'Celebrity Apprentice': another oversold meltdown
Did you hear that Dennis Rodman melted down on last night's Celebrity Apprentice? Major! Meltdown!
At least according to all the ads on NBC, ads on the Web, Tweets from Annie Duke, etc.
Then when it finally happened, it was weird but not very surprising or interesting.
Anyway, the task this week was to create a "stage show" for a product launch. The product in question was a new video phone system. (I felt kind of bad for the company since it seems like most people who want to talk via video these days probably just use Skype, which is free.)
At the very beginning of the task, when the teams were negotiating which would go first and which second, Dennis wandered over, screamed at Clint Black, ripped off his microphone and walked out. OK, then.
Team Athena was in total chaos during brainstorming. It seemed like someone was always on the phone at the table, interrupting the process. Then Claudia Jordan, who was project manager, and Melissa Rivers had a total communication break down. Melissa was trying to help come up with ideas, but Claudia felt like she was interrupting, and they clashed a lot. Melissa backed down and let Claudia instruct her on what to do. She ended up handling the production of the show, but not any of the creative side. (Which -- spoiler! -- was probably a bad plan.)
Their show was emceed by Joan Rivers (of course) and featured half-filmed and half-live vignettes showing how the phone could be used. It was all pretty cheesy, but Melissa pulled everything together after a truly terrible dress rehearsal.
On the men's side, Brian McKnigt was the project manager and he decided that the best centerpiece of a stage show would be (of course) himself. Dennis Rodman showed up again, but Brian didn't want him to do anything, so he just sat around. It was a little weird because Clint Black has also been performing concerts for decades, but Brian didn't ask for a single bit of input from him. The person who truly came through for Team Kotu, though, was Jesse James, who came up with the plan of filming a soldier using the phone. (Among the main goals of the task was to create an emotional connection with the product.) He drove out to West Point and filmed a guy (I believe they even said he was from Maryland, but I didn't catch his name) pretending to talk to his girfriend back home.
In the boardroom, it turned out the men won, getting 85 percent of the votes from the audience. So Dennis, major meltdown or no, lives to see another episode.
In the boardroom, things got really ugly between Claudia and Melissa, and Claudia definitely came off looking worse. She kept saying that Melissa "claimed" to be a producer, but then when Melissa would try to defend herself, Claudia would jump on her for talking about her experience yet again. The worst was when Claudia used the claiming line in the boardroom, and Melissa said, hey, did you ever watch any of the red-carpet extravaganzas from the Oscars in the past 12 years or so, because she produced those, and Claudia claimed to not be familiar with them. So juvenile.
Trump didn't have much of a choice -- the rest of the team credited Melissa with saving the task -- so Claudia went home.
I don't think she'll be missed much. I'm surprised no one mentioned her disastrous presentation on the Zappos task when trying to determine who should go home.
Categories: Celebreality, The Apprentice
