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And the winner of The Celebrity Apprentice is....
by Joel Keller, posted May 11th 2009 10:01AM
... a woman!I took this post over from Isabelle, who fell ill while putting it together (no worries, she's OK), but I couldn't resist keeping her joke intact. Of course, the winner of this year's Celebrity Apprentice was going to be a woman, given that the finalists were Joan Rivers and Annie Duke.
Last week, Isabelle polled the TV Squad readers on who they thought should win the show and on who they thought would win the show. As of now, 52.8% said that Annie should win while 59.1% said that Annie would win. The poll results are rather close but Annie got the lead for both questions. Were your predictions right?
Well, leave it to The Donald to buck expectations yet again: he picked Joan Rivers as the new Celebrity Apprentice.
I've got to say, though, that Joan deserved it. In the final task, the two leads had to put together an event that had a blindingly confusing mix of a silent auction, branding for Kodak's digital picture frame, and a field trip to see Cirque du Soleil's Wintuk (how long ago was this episode taped, by the way? Wintuk runs in the late fall/early winter, at least according to the ads I saw for the 2009 version).
Despite the fact that Annie raised over $400k to Joan's just over $150k, Joan's auction and party was much more interesting. Female impersonators, Kathy Griffin, and a fun atmosphere will probably attract more people than Bernard Hopkins and a bit of a more "elegant" theme (though I would have probably gone to Annie's party over Joan's). Joan ended up winning three out of the five categories fot the event, trumping (pun intended) Annie's vaunted ability to shake down her pro-poker buddies for large amounts of cash.
So my guess is that Trump picked Joan on the basis that she won the final task. But there was something to be said about her ability to get the folks at God's Love We Deliver to rally around her when the event planner she was assigned quit because she was too demanding.
A word about that: the planner was David Tutera, who hosts a WE network show called My Fair Wedding. As a man who's scheduled to get married at some point in the next couple of years, I've been enticed to sit through a few of the episodes by my fiancee. Given what I've seen there, I can see how this task might be too much for him. He seems to be in love with putting white curtains everywhere, and Joan was looking for bright and fun. Yes, she was demanding, but she wasn't rude or insulting; Tutera probably pulled out when Joan wanted to bring in someone to help him. Yikes. Sensitive much, David?
What was Annie's downfall? Two things: her crummy interpersonal skills and the fact that Joan completely got into her head. After David and his firm pulled out, you can see Annie's eyes go red with rage as she tried to put together a design team at the last second. The scene where Annie bitches about Joan to Tom Green was priceless because Tom wasn't having any of it, calling her out on how much the topic of Joan was dominating her conversation. So you have to give Joan credit; sure, she overreacted to Annie's two-faced nature and how her daughter Melissa was treated, but she managed to drive Annie, who's job is to stay cool and read people, nuts.
But Annie wasn't exactly a person people want to rally around. Green and Dennis Rodman basically did very little, because yet again Annie took it upon herself to do everything. That kind of micromanagement just doesn't work even on short-term tasks, leading to team revolts. Joan, on the other hand, did a much better job at making sure everyone -- yes, even the lazy Clint Black -- made a contribution.
So, did Donald pick the right person? Like I said before, definitely. Joan proved that her famous tenacity is still intact, even after almost fifty years in show biz. I mean, the woman's 75 years old and she has more energy than I do, and I'm half her age. And, despite her ability to cut a person in half verbally and hold a grudge like no one's business, people seem to like her and want to do well for her. You can't really say that about Annie.
But who Donald really should have had in the finals was Jesse James, mainly because of his likability and fly-under-the-radar business sense. But he couldn't pass up the Annie vs. Joan grudge match, and it made for a fun (but 90 minutes too long) finale.
Quick question: Do you think Joan let bygones be bygones in the months between the final task and the live finale? When she walked in, she patted Annie on the shoulder, then hugged her after she won. It even seemed like she was about to say that she didn't dislike Annie, but she was interrupted. For her part, Annie still seems to have a blinding hatred for Joan, but that might have just been to make her case during the final boardroom.
Did Trump make the right decision? Who do you want to see on the show next year? Let us know in the comments.
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