The Apprentice: schadenfreude rears its beautiful head

The contestants "compete" for 13 weeks and every other day he "fires" someone from the ongoing job interview.

A Mark Burnett production.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than I expected.

All the contestants seem pretty damn qualified and successful already.

The punchline, of course, is: if you're so damn smart and have avoided failure your whole life, why would you want to do it on national television.

Vanity and nihilism at its most watchable.

Please, I can't be the only one who watched this.

My immediate hates: the Asian woman with the underbite who took a 1-hour lunch break and complained about her high heels, and David the dork (who got voted off tonight, v. deserving after watching him annoy passers-by in a desperate attempt to shuffle lemonade).

I also hate Sam's "type," but psychophants like him are made for shows like this. You know he's going to be around a long time.

I heart reality TV.

Underbite Tammy isn't a team player, her "I hear that people don't like me tell me why" speech was a total ego-driven play for attention.

David is not cut out for leadership, if only for admitting that he wasn't a sales guy.

Sam is an awful and transparent brown-noser; "I'd like to get to know Trump... in the back of a limo..." etc. I'm almost a bit surprised that Trump didn't fire him right off the bat for sucking up to him so hard that he bothered to name Trump's parents.

And if Angelina Jolie lezzed up with Katie Holmes, their child would be Jessie.

That hairpiece is flat out amazing.

This should we be much better on HBO, you know that old coot sitting next to the Donald was dying to swear. "Hey fuckface, your fired."

Marissa Marchant is not a womanb but in fact a sycophantic man!

Excellent conflict among the women, with the bossy, one-directional (her-to-you) Amarosa having it out with Ereka, and Amarosa playing the race card when Ereka said "pot calling the kettle black"...whatever. Amarosa just can NOT handle it when she's not involved in the mix of things, instead of trying to work with the team, so they're making it look like she's gonna be the first to go (which, if you know Mark Burnett, will be the last thing to happen).

Sam is insane, though. He is as poor at following direction as Nick was in leading. You just know they're keeping him around because he makes for entertaining TV.

With a new "Survivor" coming in just 2 weeks, "The Bachelorette," "Average Joe 2," "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance," "The Surreal Life," et al. all crowding the airwaves, my TiVo is definitely getting a workout. I couldn't cram this much bad teevee in without the li'l gadget, come to think of it...

You're absolutely right about Sam sticking around -- it was pure pleasure on a stick to watch him squirming and sucking up to Trump.

You're absolutely right about Omarosa too. She badly wants to be project manager. She's also a political consultant, so her playing the race card makes sense.

She knew very well that Ereka wasn't being racial; that's one of the greatest, most genuine wind-ups I've ever seen on national television. I would bet mad money that after Ereka screwed up the cliche ("Well, that's calling the kettle black!"), Amarosa thought to herself, "Okay, I'm going to play with this dumb bitch now."

The women's idea would have been fantastic had it been carried off with any degree of subtlety. The captions were just too much.

Anyway, getting off-topic here, does anyone here watch "Airline" on A&E?

What was funny to me was how much their argument paralleled Trishelle's argument with the black Baywatch "actress" on "The Surreal Life" recently.

I think she screwed it up because as it was coming out of her mouth she realized that Omarosa was going to purposefully take it out of context.

Anyway working with omarosa would be my idea of complete disaster.

The main thing to learn from this show: miniskirts are back!

Amarosa was pissed and wanted to shut Ereka up. Ereka made the colossal blunder of butchering "the pot calling the kettle black" while arguing with a cutthroat person of color and Amarosa pounced on the opening.

(xpost I have no idea how her name is spelled)

Also, I loved the advertising guy and all his cliches. "Swing for the fences." "The guys have got the steak, but the ladies have the sizzle."

http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/01/16/a_real_winner_of_apprentice/

Theory: I think Sam has realized at the end of the second week that he has entertainment capital as the show's resident 'Wild Bill', and thus is less easily expendable, which is why he has decided to go with fully over the top and wear the hat next week (and maybe also to screw Troy, "Well, Mr. Trump, Troy suggested that I 'become the hat'"). What do you think?

I thought he was going to climb over the table. What a fucking idiot.

Omarosa is an asshole who wishes she had a dick so her whole act would come off as more socially acceptable.

OK, random thoughts:

1. It's getting tiresome watching the women use sex to manipulate others to get what they want. When the really attractive woman lifted up her shirt to show her "stomach" (aka her tits), I just rolled my eyes. Yes, it makes for good reality TV, but this is supposed to be a show to see who's the best business person, and sex can only take you so far. The women jumping up and down when they were buying gold was nauseating, too.

2. Omarosa says others have thin skins, but just look at her passive aggressively walk out of the group meeting when the issue of conflict is raised, even though her name was not mentioned. She may have gone from the projects to the White House, but she's a terrible business person, from what I can see.

3. Sam sucked, plain and simple. His planning was terrible, his clock management was terrible, and he fails to read situations and other peoples' emotions, and just ends up pissing off his teammates. Good riddance.

There is nothing worse than the networks trying to mess with my schedule manipulation.

What's worse--telling the world that you are a guy who works on Wall Street and signing autographs in jest or winning the competition on T&A?

Well why did Kwame and the guy who had this brainstorm think people were willing to pay $ his autograph? The fact that he was set up in public place & being followed by a camera crew could easily give people the idea that he was someone famous. Nick (or whatever the red-haired ones name is) is obviously getting outraged from purely personal motives. But I thought Kwame and the other fellows actions were deceptive and a colossol waste of time for someone who was acting as the project manager.

2) The cameraman point: WELL, DUH!

Does this say anything meaningful about gender role expectancies? "At the end of the day, we've gotta have a man as our CEO", etc.?

Kristi Frank appeared in Red Shoe Diaries, albeit pre-breast enlargement surgery

from the Gawker

And then this was funny too:
some blog

Omarosa for Congress?

Part of it was that some of the women were being carried by their teammates. So once all of the ineffective men were gone and the teams were shuffled, it was time to start weeding out the ineffective women. And then the bitches. Also when the women were a team, they were "the unified, empowered women team" .. until they started to get on each other's nerves and get catty. And the men were all being laid-back and weak at first.

wtf? why are these businesswomen dressed like strippers dressed like businesswomen?

Certainly more realistic.

I find I don't care at all which of the final two guys wins.

Same here!

Yeah, but part of being a good boss would involve coming down a little bit harder on someone like Omarosa. I still like his style of management/leadership better than Bill's, but she made too many outrageous gaffes that shouldn't have been benignly tolerated the way they were.

I would have picked Amy to win the race -- I would rather have her working for me than Kwame or Bill. I was surprised that after the interview process the interviewers came down so hard on her -- saying that they didn't get a true sense of her and that she was like a Stepford Wife. I thought that was what you were supposed to do in interviews (give them the answers they want)-- since when are you supposed to reveal your true personality? Also, I loved how during the interview process suddenly intelligence and integrity were the two important qualities to work for the Trump orgranization.

Also, it seemed too tidy that Bill was offered a job in his home town. And I don't see how Bill has such a genuine personality. And I don't know what the big deal is about Kwame's Harvard MBA--why they keep touting it. It's not like an MBA is the most intellectually rigorous degree--no matter where you get it.

(Bill was a failed Bachelorette candidate and Kristie a former soft porn actress.) Also, I don't know why they kept saying that Kwame's event went off fairly well -- from everything we saw it was a disaster. And why did Caroline smile and laugh in the final episode? Was she told to let her guard down a bit?

And why are all of Trump's girlfriends foreign?

Because most people think it's a big deal?

Amy struck me as someone who gets by in life on her charm a lot of the time and doesn't have many ideas beyond that. She would probably be great in sales but not much else.

Someone told me they read that she's 34. I wouldn't have guessed that. (not that she looks old...)

But that's reality in a nutshell. Only two or three people of of every sixteen know what they're doing anyway.

Unless her job prospects have been sunk so low that she's compelled to swallow the bitter pill.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/04-16-2004/0002152900&EDATE=

I can't imagine working with any of these people. At least last season, I genuinely liked Erika, Kwami, the guy who won, and the other woman who everyone thought was going to win. These people just seem nasy and backstabbing. I guess that's a given considering they all have the benefit of having seen the first season. But, ick. I think the nicest guy was the one who got fired.

i loved how chris rock came onto conan after the finale last season, and said how he's not too surprised that in the final white/black guy showdown, he was not surprised that "kwami" did not win: "how many managers do you know named 'kwami' ? that's right... "

also, did you hear that omarosa is thinking about running for office? she was at the DNC

I love the Raj guy. He's so fucking off-the-scale pretentious, he's actually refreshing to watch and listen to. He's like the antimatter Rudy Boesch.

The look of invincibility gradually trickling out of Bradford's face, to a midground "Hmmm, maybe I just did something stupid? But if I play my cards right and act low key and confident it probably won't matter..." to his final, fatal, "Oh my God, what the fuck did I just do?", deer-in-the-headlights look...

It was like something out of Scarface: "You wanna wave jer immunity, you cock-a-roach?!" Or at the very least, Jack Palance in Tango & Cash (he needs some mice to play with, though).

My hatred of Ivana and Stacie will just have to wait a few more weeks to be avenged, though those 2 annoying women do make for good TV. I loved how Stacie was complaining about Ivana not being a strong leader and how the team was unfocused. You know, as if her going off on her own under the table to phone in 5 interns had nothing to do with the lack of unity.

p.s. You know what everyone else was really thinking: "Uh, is this the appetizer? Where's the food?"

Although Trump never said as much, the reason Bradford's decision was so stupid was because it made his blinding ego so transparent. If there's one thing this season has revealed about Trump, it's that if he gives you something you shouldn't squander it--Trump has been impulsively annoyed by people who don't take his gift of 3 people to the board room, and annoyed by someone who wouldn't take a pass on immunity.

Definitely. His move to waive immunity with the shit-eating grin had arrogance scrawled all over it.

I was trying to think of what the scene reminded me of, and it just came to me: I Claudius. When one of the Senators prays for the mad Caligula's (John Hurt) recovery from illness, offering his life to the gods in return for Caligula if Caligula is spared. Caligula does indeed recover, finds out about the guy's prayer, and holds him to his prayer. The guy tries to downplay what he said, other sympathetically try to distract Caligula with other things, but inevitably to no avail. Finally, Caligula executes him.

True, but you can see the flip side, too (choose three people as the PM and look like you're 'hiding' behind them to increase your chances of not get fired), and Trump readily acting on that as weakness and firing the PM.

I thought Pamela was appropriate to choose two, because it being so early on and everyone performing generally adequately, she wouldn't be able to choose 3 people and NOT look like she was hiding. I think she did have enough intuition to figure this out, and played it straight: "I'd be cutting muscle, not fat".

Ivana's choice was for 3 people was glaringly bad: a) she was not decisive enough and did a poor job as the PM to begin with, b) she looked even more wishy-washy changing from 2 to 3 people and c) again, like Pamela, there really weren't 3 people (at least, that I could see) that you could choose and feasibly argue performed poorly, so it would have the cumulative effect of making her look like she's hiding. I don't see her lasting too long in the ranks.

was her psychotic/schizo outburst broascasted on an earlier episode or was it behind closed doors?

I'm not saying I think she's a crazy schizo, but she knew she freaked out the others, she knew nobody liked her because of it, and she never tried to smooth things over with anybody ... what did she expect?

I'm trying to decide if this year's batch is actually worse than last year's at getting stuff done.

I was more than a bit perplexed at George Ross arriving at the conclusion that Pamela's leadership was GOOD? Is George smoking crack?! I thought it was completely awful, and Trump very rightly fired her.

She made bad decisions, clearly wasn't listening to anybody, quick to delegate in a manner that was clearly 'so I can point fingers at somebody else if we fail'. I've never seen a more glaring example of UN-effective leadership; basically, someone barking orders at people with her ears covered. I would never, EVER hire this woman to lead a group of people, based on her performance last night.

Now, I can definitely understand that in a position of leadership you can't be a push-over, and you can't expect to have everyone like you. But still...Am I missing something here? I am scratching my head that George thought she did such a good job. I admit I know zero about Business or what is taught in Business majors/schools. But I thought for sure that most business people with just a basic, common-sense grasp on human nature/psychology, would watch Pamela's performance last night and cringe?

"you're sweating again, you sweat alot."

there's no celebrity apprentice thread, huh. It's about to go down live. Trace Adkins vs. Piers the evil brit. You guys missed a lot of vintage gene simmons

watching now - trace adkins seems very likeable, but i love the ruthlessness of piers. shame i missed the rest of the series.

piers pretty much walked away with it by the time of the finale tbh, they've done a great job of maintaining the tension. trace is # in our hearts. gene was roffles but he got taken out early

Funny, Piers got fired on the UK Celeb version.

i think having Trump as your boss for the rest of your life is the most horrible "prize" imaginable
― Sym (shmuel), Saturday, April 17, 2004 2:36 PM (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink