The Apprentice: Some Dude’s Backyard

If you go to NBC.com right now, it looks like you can watch a full replay of last Sunday’s episode of The Apprentice: Los Angeles. Only the link on the front page of the site 404’s. I don’t blame them one bit. If my name were on that pale imitation of their earlier success, I wouldn’t want to extend the viewership of that show either.

The Apprentice Los Angeles Full disclosure: I have watched every single episode of The Apprentice. I watched all of the Donald Trump Coke Classic shows. And I watched all of the Martha Stewart New Coke shows, even with the lackluster candidates provided to Martha, and even though I have never seen anything else of Martha Stewart. Unless you count SNL sketches. Realistically, I think my viewing habits re: The Apprentice make it more meaningful when I say that I expect to permanently remove it from my TiVo queue later today. I’m writing this at 2am Saturday night/Sunday morning, January 14, and the show airs Sunday nights. At the end of this article, I’m going to tell you a spoiler for tonight’s episode. I know this secret info either because (a) I went to college with some big muckymucks at NBC or because (b) I have committed my valuable time and sharp business acumen to the lame task of figuring this out.

There was a lot I really loved about the first season of The Apprentice. I loved the whole businessman-as-rockstar vibe of the show. Before I lived in Los Angeles myself, I used to constantly get asked if I was in a band. There is no reason why living your life passionately and flamboyantly and taking the road less traveled should equate to being good at singing or playing popular music. Of course, living in Los Angeles has sapped some of my desire to put on some over-the-top outfit and traipse around town. Sure, I’m a writer and a photographer and those might sound like creative pursuits to someone who hadn’t been overexposed to La-La-Land. Truly, people in my town tend to view anyone dressed very creatively as either (a) a stylist or (b) a tourist or (c) talent. And, when LA people say “talent,” they do not mean it as in “good at something,” but rather as the raw meat of the Hollywood machine, the stuff they grind up every day. Coming out of a punk rock DIY background, I find the idea of “talent” as another species anathema. I started off publishing pictures of my friends and peers. When I picked up a camera, I wasn’t documenting something I felt separate from. But I found that dressing the way I did was a drag.

If someone had directly yelled at me and overtly told me I had to change, I would have spit on them. They could not have forced me. But the Los Angeles pressure was more subtle than that. I found that, if I looked hot on a shoot day, the photos often didn’t work out as well, as models were likely to get either competitive or amorous or both. It is easier to not bother blow-drying my hair when I got out of the tub, so I wasn’t going to bother, if it made my day harder. And I found it difficult to do business. I would meet with people where I thought we could make win/win deals and they would try to take advantage of me and be shocked when I noticed. My kinky and freaky clothing and my multi-colored hair seemed to make the businesspeople assume I was wet behind the ears. It made it a lot more likely that there were going to be sharks circling me. Sharks who were sure my looks meant blood in the water. Sharks who were going to be really really pissed when they didn’t get a meal. And I definitely bear more than a few scars from sharks I didn’t manage to get away from in time.

So, I know I’m not as obviously flamboyant as I once was, but Donald Trump became a bit of a personal hero to me, when he displayed a combination of business wisdom and charismatic garishness. Most CEOs do not get in front of the camera and I appreciated that he did. In his famous boardroom scenes, where contestants on the show were eliminated, Trump had two very businesslike lieutenants in Carolyn Kepcher and George Ross. That first season of the show, Trump also had an amazingly impressive assortment of candidates. The structure of the show was to split the candidates into two teams and have them compete against one another in business tasks. The first season candidates seemed like truly exceptionally capable and innovative businesspeople. They impressed and intrigued even with the ways they addressed a task as simple as running a lemonade stand. At the part of each episode where Trump would tell the viewers some nugget of Trumpian wisdom, I used to hang on his every word.

This makes my disappointment in The Apprentice: Los Angeles much worse. The NBC web site has nicknames for all of this season’s candidates. They are pretty uniformly stupid and include such winning phrases as The Webhead and The Believer and The Blonde. The candidates from the first season of The Apprentice appeared to be, perhaps lower on the totem pole of life than Donald Trump, at least as presented. But they were still presented as all being winners. Many had achieved greatness before the show and many went on to still greater achievements after it and perhaps partly because of it. The name of the game this season, however, appears to be to degrade the candidates as much as possible. Why Trump would want to work with someone he has already humiliated is anyone’s guess.

The first twist on the show this season is that the losing team has to sleep outside. Essentially the two teams compete against one another on various basic business tasks and whichever team loses, not only has a member fired, but they have to sleep in tents in the backyard of a house. They refer to the house where the winning team sleeps as “The Mansion,” but the view from their backyard doesn’t look to me like Mark Burnett and Donald Trump sprang for the best Los Angeles real estate. Actually, it looks like “The Mansion” is in Southern California, but not technically in Los Angeles at all. Additionally, the entire winning team sleeps in the same room on beds which look like they were purchased last minute at Ikea. “The Mansion” looks like a decent enough house and placing a whole television show in a house or two is difficult, but glorifying that pedestrian abode just gives the lie to everything Trump has ever praised or bragged about in the past. Trump Tower, where the New York-based seasons were shot, looked nice. Candidates had roommates, but at least it was not a summer camp style dormitory. I cringe in embarrassment for this season’s crop as they go on for the cameras about the haves and the have nots and how sleeping outside makes people hungrier to win and being indoors makes victory so much sweeter. Keep in mind that we don’t really have weather in Los Angeles, so it is not like the people in the backyard are getting snowed on. Has Trump actually fallen so far that the best thing he could offer winners was the opportunity to sleep indoors? Has he actually managed to find people he thinks are good at business who are dazzled merely by having a roof over their heads? Mind you, a central plot point of the season opener for The Apprentice: Los Angeles was refusing to let businesspeople go to the bathroom. I’m not making that up. I wish I were. Each season of The Apprentice has shown less of the interesting business aspects than the last. I thought the shift in focus towards personality conflicts between contestants was bad, but telling professionals they can’t use the toilet and filming how they react is just pathetic.

The Apprentice Los Angeles Other things which suck about The Apprentice: Los Angeles include Trump having fired one of his lieutenants, Carolyn Kepcher, for enjoying the limelight too much. This suggests that the mere act of pointing a camera at someone makes people think they are a greater person at the very same moment it turns them into a lesser person. Maybe true and maybe a justified rightsizing, but it makes it look like working for Trump is not quite the “job of a lifetime” that the commercials for his show suggest. George Ross, with his brilliant insight and professional gravitas, apparently still works for the Trump organization, but he doesn’t really care for LA and has work to do in New York. So this past week’s boardroom, Trump had his daughter Ivanka Trump on one side and the leader of the winning team on the other. Of course, the leader of the winning team had to act like a jerk and rub her victory in the face of the losers (even thought they lost by a very very slim margin.) Here is the big twist coming up tonight: The candidates already know that the winning team’s leader (The Hottie) will remain the leader as long as she is winning, but what they do not know is that she is going to have to switch teams and try to lead the people she just lorded it over in the boardroom. Hardy-har-har.

I thought Ivanka Trump came across great on the most recent season of the show, when she guested. Her image then was tough, beautiful, flawless, brutal but fair. Unfortunately, she apparently went to image coaches over the summer and she just comes across as a mean person with bad manners now. Her taking Carolyn’s place on Donald’s left also gives one the sense that nepotism is going to be the way in the Trump organization and it may make no difference how hard someone works. Which makes viewers ask why anyone would compete hard to get a job working for the Trump family, especially when they never let anyone else finish a sentence.

The Apprentice Los Angeles Speaking of Ivanka, most internet users will have been unable to escape the recent feud between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ll give the Cliff’s notes, so anyone who missed it previously will now have this data filling up their gray matter. Trump owns a pageant or two. A couple of pageant girls were seen out on the town, behaving in a supposedly unseemly manner i.e. allegedly drinking, doing lines, possibly having sex partners back to her place, and maybe kissing girls. The implication was that the two pageant babes were lovers. There was a big public brouhaha where stripping one girl of her crown was discussed but she was given a second chance and the whole thing was unseemly for all involved. So Rosie stated publicly that she felt Donald did not have the moral high ground or compass to judge a twenty-year-old girl. So Trump called Rosie fat and is suing her and Ivanka told the press she felt Rosie was a bully. I’d feel more sympathy there, if Ivanka and her father were not both coming across as such bullies on The Apprentice: Los Angeles.

Full disclosure: Although I understand that Rosie appears on the show and has said inflammatory things on it before, I have never watched The View. Unless you count SNL sketches. It is my understanding that Rosie O’Donnell is a famous lesbian and my opinion that she may have felt a responsibility to speak out about the pageant nonsense. Or she could be a jerk. I have no idea.

Now, maybe I’m just letting my own sexual fantasies intrude here, but I get the impression Ivanka Trump knows how to please a woman. On the list of things this former Trump fan is horrified by is his apparent homophobia. Is it really that awful if some pageant winners make out? Is it really that awful if Rosie O’Donnell is not physically attractive to Donald Trump? Is Ivanka Trump not on the cover of The Advocate because Trump would consider it unseemly? And, most importantly, by being on the show The Apprentice, does Trump have the right to go after Rosie in court? Does The Advocate have the right to put Ivanka on their cover whether or not she wants to be there? Are they public figures who are subject to public comment? What makes someone a public figure? Does becoming a public figure make someone a worse person? I don’t know all the answers, but watching the tragic devolution of this brilliant TV show, I am definitely thinking about the questions. I hope I am not causing any damage by pointing my own cameras at people I think are cool.

At any rate, I think I won’t be buying any more Trump books or watching any more Apprentice shows after tonight. I do intend to continue to watch Saturday Night Live. But I won’t be watching Donald Trump any more. Unless you count SNL sketches.

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Posted by on January 14, 2007. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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