Shark Tank, which premiered in the U.S. in 2009, offers the real deal: the opportunity to take your day job and shove it. The products that the guests present on the show are typically not medical or technological advances, which might bore the audience. Instead, they tend to be different types of highly specialized junk: peel-and-stick lapels that turn an ordinary suit into a tuxedo; an interior light for the toilet bowl; a cap that cures bed head; colored hair spray for dogs. Many of them are silly, but they have the potential to transform the inventor’s life. A man with a new kind of sponge called the Scrub Daddy (it changes texture in warm water) became a multimillionaire as the result of the deal he made on Shark Tank.

Unlike The Apprentice, the show doesn’t have a host, just a panel of investor “sharks,” the most famous of whom is the billionaire Mark Cuban. When he agreed to appear on the show in Season 2, it marked a rare, perhaps singular, moment of humility. His own reality series, The Benefactor, which was his version of The Apprentice, had flopped so badly in 2004 that ABC didn’t even air some episodes of its lone season. This is the original grit in the oyster of his long, fantastical lovers’ quarrel with Donald Trump.

On Shark Tank, Cuban wears a Gordon Gekko outfit of sharp suit, crisp white shirt, and Dallas Mavericks cuff links (he owns the team). His brand is male dominance, and his Shark Tank investments include the Rugged Maniac Obstacle Race; a Breathalyzer you can plug into your smartphone; and a new boxed wine that “drinks more like a spirit.”

His gentler opposite on the show is Lori Greiner, who—like Joy Mangano, who inspired the 2015 movie Joy—is famous for inventing products and selling them on QVC. She favors inventions that homemakers will want: all-natural cleaning products; reusable paper towels; beanbag chairs that unzip and turn into beds for sleepovers. She won’t invest in anything too manly or gross—a beard oil wasn’t her thing—but she did put down more than 300 large for 10 percent of Squatty Potty, the purpose of which had been illustrated to the sharks with a bracingly detailed animation of the large intestine and some frank talk about “choking the rectum.”

People occasionally cry on Shark Tank, which makes sense: It’s in the nature of entrepreneurs to take huge and often unwise financial risks, and when they realize they may not get a deal, some of them become overwhelmed. But to truly see how indifferent the marketplace is to the dreams and sacrifices of self-starters, you must turn to another show, an ABC vehicle called The Toy Box, in which toy makers have the fate of their invention, and often their family’s financial future, decided by a panel of four precocious kids. A man who raided his kids’ college fund on the promise of a kind of sports haggis—a soccer ball stuffed with a football and a baseball—made it to the finals before being sent home. Another family man had taken a second job to bankroll his work on a giant worm costume in which kids could compete in “worm races.” The costume was so hot, and the inventor so drenched in sweat after his demonstration, that you knew he would not fare well, and he didn’t even get passed through to the final round with the kids.