The Celebrity Apprentice Review: Coup d’Trump

Week Eight of Celebrity Apprentice starts like any other, with NeNe upset and the men whining about Gary Busey. Gary is, thankfully, but a memory now, though Meat Loaf is still profoundly affected, reeling from the experience. While the rest of the contestants chill in the champagne room, toasting their Busey-free future, NeNe is tucked away on a couch somewhere, chagrined by the fact that LaToya doesn’t want to be best friends with her after the season ends. John Rich is optimistic about his team; there are three “race horses” remaining, he says, so the men should be virtually unstoppable now. Since the women’s team is crumbling due to infighting and a malignant tumor by the name of Star Jones, I’d say the guys have it in the bag.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I could do without the scene at the start of every episode that features last week’s winning Project Manager handing over a check to their charity. I know that’s what this show is pretending to be all about, but I find it condescending at best. This week, we get Hope bowling with some representatives from Best Buddies before gifting them with $20,000 and plenty of hugs. There’s no reason for this program to be two hours long; it’s adding insult to injury when we’re given extended shots of The Donald walking down long hallways and the corporate executives du jour explaining their idea of brand messaging for several minutes at a time while the charity segments last approximately thirty seconds apiece. The players might as well speed by charity headquarters in a limousine each week and toss dollar bills from the windows on the way to their next task. I don’t think anyone would notice the difference.

Trump greets the contestants in one of his many high-rise buildings by preposterously stating, “Everybody’s saying I should run for President” before playfully soliciting their support. They’re all talking about it as if it’s all a harmless joke; I’d be laughing along with them if only the situation were actually a giant farce and not a tragic reality. The task this week is to create a four-page conceptual advertising campaign for the Trump Hotel Collection, a series of luxury establishments in different locations. As always, the teams will be judged according to creativity, brand messaging, and the strength of their pitch to executives. Star immediately demands to be Project Manager, while John Rich is pushed into the lead by his own team despite claiming to be “drawing a blank” when it comes to luxury accommodations. It’s too high-end and outside his range of expertise, he claims. This guy consistently acts like he just fell off the turnip truck; is he afraid he’ll alienate his fans if he admits to having stayed in a hotel room at some point in his career?

Star hits the ground running during her team’s brainstorming session. Since she’s lodged at Trump’s hotels many times, she says, she knows all about their expectations and impeccable taste. “I know as much about luxury as I do about living,” she says. Star suggests the tagline, “Individual elegance, collective luxury.” If all this promotional stuff is her specialty, I don’t understand why one hundred per cent of her material is ridiculously lame. She suggests taking photos of Hope “luxuriating” in the bathtub with champagne. That’s no less stale than the “service shots” of a waiter at the door with champagne that Star banned just minutes ago. LaToya uses her famous psychic abilities and says that if Star’s creative ideas fail, she’ll just blame somebody else in front of Trump. Meanwhile, the men are dreaming up scenarios including helicopters, green screens, and fortune-telling mirrors or something; Meat Loaf sees Gary’s departure as having left an opening for team crackpot, so he paces around the room spouting themes inspired by David Lynch. It’s a confusing maelstrom of ideas, but the men still manage to come up with an infinitely better tagline than Star did: “Live the life.” It’s simple, but I think it conveys the right message.

Meanwhile, back at the women’s camp, NeNe is horrified upon receiving her assignment to go shopping with LaToya, and she decides to waste time speaking up about it instead of biting her tongue and getting on with the task. At a table along with the rest of her team, NeNe tells Star that she can’t work with fake people and calls LaToya out for unjustly throwing her under the bus in the boardroom last week. Being the instigator that she is, Star is anxious to dig into the drama, insisting that they’ve got plenty of time to talk. They wouldn’t have quite as much free time if they’d been a bit more creative during the brainstorming session. LaToya cries and says that eye-rolling and name-calling hurts her feelings. NeNe has never imagined such a concept. “Maybe I need to be more sensitive and not so rough?” she ventures, taking a stab in the dark. The two warring ladies make up quickly, and Star reiterates the theme of their task, which she misremembers as “Elegantly individual, collectively quality.” Really, Star?

I don’t understand why Trump keeps introducing us to his children. Son Eric Trump is joining us this week, and he’s just as much of a tool as the other two. Don’t these people feel kind of silly acting as henchmen for their father? Star calls in an order for some of Ivanka’s custom jewelry for the photo shoot, as I’m sure she was instructed to do. I’m glad Ivanka has found a vocation that showcases her unique talents and sets her apart from the rest of her family. I know absolutely nothing about jewelry, but I’m fairly certain I could make a career of designing it. Anyway, Star and her team enjoy the privilege of getting manicures for the photo shoot they’ll be featured in, and Star has never felt better during a task. “For the first time in my life, being pretentious doesn’t hurt me,” she says, referring to her advantage in this challenge. That means the women will absolutely not lose this time, right?

The men aren’t following the “no service shots” rule; they somehow think that photos of a fancy butler outside of a hotel room door are interesting enough to include in their ad campaign. Unfortunately, Meat Loaf is in charge of shooting the scene, and his teammates end up hating the pictures, which make the butler look like a Mafia warlord instead of friendly and welcoming. They end up having to chop the waiter’s head off in the shots, including only his arm with a towel draped over it. The women, for their part, are shooting Hope in and near a bathtub with a thick white robe covering most of her body. NeNe is directing the shoot, but Star isn’t happy with it. She complains that Hope is too covered up, not naked enough for the scene. “She could be any miscellaneous girl,” Star says, wanting NeNe to play up the Playmate of the Year a bit more. Instead of responding to constructive criticism by taking it in stride and making minor adjustments, NeNe decides to fly off the handle and defend her decisions. She could stand to be a little bit more reverent when following orders from her leader, but since Star is particularly heinous, I’ll give NeNe a pass.

It’s time to prepare for presentations, and the players are nervous. The men spend what seems like hours poring over their ad copy to make sure there are no typos whatsoever, since that would be humiliating. LaToya intones that Star should be fired should they lose. Yes, she does seem to have come up with all of the ideas, and she did spend the bulk of her time being pampered and having her photo taken, it would appear.

The men present first, with John Rich telling a few male executives about his own experience staying in a Trump hotel while filming Celebrity Apprentice. He’s impressed by the baby cribs, since he has children, and he gushes about the world-class service offered by the establishment. The judges look over the men’s materials and seem somewhat pleased, but I suppose we’ll learn what they were truly thinking in a moment. The women present next, and it’s pretty much the most embarrassing spectacle I’ve ever witnessed on this show. Star leads the pack, telling the executives that she wants to make the Trump brand synonymous with “luxury.” If by “luxury” she means “decadent excess,” then I think that’s already been taken care of. She says that the collection of hotels is “luxury personified,” leading me to question whether she understands what the word “personified” means. Then she has the women take turns reciting random words as if they’re presenting a project in a middle school classroom. Consistency. Compassion, Style. Escape. Lifestyle. Atmosphere. Original. I think they repeated words a few times, and there must have been a billion of them. If these women weren’t operating under a totalitarian regime under Star, they would have felt comfortable protesting; I can’t imagine that any of them could have thought it was a good idea.

The executives loathed both teams, as Trump learns in their pre-boardroom powwow. The women’s presentation was sleazy and cheap, they say, and their little recitation of adjectives and values made the judges cringe. Also, their materials were befuddling, as Hope wears a towel in the bathtub and drinks from an unopened bottle of champagne. There were altogether too many photos in their brochure, and the print was overwhelming. The men’s ad copy had a few typos and lacked a “call to action,” meaning they fully neglected to include contact information for the hotels. There was too much text to read, and they missed the point of the task, essentially, by talking about everything other than how to actually stay in a Trump hotel. The judges claim that the men made a better pitch, while Star’s presentation didn’t seem to come from the heart. That might have something to do with the fact that she doesn’t have one.

In the boardroom: Trump asks both teams how they think they did. Star claims she’d like to live in a Trump hotel forever, and the women lavish effusive praise upon Star under implicit threat of terrible punishment. NeNe is the only exception; she gives credit to Marlee and calls LaToya “great” before accusing her fellow players of kissing up to Star in most cases. The women deny her claim, and Trump moves on to the men, who also defend their team. Trump admits that everyone in the room is “very, very smart,” which makes Hope perk up a bit. She’s probably never been told that before in her line of work. Trump lets the cat out of the bag; “The judges did not like either team,” he says. The men’s team was on its way to being a good concept, he says, but the executives didn’t appreciate that the men were pitching the hotels themselves rather than their ad campaign. I could have easily made that mistake, so I see how it’s a fine line. Trump mentions the cluttered eyesore of photos and ad copy in the women’s materials, along with their utter lack of emotional connection with the theme. Again, perhaps if Star weren’t a robot, things would have worked out differently. Why would anyone ever look to Star for heart or anything related to humanity?

Though the executives felt there was no winner, the lesser of two losers was the men’s team. Trump begrudgingly offers the $20,000 to John Rich’s charity, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. The men retire and drink liquor to celebrate their “win,” while the women stay back to duke it out in the boardroom. Star begins by asking if she can make an argument in her team’s defense, but Trump makes the point that the women didn’t do well enough for her to be making any arguments. Star puts forth the idea that though she came up with the concepts and ordered the execution of those concepts under force, she shouldn’t be fired. NeNe admits that she directed one of the photo shoots but reminds Trump that the women collectively came up with the ideas. I saw no collective creativity; I think NeNe was a bit too easy on Star. LaToya suggests that Star be fired, of course, while Marlee, who is Star’s pet and would defend her under any outrageous circumstance, says that LaToya should go. Hope sits at the end of the table looking pretty and staying silent, which is exactly the behavior that’s carried her through this game so far. Star brings back LaToya and NeNe to be considered for firing.

Star accuses LaToya of not being a strong player, while LaToya helpfully mentions that Star has been coming up with all of the awful scripts that get the women fired, so she’s responsible above all others. This point should be evident to Trump, but he admires Star’s moxie over LaToya’s meek demeanor. NeNe, much to my surprise, sort of sides with Star and says that LaToya isn’t a strong enough player to move forward in the game. Trump seems to buy this; he says he likes LaToya but sees that her own team doesn’t want her around anymore. His reasoning is that the women deserve a fighting chance in the competition, and they can’t succeed without cutting their most reviled player from the roster. Trump compassionately fires LaToya, largely unaware of the brainwashing he’s been subjected to by Star. As LaToya enters the elevator, NeNe tells us that Star would do anything to win, even if she has to cut a teammate’s head off, and that “Star has orchestrated all of this.” What we just witnessed was a coup of the most evil kind, and it’s only the beginning.

Season 11, Episode 8: “Bitter Suites” (original airdate April 24, 2011.)

Celebrity Apprentice airs Sundays at 8/7c on NBC.

Images courtesy of Douglas Gorenstein and NBC Universal.