The ratings are my effort to sum up the idiocy of each week (which there aren’t enough bits for) but to also reflect how I think things are going overall. Andy had a fantastic week. He was decisive, sure, but also yielding without giving up ground. His ideas worked, and worked well. That said he is not winning the whole shebang. I’d bet $1,000 on it. For this one great effort, he has at least 2 poor ideas that really cost his team. He also has a series of minor mis-steps over previous weeks. Along with those, he has no respect and his age and lack of experience will ultimately doom him in Trump’s eyes.
Thus, my ratings have to reflect that. I’m trying to isolate the final 4 and with Kelly, Kevin, and Jenn M. I think I have 3 of the 4 (short of a completely boneheaded move or an off the wall firing by Trump. There is no way to account for this).
I kind of think the final 4 will have either Maria or Ivana in it. Not due to their skills, but more due to the fact that there are currently about 5 people left with 0% chance of winning, but I can really see one of them skating through and then being dismembered in the final interviews.
If this season runs like the previous, I think the final 2 contestants may have some serious dead weight on their hands when they have to pick their final teams from the recently fired.
I liked his comment to Wes after he hung up. Basically, he said that they were just trying to cover their asses so they’d have a focus for their blame in the boardroom in case they lost. So true.
I also agree that the military idea wasn’t inherently bad but was executed very badly. The military doesn’t recruit with bloody war images. The part when the police were in a subway car pointing their guns at bodies on the floor was scary, as was the fascist drum beat. Andy’s commercial was really good, almost profesisonal, and that tagline was great. He also handled himself very well throughout the task.
If in fact that’s what happens. If the bootees show up next week (in whatever capacity – and I’m not ignoring your question, annieclaus, I’m trying to come up with an answer to it!), will they show up again for the final task? OTOH, the two finalists will have to have some kind of team to work with/boss around at that point – maybe that will include the bootees between now and then?
I have completely given up on Raj: Verdict… he’s a not intellectual, he’s a dick.
Remember his anti-Democrat and ‘slick Willie’ comments while playing tennis? He’s a right wing nut. And that ideology blinded him in this project: We’re at war! You can’t be military enough!
The drum beat of fascism drowned out the instruction: go for the heart.
Not to mention the other character defect of right wind ideologues: More than completely full of himself (which is the same as being more than completely full of shit).
I’m sticking glued to the show not to watch his firing (which I will enjoy) but to watch the taxi cab confession and what will undoubtedly be the worse case of cluelessness, ever.
So what do y’all think about the suggestion that Andy’s campaign could have used an injection of sex appeal?
I think Andy was right to reject that notion. Not every ad campaign needs to rely on sex. Heck, in this case, it would have probably attracted entirely the wrong crowd.
On a related note, I think that Andy’s initial attempt to use classical music was misguided as well. After all, it’s not as though they need to attract cultural sophisticates; indeed (and I don’t mean this in a disparaging way), I suspect that cultural music aficionados would tend to choose entirely different career paths.
We don’t know what Andy meant by “classical” music. I’d guess there are quite a few ordinary people who recognize (and enjoy) classical music without thinking of it as such. (Like me, someone who didn’t connect Fantasia with Tchaikovsky for a long, long time.)
I think that it, like pretty much all of Maria’s ideas, was a big load of horseshit. This idea has been discussed at great length on TWOP, and the concensus is that if DD had wanted a sexy ad, he would have pointed at his crotch, not his chest. (Personally, I think he was actively trying to avoid “sexy” because of the testicle ad fiasco from last year.)
As for the classical music thing, you have to keep in mind that not all classical is light, fussy stuff. A lot of forceful, dynamic background music is classical. Classical music is used in commercials and movies all the time. Hell, they used it in the old Warner Brothers cartoons quite a lot. "Kill da Wabbit, " anybody? I think Andy was thinking something along the lines of “Ride of the Valkyries,” rather than “Fur Elyse.” That would have worked a lot better to evoke the mood they were shooting for than, say, techno-pop.
Over at TWOP, there’s a pretty sizable contingent (including the recapper) who think Kevin was way out of line in telling Elizabeth she needed to shut up. People are saying he was up in her face, yelling at her, berating and belittling her, lecturing her, etc. I’m not really seeing it, myself. Near as I could see they were at conversational distance the whole time, and while his voice did raise a bit, I wouldn’t call it yelling by any stretch. Besides, she needed to shut the hell up and listen to what he was telling her, because it was information she needed to hear. She kept talking over him, and while that’s very rude, the more damning point is that if your yap is flapping, you cannot possibly be listening. Telling someone who won’t quite yammering while you’re trying to impart vital information that they need to shut up for a minute isn’t out of line, imo.
Anyone have any thoughts on this bit of interaction?
I can’t imagine what show they were watching if they thought Kevin was rude. If he said “shut up,” it had to have been out of frustration, because he was trying to help her by explaining what the perception of her was – and she wouldn’t. shut. up.
I’m starting to really root for Kevin at this point. Competent and sane. Who’da thunk that combo would be so hard to come by this season?
The shut up was fine,.I read TWOP a lot (mostly for The Amazing Race), and my main complaint is that folks there are far too judgemental of things people on these show say. There are times when the criticism is valid, but often it is just too nitpicky and critical.
Maybe this thread is dead already, but I just got to read the end of it, so… I think Kevin was 100% justified in bitch-slapping Elizabeth, and his mere utterance of “shut up” was too mild. He sat up with her all night coming up with what they both thought was a viable campaign, and at the first sign of disagreement from the team, she folded like a house of cards. If I were a sleep-deprived, over-worked Kevin, I’d have screamed at her, loudly, with froth coming out of my mouth. Elizabeth dropped the ball and wasted his precious time. At that moment, she sealed her fate. I felt bad for Kevin. He’s the best one of them all, possibly the best player so far, including Season 1.
As for Jenn… do you think Wes would have liked it if Jenn were coaching Andy on how to win in the boardroom? I bet he wouldn’t, not one bit. I think it was improper of him to be involving himself in that whole situation and Jenn was perfectly within her rights to tell him to mind his own business. If he wouldn’t appreciate her doing the same thing to his losing PM, then he shouldn’t do it to hers. End of story, IMO.
They did a task with Donnie “Nipples” Deutsch last year, too. (The nipple jokes are due to the truly unfortunate shirt he was wearing last season, and the fact that he seems to need to keep his office a bit warmer.) Last season’s task was to come up with a campaign for Marquis Jet, which is some sort of small luxury airline catering to higher-end business travellers. There were no real parameters on what kind of campaign it should be, and the company told the women they wanted something flashy and eye-catching.
The women were in gigglewigglejiggle mode at that point, so they naturally went with the idea that sex sells. They tinkered with pictures of them in short skirts on wings, phallic-looking pics of the planes, that sort of thing. One of their final print ads was this shot of a plane from sort of underneath. The body of the plane was straight up, the wings were angled up and out, and those roundish thingies that are at the base of the wings were sort of hanging down. It was the crotch shot of the aviation world, really, and Assorama dubbed it “the testicle ad.” It was quite the attention-grabber, I must say. And although the women won (the men’s campaign was a real snoozefest), DD flat-out said that he could never actually use a campaign that was so overtly sexual.
