Well, it’s finally here… After months of waiting, Sir Richard’s new series, The Rebel Billionaire, premieres tonight at 8:00pm (7:00pm Central) on the Fox network. Yahoo News has a review, with this interesting quote…

Given Branson’s involvement as host and the way in which this unscripted series has been promoted, there’s an expectation that this will be little more than a copy of "The Apprentice." Such an accusation would be entirely unwarranted. This actually is a copy of "Fear Factor" and "The Amazing Race."

Pretty close to what I was hoping for, but probably more fun and ratings-minded than my idea was.  

I’ve seen a lot of people criticize the show’s premise already, that these Fear Factor type stunts could help Branson pick someone to run the Virgin Group. I’m admittedly biased on this (and most things involving Sir Richard), but I don’t think it’s as far-fetched as it sounds. The show’s website now has information on all contestants (cursor over a person to see their info, as shown in the screenshot here), and almost all of them have some business experience, so it’s not like he’s picking high school students to run a company. Then consider that unlike Trump who’s known for micro-managing many of his ventures, each Virgin company has a CEO who runs operations. So it’s not like any of these contestants are going to be running Virgin Atlantic anytime soon. Many of us Branson fans might have been hoping for a more cerebral show, perhaps one along the lines of Mark Cuban’s Benefactor, but again, consider that a show like that isn’t nearly enough fun for Branson to waste his time on. It’s not like he needs the money (he’s donating the proceeds to charity), and he’s pretty up-front about the motivation of this show: He’s marketing the Virgin brand into America, to support Virgin Mobile cell phones, the Virgin America airline, and everything else in the Virgin empire. So his goal is to attract the largest number of viewers, not to educate aspiring entrepreneurs.

And speaking of Virgin marketing, here’s a screenshot of an email that went out to Virgin Atlantic’s flyingclub members this week. Always nice when you can cross-sell to existing customers with your "fearless leader’s" adventures…