Let's Talk 'Apprentice' For A Moment, Shall We?

Let me start off by saying that I’ve not been covering Celebrity Apprentice, but I love it dearly and more people should watch it. Second of all, what the HELL was that?

After spending two hours watching Clint Black produce the lamest “viral video” of all time, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that he and his beady eyes would be offed without a second thought. Instead, however, Trump lashed out at Khloe — who admittedly has been a lightweight (in presence only, ahem) all season — for her DUI issues last year. Turns out The Donald wasn’t aware of Kuh-huh-loe’s (sorry, just pronouncing the name the way it’s spelled) criminal history, and he was none to pleased to find out that she’d skipped out on a task to go to a mandatory DUI class in California. This did not sit too well with him as he apparently has a (well-deserved) ax to grind with drunk drivers. The Donald gave twenty-thousand dollars to Kuh-huh-loe’s charity and then BAM! He fired her!
I had mixed emotions on this whole thing. On the one hand, The Donald can do whatever he wants, and this isn’t a real “job” situation, and he may have felt legitimately betrayed by the casting peeps behind the show. On the other hand, Khloe has been serving her time, and her firing really had nothing to do with anything on the episode at all. I kind of got the sense that she’d probably be dropped no matter what happened with either of the teams this week, and that in turn felt a little cheap.
The good news is that we’ll have that smarmy Clint to kick around again next week (when Piers Morgan returns — I slow-mo’ed the preview. He’s the mystery guest). The bad news is that we won’t have T-Boz, who at the end of the last episode seemed like she was riding a wave of major potential for the series. Heck, even at the beginning of the boardroom, Trump praised her skillz. However, when she volunteered to join Melissa in the boardroom, it was the kiss of death. Trump equated her to Bradford, the idiot from season two who voluntarily gave up immunity and then got fired for it. As Andy Dehnart mentions here, the situation was kind of different though. Bradford acted out of hubris. T-Boz acted out of, well, “support” I suppose. But at the end of the day, both Bradford and T-Boz willingly put themselves in the line of fire, regardless of the motivation, and Trump could not commend that. He up and fired T-Boz out of nowhere, and everyone was totally shocked. My jaw: on the floor.
Oh, but last night’s show had more silliness than just the ridiculous boardroom. First off — let’s talk about those ridiculous viral videos. They were awful. Both of them were. The Clint Black one goes without saying — it wasn’t particularly funny, smart, or sensical. Plus, it wasn’t viral at all. It just played out like a lame commercial made by an even lamer man. And honestly, when Clint does that sketchy-ass smile, I feel the sudden and intense need to take a Silkwood shower. I’m not sure that Joan Rivers’s ideas were so great, but they had more potential than the crap Clint came up with. He’s awful.
Over on the Melissa Rivers side of things (oh yeah, the teams were rearranged — Jesse was moved over to Athena while Natalie, Joan, and Khloe headed to KOTU [and by the way, KOTU? Kings of the Universe? It’s MASTERS of the Universe, you idiots!!! {sorry, parenthetical nestings of rage}]), Annie Duke came up with the idea of having Jesse get scrubbed down by a bunch of little people. I didn’t think the idea was inherently funny, and if anything, it was every so charmingly patronizing and condescending, but at the very least, it was more in the “viral” mindset than Clint’s hunk o’ junk.
The final product was a weird mashup of images that had several of the girls — as well as Perez Hilton (??) — cackling their stupid asses off. I’m wondering just how and when Perez Hilton became an authority on viral video. Celebrity gossip? Okay, I’ll give him that. But seeing that he’s yet to ever post, create, or discover anything famously viral, I’d have to say this was rather questionable casting. Anyway, at the end of the day, the Jesse James video wasn’t really that funny. Just because you throw a bunch of midgets at us doesn’t mean it’ll automatically be hilarious. Instead, the whole thing came off as a strange Orbitz commercial.
I actually thought the task of creating a viral video was a surprisingly awesome challenge. Making something viral is like trapping lightning in a bottle — you never know what’ll appeal to people. It’s not as simple as creating a regular video — and watching these celebs fail to wrap their minds around that was kind of brilliant. Of course, if the stars were confounded, the All Detergent execs were positively clueless. I don’t think they even knew what they were getting into. It’s like they’d heard a whole bunch of buzzwords like “viral” and “YouTubes” and had seen the video of the Mommy singing the William Tell Overature and thought “Hey, let’s do that!”
Of course, as soon as the notion of profanity or sexual innuendo was introduced to the exec, they looked like they wanted to pee their pants as they realized what a mess they’d gotten themselves into. Amusingly, by the end of the hour, their wholesome All brand had been linked with masturbation, intolerance, and unfunniness — which is probably a major downgrade from the muddy frog who always gets the kids’ shirts dirty in their TV commercials. The whole episode was a classic case of corporate myopia mixed with a staggering lack of star-studded creativity. And that, my friends, was awesome.
Anyway, what did you think about the episode? Did you like the Jesse James video? And have you seen the new “viral vids” by Melissa and Joan Rivers?