sandy Grushow told Bill Carter of The New York Times, referring to Darnell's blood-and-guts fare. Grushow killed at least 10 future shows, including World's Nastiest Neighbors, Plastic Surgery Nightmares, and Jumbo Jet Crash: The Ultimate Safety Test (in which Darnell and Fleiss planned to crash a 747 in the desert). Another Fox executive later called such specials "ratings crack" and vowed that Fox would immediately return to higher ground.

Darnell says the network brass supported him and by killing off the shock-reality genre forced him to create a more sales-friendly form of reality TV. "I'm like the phoenix, coming back again and again," he says, "but I've never been in the eye of a storm like that."

Fleiss hid out. "In this little cave-like office in the dark, in the rain, I was basically going broke," he says. "There was an internal investigation, an external investigation. It was the lead story on the news every night, and in every tabloid. It was the darkest, most depressing thing I've ever been through." The pressure was so intense that Fleiss and Darnell both lost 10 pounds, which Darnell could hardly afford.

"I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars," says Fleiss. "The atmosphere at Fox was adverse.... They audit your budgets, they disallow things. And they were pretty aggressive."

Two weeks after the Multi-millionaire calamity, Fleiss was hot again. His then agent, John Ferriter of William Morris, was fielding calls for his services, including, Ferriter says, a bid from UPN for the Multimillionaire franchise. Hollywood had forgotten and forgiven, but Fleiss had not. He was still down in the dumps, but, with Darnell in his comer, he sold two new shows to Fox: Million Dollar Mysteries, featuring unsolved mysteries and offering cash rewards, and Battle of the Child Geniuses. "I call it my Butch-and-Sundance-go-to-Bolivia days," Fleiss remembers. "You know, because I tried to go straight. I tried to steer clear of controversy."

A month before Multi-millionaire aired, CAA agents Steve Smooke and Michael Camacho had asked Darnell if he knew of any rising reality talent. "Mike Fleiss," Darnell said. "The guy's a superstar." Today Darnell says, "I am an exceptionally loyal type of human being. I don't know how else to operate."

After Multi-millionaire, the CAA agents set up an eight P.M. meeting with Fleiss at a bar near his home. Fleiss switched agents, and CAA set up pitch meetings at all of the networks.

CAA got him a job as show runner, or executive producer, of Spy TV, the hidden-camera series on NBC. The eagle landed for Fleiss when his agents delivered a sevenFigure development deal with Telepictures, a Warner Bros, division of primarily daytime television that was seeking to get into prime time.

That deal "made me rich," Fleiss says. The problem was that he had to create a show, and two weeks into his new deal nothing was coming. "I'd stay up all night, racking my brain, free-associating, asking myself, Can I make that a show? Can I make that a show? Anything! Anything that you can see or hear, taste or feel, you run that through your creative process. But I wasn't coming up with anything!"

He pulls out a folder of reality treatments he discarded. "Here's Mail Order Brides, which is an idea I think someone is doing now," he says. "Intervention. Cold Turkey is about people trying to give up addictions. Spot Your Former Lover: a roomful of people"—he switches to an announcer's voice— "'You slept with one of these people, and now you've got to find that person.' Social Climbers. That's a title I kind of like. Ruin Your Life. That's pretty good. What's it about? I don't even remember."

The stress made him so sick he took to his bed. "I had a 104 fever," he says. He thought he had the flu, but his wife, Alex, whom he had met at Knotts Berry Farm when they were in high school, where she was class president, says he was in the middle of a "creative trance," from which his best ideas spring. When he managed to pull himself out of bed for lunch, Fleiss found Alex planning their 20th high-school reunion. And in that instant he imagined what would become High School Reunion: 17 classmates flown to Maui, "to pursue their unresolved relationships, romances, and rivalries." (It is now in its second season on the Warner Bros, network.)

The next day his genie delivered The Bachelor: 25 women, one bachelor, and a catfight for the bachelor's hand. "A dating show where you watch your relationship evolve," he says. "Within 15 minutes I had the whole thing in my head: the roses, the house— everything. I swear to God, it all came in like one flash."

His agent, Michael Camacho, called to check on his progress every morning. "I said, 'Hey, I got a new idea. It's called The Bachelor, and here's how it goes—' And he said, 'Not another effing wedding thing!"'

He pitched The Bachelor to Darnell, who was busy with Temptation Island, and "off the relationship stuff," so he passed. Next, Fleiss pitched it to Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Entertainment, who, busy with The Weakest Link (a game show where losers are booted off by a bitchy British hostess) and Fear Factor (in which contestants, for a $50,000 prize, perform acts such as bathing in a vat of cows' blood and pulling rats out of a tank with their teeth), also passed. Finally Fleiss pitched the show to Andrea Wong, senior vice president of series and specials at ABC. "And I bought it in the room," Wong remembers.

The Bachelor was a reality revolution, ushering a soap-opera concept into prime time. "Zsuj," says Lisa Levenson, the show's executive producer and a soap-opera vet. "It's spelled like Zsa Zsa," she explains. Zsuj (pronounced zhoodge) is a televised sense of fantasy, romance, candlelight, and roses, she says, designed to make viewers believe they're seeing more sex than they actually are. "It's all about the zsuj in soaps; it's all about smoke and mirrors," says Levenson. "There are a lot of dating shows, like Blind Date, for example, where they go to a Bennigan's restaurant and stick a camera on two people. Our goal was to raise the fantasy level."

The Bachelor is all zsuj, from the formal rose ceremony ("Will you accept this rose?" the bachelor asks the candidates he chooses to stay in competition for his love) to the sudsy Jacuzzis and private jets ferrying couples to Manhattan, Aspen, and Hawaii, to the written invitation to certain ladies to share the lord of the manner's crib for the night (which the audience watches via night-vision cameras).

At first, the show ran on Monday night, and the early ratings were respectable; then the word of mouth took over. Though the critics drew their swords, the audience became addicted. "When Entertainment Weekly gives me an F, I know I've got a hit," Fleiss told the press. The ratings rose until ABC made the decision to slot the finale in the May 2002 sweeps, on a Thursday, against Friends, CSI, Survivor, Will & Grace, and ER. The Bachelor triumphed with a 17 share in the 18-to-49 demographic during a time period in which ABC had previously been doing 7 at most. The Bachelor franchise is now ABC's highest-rated show in the 18-to49 demographic.

"It's cheesy and idiotic and filled with some of the silliest stuff you can imagine," says professor Robert Thompson. "Yet it's so good at being idiotic. The way you get to know 23 people in the first episode. It's brilliant storytelling!"

Every morning, Darnell was on the phone with Fleiss discussing, dissecting, and reassuring his friend about The Bachelor's ratings numbers. But as The Bachelor's numbers rose, Fox was sinking into the doldrums. "September, October, November—the network was having its own troubles," says Darnell. "Baseball was dragging us down. We needed something for fall."

It must have been tough for Darnell to watch his protege revive the relationship genre that he himself had originally revived with Multi-millionaire. All Darnell will say is "We knew the relationship genre was working. But we didn't know what the Fox spin would be."

Darnell and his creative team talked about how to bring the genre to a new level of reality TV. They were on their way to meet Darnell's wife, Carolyn, for lunch one day when Sabrina Bonet IsHak said, "Why don't we lie to them?" With that, a bell went off in Darnell's brain.

By the end of lunch they had the bones of a show that would turn the relationship reality genre on its head: 20 women and one bachelor, but where Fleiss's Bachelor stars a bona fide professional buck, Darnell's bachelor would be bogus. The women would be told that he had just inherited $50 million, but he would actually be broke. "It was a great idea because it was a new idea, based in some real sensibilities, which is some women may be in a relationship for the money," says Darnell. To test those sensibilities, they would tutor their ordinary Joe on manners, wine, culture, dancing, and other aspects of the good life. Then they'd whisk him and the women competing for his "fortune"—many of them maximum money-grubbers—to an exotic locale, which would turn out to be a Loire Valley chateau. Taping the show in advance, they would let the audience in on the joke, but leave the women in the dark. Not until after the bogus millionaire had chosen his lady would they make him reveal to the winner that her prince was actually a pauper. "We even had a name," says Darnell. Joe Millionaire.

It was the kind of mainstream reality blockbuster Fox Entertainment Group's chairman, Sandy Grushow, and president of entertainment, Gail Berman, had been dreaming of. "We had taken the necessary step of weaning ourselves off [blood-and-guts reality] programming," says Grushow. "Not only did Mike and his team come up with advertiser-friendly shows, they came up with hits that are performing better than ever."

To produce the show, Darnell tapped his longtime collaborators Chris Cowan and Jean Michel Michenaud of Rocket Science Laboratories. They auditioned hundreds of potential Joes before taking the final five in to see Darnell. Darnell, who doubts his instincts in judging men, left it up to the women in his office, who were most struck by Evan Marriott, the tall, dark, and handsome $ 19,000-a-year construction worker. Cleaned up, he made a very believable Joe Millionaire. Best of all, when he was told three days before he was to leave for France that he'd have to lie to 20 women on national television, Marriott laughed and said, "O.K. I'm ready for a change in my life."

"The big problem with the show was keeping it a secret," says Darnell. If the bachelor's real net worth got out to the women, the show would be dead and millions in production fees would be lost. They all discussed the show in code, calling it "The Big Choice" and its reveal (that the millionaire was actually an ordinary Joe) "the Grommet," and swore the production team and Fox executives to secrecy. They released a phony story about the production, which they spoon-fed to everyone, including Fleiss's agent, Michael Camacho, when he called Darnell to do some reconnaissance about the "Project X" he'd heard about.

"It was kind of a no-brainer that Fleiss would be pissed," says producer Michenaud. "It was basically taking his concept and twisting it and turning it on its head. The whole show was just trying to push reality further. It's almost a meta-reality show. The audience is in on something, but the cast isn't."

On the Wednesday before the Joe Millionaire promos were to run, in November 2002, Fleiss, Darnell, ABC's Andrea Wong, and their significant others gathered for pre-Thanksgiving dinner at Mark Thompson's house. At one point, Darnell called Fleiss outside. "I told him, 'Look, it's a new show. I can't tell you exactly what it is yet, but it's going to have elements that seem familiar to you, so just get ready for it.' "

Recalling the scene, Fleiss switches into Darnell's excitable but ever-so-charming voice. "'Tomorrow there's going to be promos running during football, and, uh, you're not going to be thrilled about it!'

"So I said, 'It's basically a Bachelorette thing?' He goes, 'No. More of a Bachelor thing!' I'm like, 'Aaaah, are you fucking kidding me, Mikey?' "

"All of the sudden I saw the two Mikes get into a fairly heated conversation," says Wong. "Mike Fleiss went, like, crazy and for the rest of the night was completely disturbed and could not focus on anything else."

"Anyway, we had a good Thanksgiving," says Fleiss. "Then the next day the promos start running. That's when I got pissed. I saw"—his voice switches to the baritone of the butler on the show—" Twenty women! One man!' You know, I'm like, That's my fucking equation! That's my formula!"

At nine o'clock on Monday, January 6, on Fox, butler Paul Hogan intoned, over shots of unshaven Evan Marriott on his bulldozer, "Once there was an average Joe. He made a humble living by simply moving dirt. Meet Evan Marriott, annual income $19,000. What would happen when this average Joe is transformed into a multimillionaire? Now, Evan will invite 20 women to a chateau in France who believe that he has just inherited $50 million." The camera cut to an aerial shot of the rented chateau in the Loire Valley.

Watching it, you can imagine Darnell grinning over every salacious frame. He calls Joe Millionaire "a twist on relationship shows, and frankly the entire reality genre," and it was a twist of Darnellian proportions. The show had taken Fleiss's basic Bachelor setup, twisted it, and created something better. Darnell even twisted Fleiss's zsuj and multiplied it by infinity. "Oh, my God, it's a castle!" one bachelorette shrieks as her horse-drawn carriage turns the corner to Joe Millionaire's love nest.

Waiting by his telephone for the ratings numbers at 5:45 the next morning, Darnell expected to hear from Fleiss. "I thought maybe I'd get a call the first day," he says. "I didn't."

Darnell tried repeatedly to reach Fleiss on his cell phone. "Fleiss would look at his caller ID and say, 'It's Darnell. I don't want to talk to him,' and wouldn't answer," remembers Telepictures senior vice president David Auerbach.

Andrea Wong counseled Fleiss. "The year before, Mike Darnell and I had had a race," she says today. "I bought a show called The Chair. You sit in a chair and it's about your ability to stay calm and control your heart rate while you're put through enormous pressure answering questions. Mike tried to buy it and didn't get it, so he developed a show called The Chamber, which had very, very similar qualities." Both shows premiered the same week. Both were gone in a hurry. "We sued each other over this," says Wong. According to a source close to the Fox production, someone "from ABC's The Chair was caught trespassing on the Fox set of The Chamber." Each side accused the other of treachery or espionage. Both lawsuits were dropped.

There was serious consideration of a lawsuit over Joe Millionaire. "We did look at it," says Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions. But they forgot about it when a judge threw out the CBS lawsuit against ABC over claims that the network's I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me out of Here! (in which B-list celebrities such as Robin Leach and Melissa Rivers are marooned in the outback, where they compete in various acts of daring, gross-out, and gore) was a Survivor rip-off. "We decided all it would do would give them more publicity," says Paratore.

"Mike Fleiss was livid; he was pissed. He couldn't believe his best friend fucked him like that," says David Auerbach. "But then he realized it wasn't personal, it was business, and he got over it and moved on."

"Hey, man, I love you, and I hope you understand that I had a right to get a little miffed," Fleiss finally told Darnell. "We're going to hit each other hard, but after the game we're going to go out for beers." Darnell doesn't drink, but soon they were back to their early-morning calls and regular tennis matches. "He kicks my ass every time," says Fleiss.

By the time they resumed their friendship, Joe Millionaire was racing toward its February 10 finale, when it would break all of Darnell's previous records, achieving his first 40 share in the 18-to-49 demographic. "I've never had a 40 share," Fleiss tells me. "That's super-rarefied. But Joe Millionaire had a great reveal. Reality TV is all about the reveal. Survivor: who will be voted out? The Bachelor: who will be sent home brokenhearted? Who will be chosen the American Idol? Even I wanted to see Joe Millionaire's reveal: how will the girl react when she finds out the guy isn't really a millionaire?"

At first Fleiss couldn't bring himself to watch the show. But he was watching along with the multitudes when Zora Andrich, the last woman left in the castle—the runner-up was later discovered to have appeared in bondage and foot-fetish Films—heard Evan Marriott say, "I don't have 50 million. I don't have 50,000." Then, in a sublime television moment, Zora accepted Evan for who he was, and the rent-a-butler presented him and his would-be bride with a surprise gift check for $1 million, courtesy of Fox and Mike Darnell.

"We all got chills!" says Carolyn Darnell.

"When Zora said, 'Can I kiss you?,' I cried!" says Sabrina Bonet IsHak.

"And she was going to send the money to her poor relatives in Serbia!" says Mike Darnell. "You couldn't invent this stuff!"

It must have been one hell of a reveal for Fleiss to discover that his friend was not only a master of reality but also a master of something even greater when it comes to television: imitation. As for spinning his show off someone else's brainstorm, Darnell explains, "Television is a land of imitation. Nothing's new, quite frankly. American Idol is, in its own way, a new version of Amateur Hour or Star Search. These shows are just new versions of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. It's upping the ante and making year-2000 versions of them. When something hits, it opens up doors. Your job is to figure out: How can I make a better show? A bigger show?"

"The problem for these types of shows is you can't do the same trick continually, so each time there has to be an escalation of whatever the trick is," says retired NBC president Don Ohlmeyer, who has become a critic of reality TV. "You finally get to a point where the only trick left is self-immolating monks in Times Square. The question becomes: How far does the sequence go before you reach Times Square?"

There's apparently still a ways to go, as Fleiss once again finds himself chasing the little wizard. "Right now, Darnell's unbeatable," he says with a sigh. But he is already doing things Darnell's way. After the success of American Idol, Fleiss created Are You Hot?, a show that was similar but without the talent competition. Next, the success of Joe Millionaire inspired Fleiss's proposal for a future prince-or-pauper series,

Rich Guy, Poor Guy. In late April, Fleiss signed a multi-year deal with CBS, giving the network access to his services and his Next Entertainment team of producers and show runners. Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, says, "We felt it would be terrific to have him over at CBS and try to develop some shows for us. I think, ultimately, you'll find next season each network with a couple of reality shows, and it will be the better ones. That has always been our attitude. We're on Survivor 6 now and in production on Survivor 7, and it's still a top-five show."

Meanwhile, Darnell is moving on to higher (lower) ground with Joe Millionaire II (with a surprise twist to come), 101 Things Pulled from the Human Body (for example, a piece of a tornado-hurled two-by-four removed from a woman's ear canal and a swordfish's sword removed from a man's eye), and Miss Dog Beauty Pageant, a canine beauty contest, followed by a rash of other top-secret shows and specials. Industry sources put Fleiss's and Darnell's annual earnings in the mid- to high-seven-figure range. For the two Mikes, however, financial figures are secondary; ratings are the numbers that count.

The full reveal on Mike Darnell and Mike Fleiss remains to be screened. Will Fleiss someday out-Darnell the great Darnell and finally get his 40-share show? Will Darnell once again take the clay of that success and mold it into something even bigger, better, hotter? One thing's for sure: the world will be watching.