The Apprentice: Los Angeles Weekly Performance Review, Episode 9

The Task:
This week’s task was to create a 45-second soap-opera-style webisode to promote Dial’s Soft Scrub Deep-Clean Foaming Cleanser. The combined judgment of two Dial executives determined the winning team, based on criteria that apparently included product prominence, clarity of message, ability to enunciate, and the cliffhanger tension value.

There are so many odd tasks this season, I’m beginning to get nervous about what job awaits the winner of the series.

Team Arrow:
Team Arrow’s webisode was almost perfect. The product was clearly in evidence several times, they had a clean and simple storyline, and I’m sorry, they also had a reasonable cliffhanger. After all, regular soaps would spend several episodes building up to a disconnected marriage proposal, so why wasn’t it good enough for here?

Frank:
I was hoping that Frank could make a comeback in the post-Surya era. He did, and we saw the return from limbo of the enthusiastic and mostly-mature guy who sought a high-paying job.

There’s actually not much else I wish to comment about Frank either way this week, so although the supporting actor Emmy in 2007 may well be headed in another direction, Frank gets a SATISFACTORY rating this week.

James:
James did a smart thing when they returned from the Boardroom at the top of the show – he made it clear that there were no hard feelings between himself and Tim. He backed this up, pre-Boardroom, with his noble (but unrealistic) sentiment that he would not want to bring anyone else to the Boardroom if they lost.

James stepped up to be PM, primarily because after getting savaged in the last Boardroom, he had no option not to. I think he did a pretty fair job.

Probably his best move was to recognize that this week, the rest of the team had more to offer in the area of creativity. Unlike his predecessor, he knew it was best to step back and get out of the way. Note, he did not abdicate his responsibilities, but he let the creative people run with what was clearly a solid idea, while maintaining a watchful eye on the proceedings.

It’s unusual for a PM not to be the one to make a presentation to product execs. I mean, we’re talking three or four sentences; it’s not rocket science. As he was not in the video, James missed an opportunity to enhance his visibility.

In the Kinetic Boardroom, James was pretty quiet. He asked one question that we saw, but as he did not incur Aaron-scaled wrath from The Donald, I must assume he made other contributions.

James’s rating is therefore GOOD. He just might have escaped from Trump’s doghouse!

Nicole:
Using her knowledge of the soap universe, Nicole drove the initial storyline. I liked the basic idea right away, and even more so when she and Tim flushed it out. The addition of some close-ups improved their final product dramatically.

Nicole’s voice is not very microphone-friendly and in some of the early takes, was almost as inaudible as Muna’s. However, by the time the final take was laid down, she delivered her lines in a controlled tone that was easily understandable. For making that adjustment, well done.

This was Nicole’s best work in a while, and her rating is also GOOD.

Stefani:
Stefani stayed in the background again this week. I think she could have handled the acting role better than Nicole, but we’ll never know.

The one contribution we saw from Stefani was that she made the short presentation to the Dial execs, which she handled easily. Her rating is SATISFACTORY.

Tim:
Tim did his best work when augmenting Nicole’s initial storyline, including introducing the use of music. He was almost getting Muna-ish in his extreme attention to detail, and we could humorously see Stefani suffering in near-silence at the back of the room. However, attention to detail isn’t Arrow’s strong point, and although Tim may have been somewhat overdoing it, someone needed to be fussing over the little things.

Tim was clearly not at ease acting his role, including the “showmance” parallels, but he got the job done. His rating this week is GOOD.

Team Kinetic:
There were two major failures by Kinetic this week. One was that the product was not prominent, and the other was allowing Muna to be on camera. The latter problem led to drastic edits in order to expunge unusable dialogue, and that led to confusion in their storyline and the Dial execs. The fault for both issues rests ultimately with the Project Manager.

The team began the task with an effective brainstorming session, and the Yahoo webisode showed all but Muna contributing creative ideas toward the final plot.

Let’s take a closer look at the last three seconds of their video, the much-lauded cliffhanger. What message are we left with? What I took away from it was: the product’s instructions are hard to read, the purpose of the product is not clear, and it doesn’t work as fast as some would like it to!

Trump opened the Boardroom meeting by saying, “I think you’re all really outstanding.” For the surviving members, it’s good to know that Trump is supportive of their team.