Not to disagree with your premise – but Connecticut is practically next door. Hundreds of thousands* of people commute from Connecticut into Manhattan on a daily basis.
*I have no idea what the actual number is, but it’s substantial. It’s less than an hour on the train.
I didn’t watch this, but I’ve glanced at this thread, seen the clips and heard all the ruckus. I can’t believe Joan was allowed to quit, make a stink and come back let alone win the whole thing. I wholeheartedly agree that it sounds like it was fixed. Joan’s (and her kid’s) careers must have been slipping and she needed more attention.
Absolutely.
In times past, Trump always took a “whole picture” approach to judging the performance of each candidate. He would consider a broad range of unspecified but common sensical considerations – matters such as fund-raising or profit-making ability, business etiquette, strategic planning, public relations, proper conduct, and performance during previous tasks. In the finale though, for the first time in Apprentice history, Trump had a magical list of five specific criteria – criteria that were not divulged prior to launching the task. Why?
There’s only one possible reason: To justify selecting Joan Rivers as the victor. If he were to go by his traditional criteria, there’s no way that Joan would have won. Annie had more victories, she raised more funds, and she was never brought into the boardroom. She conducted herself calmly in the boardroom, despite Joan’s accusation that Annie was “berating” her. She did criticize her opponents, but she never resorted to shrill screaming or over-the-top insults, and unlike Joan, she kept her profanity out of the boardroom.
I realize that some people will disagree. Some will claim that Joan outperformed Annie in terms of class and professionalism. I strongly disagree, but that’s beside the point. The point is that Trump suddenly had to trot out a magical list of hitherto unspecified criteria for selecting the winner. And why? Because without that list, it would have been much more difficult to justify his selection of the winner.
It also struck me as odd that when they talked about the criteria that Joan supposedly won, they just presented it as a statement. Ivanka listed the three criteria (celebrities, Kodak branding, and whatever the third one was) and then said “Joan won all of these.” Period. No discussion about what they liked and didn’t like about each one. No discussion about how close Annie was and the specific areas she fell short. Just “Joan won all of these.”
Granted, it could have been edited for time, but it certainly seemed like they didn’t want to discuss the results in any detail.
Absolutely right. Not to mention that one of these criteria – “celebrity presence” – made no sense whatsoever. What in the world does that have to do with the success of a fundraising event?
And were these celebrity impersonators counted in the evaluation of Joan’s “celebrity presence”?
Heck, Trump let Joan get away with stuff that he never tolerated in previous candidates – not the least of which is quitting the competition! Even if she did come back, it was a rash decision nonetheless, and I think we all remember how he eviscerated Season Two Bradford for a much less damaging act of bravado.
You may recall when Melissa was storming off after being fired, she screamed “Liars!” (This scene was edited to make it seem like she was calling Annie and Brande liars) She then said “Get me David!” She then had a behind doors chat with producers. I think the producers may have already told the Riverses they would win, so Melissa was accusing them of going back on their deal.
Wow, I find this thread so amazing. The level of sour grapes is above anything I’ve ever seen. You all think it’s so clear that Annie should have won that you have to resort to crying “fix” in order to justify her losing.
There were five criteria, Joan won three, so she won. Why is that so hard to accept? Ivanka didn’t need to discuss why Joan won those three, it was just clear. The Kodak people said she had better branding, so no need for further discussion. The only “celebrities” that Annie had were from the poker world, people that the average Joe wouldn’t know from a hole in the ground. Joan may have had impersonators, but at least they were impersonating celebrities that the average person would recognize. You can have the opinion that the celebrity criterion made no sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was a criterion that Trump set up. And it was so obvious that the people at Joan’s event were having a much better time than those at Annie’s. Annie’s event and people were just all about the money. Joan’s event and people were about the event and enjoying it. Joan wins.
And so what if Trump didn’t take a “whole picture” approach this time? It’s not like this is the first case of a “reality” show changing the rules or criteria from season to season.
You people should be more like your idol, Annie, and learn to lose graciously.
I didn’t actually lose anything. I just thought it seemed strange. YMMV.
Same here. No real attachment to it, other than a few hours wasted by getting into it a little bit.
I happen to think that several posters here have offered some darned good reasons to believe that the outcome was fixed.
Yes, and as I said, this is the first and only time that Trump has employed a strict list of criteria in evaluating the performance of the candidates. The criteria weren’t even weighted, for pity’s sake! Nor were they divulged prior to this competition.
I also pointed out that one of those criteria – “celebrity presence” – makes no sense whatsoever. It has diddley-squat to do with either the fundraising results or the quality of the event.
Meltdown correctly pointed out that there was no attempt to explain why the candidates won their specific criteria. Rather, the results were presented as mere brute facts. You say that Ivanka had no obligation to explain how they determined that Joan won three of the five, and strictly speaking, that true. It also runs counter to the entirety of Apprentice history though, in which Trump and company routinely explained the merits on which each candidate won or lost.
You can call this sour graping if you want, but I think that the people here have offered some detailed and principled reasons for believing that the outcome was rigged.
Because this isn’t the Pit, I’m offering a restrained answer to the statement that we’re just sour graping. However, I will point out that it’s one thing to stay that a poster is mistaken. It’s yet another thing to accuse them of sour graping, and IMO, that is bordering on Pit territory.
After the fact.
In this case, the rules weren’t simply changed for this particular season. Rather, they were changed – in total defiance of all the logic that Trump has used before – for this particular challenge.
In times past, Trump has emphatically stated that he cannot simply overlook a candidate’s track record. He made it perfectly clear that past performance counts. Did he change his mind? Or is he simply ignoring that particular claim for no good reason?
I thought there were several things that Joan did better during the final challenge than Annie.
The people at her event seemed like they were having a much better time, even if they didn’t have as much money to splash around. In all, Joan’s room looked like people were having a good time and talking with the celebrities and impersonators and what not. At the end of the event time, both Joan and Annie called out “Everybody, time is running out. Make sure you have all your bids in!” On Joan’s side it felt like she was saying “I know you’re having a good time schmoozing with Clint Black. Don’t forget to buy something.” When Annie said it it came off as “you’re here to give me money. Deliver!”
From Kodak’s perspective, Joan’s event was a clear winner. Walking through the photo frame into the event was clever, and so was having the frames display information about the items. Joan was right that they should have had the charity people do it, but it seemed like a genuine oversight. Annie put a bunch of starving kids on her frame. Yeah, that’s cheery.
Then there was the whole thing with the tickets to the Cirque du Soleil. Melissa and Herschel I thought really nailed that one when they got a donor to buy all the tickets so they could give them away. They were wandering around Times Square in a huge Kodak bus giving out tickets to a hot new show. You don’t think that makes Kodak look good? And then they took pictures of people on the street and told them all how awesome they looked and that they were going to be in a special event… people like that kind of thing.
On the other hand you had Tom Green and Dennis Rodman, in the same area, actually selling the tickets for face value. So put yourself in the shoes of a tourist on the street. Who would you rather have encountered that day: Melissa and Herschel giving out tickets, or Tom and Dennis selling them for face value and then bitching at you when you didn’t buy one. All from the top of the Kodak bus. It just doesn’t look good. It’s even worse if you bought a ticket from Annie’s team and then saw Joan’s team giving them away.
Another note about the frames. THey never actually showed the presentations, but Tom Green transferred the footage from a laptop to the frame by videotaping the screen of a laptop with a camcorder. Does anybody believe that the video was a high-quality bit of filmmaking?
As for the designers quitting, it’s not clear what happened. Joan’s designer quit because he didn’t think it was possible to do anything worthwhile on such short notice and Joan was trying to get something done. I realize that he was on the background in the phone conversations, but did you hear the ideas that Joan was objecting to? He fixated on the fact there was going to be Cirque du Soleil and was all about the circus theme. He was getting “circus tables” (what does that even mean?) and said something about how he wanted clowns. I would have thought that with all the stupid “clowns are scary and evil” shit around here that people would be sainting Joan for objecting to that mess.
Joan said she wasn’t happy and he responded that he was doing the best he could. Joan said she wanted to bring another designer in to try to help her articulate her vision and the guy got all “the things you want are impossible! No one could move that ship with their mind! I quit!” Then his partner didn’t even tell Annie she’d quit, too? Yeah, real professional there. I think if you’re going to call “it’s a fix!” on anything it would be the designers. The obvious conspiracy set up is that they were never going to help design the room in the first place.
…
Hey Donald, thanks for making that crap-spewing horrorshow your celebrity apprentice.
And by the way Trump, you’re fired!
Hey, you like how I turned his catchphrase around and used it on him?
It is? Seriously? You need to hang out here more. Our grapes get wuh-AAAAY sourer than this. I mean, light-years more sour. This thread is nothing in that department.
You’re right… it’s not like the event was edited to portray the events in a particular light.
This is a reasonable analysis – my point was that none of this was discussed in the boardroom (at least not that we saw). In the past, we would have had a scene where the Kodak people gave their feedback to Donald – what they liked, what they didn’t – what worked, what didn’t. And then we’d have a scene in the boardroom where one of Trump’s lackeys would go over in detail what one team did right and wrong, and then what the other team did right and wrong. We got none of that.
Again, it could have been edited for time, or it could simply be that Annie and Joan were so hostile to each other that no one had the patience to go through the whole thing in great detail. But it was a departure from the way the Boardroom was run in the past and it didn’t leave me feeling like I had all the facts on which to know whether I agreed with the decision. From my living room, it seemed like it was all about whether or not Joan had offended the event planning people. I get that the Kodak people liked Joan’s event better – I just didn’t get why.
**Tenebras **could very well be completely right. I just wish I had heard it on the show.
I thought the boardroom was rushed, too, but my guess is that it’s because of time constraints. They were showing the boardroom section live, and when Joan and Annie started into each other about the whole decorator thing they ate up all the time. My impression is that the judging parts of reality TV shows actually last a long time, and then are edited way down for broadcast. On television it looks like they walk in, sit down, “so, what did you do this week? Ok, I’m going to fire… YOU!” In real life (which is a very tenuous thing in reality television) that boardroom meeting might last 2 or 3 hours. When Ivanka listed the things Joan had won, I thought it seemed rushed, too. My guess was that they knew they had to get everything wrapped up by 11 o’clock or the show was going to end without anyone being declared the winner.
Funny story about reality TV judging segments. During the second season of Project Runway there was a big to-do after one of the contests. Afterwards one of the contestants said that Santino stood and argued back and forth with the judges for 4 hours. In all they stood on the runway for something like 6 hours hammering out the result. (It was the lingerie episode, for those keeping score at home. I can’t remember which of the other designers told the story, though.)
Tenebras, I don’t see anybody here insisting that Joan didn’t do a single thing better than Annie. Quite the contrary; I would personally agree that her event looked like it was glitzier and more fun. Not more effective; after all, Annie raised three times as much as the elder Rivers. Joan did do certain things better, though.
The question isn’t whether Joan Rivers did certain things better. The question is whether she was the better candidate. She raised a lot less money, conducted herself poorly in the boardroom, conducted herself as badly outside the boardroom, quit on the job, and just generally acted like a shrill harpy. Virtually none of this was acknowledged by the Donald, though.
Nor were we given any reason to expect that they would be judged on those five criteria alone – not until decision time came. Heck, Piers himself repeatedly decried Omarosa’s suitability based on her interpersonal dynamics, yet when judgment day rolled around on Celebrity Apprentice II, he acted as though those five benchmarks were all that mattered. This was in complete contrast to Trump’s previous criteria, and it’s utterly inconsistent with claims that Trump has repeatedly made regarding what matters in an executive.
It’s blatantly obvious that those five criteria were made up specifically to justify hiring Joan Rivers. That’s why there was no analysis of why Joan satisfied three out of the five criteria, even though the episode was three hours long. It just didn’t matter, that’s why. These benchmarks were a transparent veneer designed to lend legitimacy to the selection of the elder Ms. Rivers.