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January 18, 2008

'Celebrity Apprentice': when egos collide

I finally caught a full episode of Celebrity Apprentice last night, and, well. What is there to say except that Gene Simmons has an ego even bigger than that of Trump. And he's been "fired."

It was all pretty strange. The women's team lost the first two challenges, so Trump basically appointed Simmons as the new leader of their team. For the challenge, the teams had to create a traveling booth in a trailer to promote a new Kodak all-in-one printer.

The men's team all attended the meeting with the Kodak executives and got the point: Since film is kind of going away (though this was never stated), the company is all about ink and allowing customers to create their own affordable digital prints.

Gene decided that he was too important to meet with the execs and sent Nely Galan and Carol Alt. Nely talked all over the executives and totally didn't get the gist of the importance of ink. Not that it mattered, since Gene had already decided that "It's a Kodak World ... Welcome" was all anyone needed to know.

The men ran with a concept of "knockout," and why not, when you have Lennox Lewis and Tito Ortiz on your team, but Stephen Baldwin upended their conference table and managed to knock a cup of coffee all over the laptop that had all their artwork and banners, killing it. They rallied and re-created what they could, heading to a print shop in the middle of the night and hoping for the best.

The next morning, the teams' trailers told two very different stories -- Gene's team's looked gorgeous with its professionally lettered signs, and Tito's team's looked pretty sloppy, with banners hastily packing-taped to the outside. In fact, it looked like the women (and Gene) might finally pull out a win.

But it turns out the execs were willing to overlook sloppiness in favor of the team that actually listened and got the concept, so the men's team won yet again.

In the boardroom, Gene basically refused to acknowledge that his team lost, saying again and again that he was right and Kodak got it wrong. Then, it was obvious that Trump was gunning for Nely, who had been project manager of the previous lost task and who biffed the meeting with the execs by talking over them. But Gene refused to bring her back to the boardroom, instead bringing Omarosa, who had done a boatload of work on the task. Trump pushed him to bring back another person, and Gene went with Jennie Finch.

The winning team was watching this part of the boardroom proceedings and realized 1) Trump wants Nely gone and 2) Gene was toast for not bringing her. And that's exactly what happened.

I have a feeling it's going to be a little less interesting with Mr. Simmons around.  

Posted by Sarah Kickler Kelber at 12:51 PM | | Comments (3)
Categories: The Apprentice
        

Comments

Big mistake bring Omorosa into the boardroom. Obviously the producers are in Trump's ear saying that she's the perfect villain, and I'm sure she'll make it far into the show.

I'm hardly an Omarosa fan, but I don't think Trump or producers had anything to do with Gene Simmons bringing her into the boardroom. I think it was all Gene's ego. Trump straight-out said she shouldn't have been there. (At least not this time.)

Nice synopsis. I think Simmons wanted to go home and committed Apprentice "Suicide". He is no dummy and knew he would be fired if he didn't bring Nely back.

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About Sarah Kelber
Sarah Kickler Kelber, an editor in the features department since 1999, got sucked into reality TV with the first episode of MTV's The Real World in 1992. Then came Survivor and American Idol, and suddenly, the genre was everywhere. She started blogging about it for The Baltimore Sun in January 2006 and has logged more hours watching and writing about such shows as Dancing With the Stars, Big Brother and, of course, Idol, than she'd like to admit.
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