the apparent-tease

Hey..

I am writing off this post immediately after sitting through a painful sixty minutes of mockery and stupidity with a NBC premiere of a TV series called The Apprentice featuring Martha Stewart. As much as the original version of the same series featuring Donald Trump was moving towards brink of torture, NBC has decided to kill its entire viewership by putting out the Apprentice - Martha Wednesdays this fall..

The Apprentice itself was a very wonderful & novel concept that was pioneered by NBC 2 years back. The first season was very impressive with a 18 week interview to choose an apprentice for the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. The series stressed about leadership, creativity, risk-taking, innovation, project management & hardwork. While the choice of Trump was still questionable, the selection of candidates, the projects allotted and the evaluation methodology & reasoning impressed many. The second season slowly slipped into a predictable pattern and the third season was hopeless. Similar trials by Sir Richard Branson in the FOX network didnt go as well as that of Apprentice and we all kinda hoped that this will end.

But NBC has changed strategy and put more misery to the viewers by augmenting the original version with its own mockery/satirical version. To start with, the very choice of Martha Stewart as the leader is simply incomprehensible. This is the lady who has spent the entire last year in house arrest sitting in a jumpsuit convicted for lying to interrogators and accused of 'insider trading'. NBC has made a mockery of everyone by projecting Martha as a 'successful leader' in the corporate world and with whom the young energetic minds of the free world want to work with.

The background score is an adaptation from the original and the camera zooms in & out exactly the same way. Another hopeless scene is that of the boardroom. Women just scream in there to increase the theatrics. The agreements were as dispassionate as one could think of and the "advisors" of Martha had absolutely no clue of what they need to do. The old-guy-advisor (Charles) had a cigar in his hand all though which was irritating. He neither lit it or seemed to smoke it.

The best comedy came in when Martha talked about how she 'connected' to customers and how her company was successful. She just didnt seem to know what she was supposed to say or do. It was so lame that it seemed as if the interview was to encourage people to leave / escape from associating themselves with this torture for another few weeks and maybe a year if they got selected eventually. "You dont fit in" is the 'punch' line used here - like that of Trump's famous "You're fired". Martha says that as if she will drop dead after delivering that dialogue. And the other fun was the way she wrote a 'letter' to the guy who was fired first. It was borrowed on the lines of the condolence letter the President writes to the family of war-martyrs. (like in Thirteen Days where JFK writes to family of Capt Rudolph Anderson).

Overall NBC has successfully managed to put up a comical or a MAD-TV version of its own Apprentice with Martha Stewart making a mockery of leadership. The race is on to see which one of the Apprentices generates more boring stuff.

Martha, You simply dont fit in.

Chao..