The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, Weekly Performance Appraisal, Episode 6: Who Let the Dogs Out?

Welcome to the weekly (some might say, “weakly”) evaluation of the contestants on Apprentice Martha Stewart. Each week, I will look at each contestant remaining and give my appraisal of his or her performance. Some of them will shine like stars and others will flicker like fluorescent lights down at the warehouse.

This week, we start off with the eleven contestants. Will any of them remember what I told them last week? Will any of them learn from their mistakes? Let’s find out.

Primarius:

Howie: Were you even in this episode?

Sarah: You’ve got a good attitude. When Jim survived the chopping block last week, you sucked it up and tried to work with him as best as you could, despite not liking or respecting him. Unfortunately, when the rubber met the road, and it came time to support Jim, you just rolled your eyes and refused to play along.

It turns out that Jim managed to pull out a victory anyway. But, if I were you, I’d be very careful. Jim knows that you were not really in his camp and will drop on you like a ton of bricks when your team loses another challenge.

Carrie: I guess you did a little bit of talking during some of the negotiations. I guess that helped.

Bethenny: You had a minimal role in this latest episode. Perhaps you’ll be able to get a fair evaluation next time. Be careful, however. David lost because he never contributed to any of the challenges and that’s where you are right now. Martha is getting rid of the dead wood and you look pretty weak to me.

Jim: Sigh. You still don’t really get it, do you Jimmy? Every week you end up in the conference room, facing Martha. You’ve been lucky so far in that there’s been a bigger screw-up sitting next to you each and every time. But, Martha is not very happy with you. In fact, she visited the loft and pointed to you and told you to be the project manager.

As for the task, you did have what seemed to be some great ideas. You wanted to put a dog in the movies and a lucky bidder on stage in a Broadway play. Wow. I mean, I’d pay for that. Okay, maybe not $15,000, but still, I’d pay a couple of thousand.

And, of course, in the end, you did manage to score a couple of the bigger ticket bidding packages and win the challenge. Unfortunately, this seemed to boost your ego even higher than it’s ever been before. I’ll congratulate you on a job well done, but warn you that if soar too close to the sun, it will spell your doom.

Matchstick:

Ryan: Wow. You think rather highly of yourself. You really think that Chad Pennington and you would simply be friends because you share some of the same interests? At least you have confidence.

As it turns out, the one package that you negotiated was a major flop. What was it? A Bar-B-Q dinner with Chad the night before a game? I am surprised that it brought in as much as it did. Not everyone is as star struck as you are.

Also, I think it was a little bit underhanded of you to shift the blame to Marcella when the package that you negotiated didn’t sell for any significant amount.

Dawna: You did well with some of the negotiations. Obviously, it wasn’t enough.

Amanda: You did well with some of the negotiations. But, I don’t think you did enough. You settled for too little. When you were chatting with the celebrities, you seemed a little bit star struck and accepted whatever minimal things they offered. The other team asked for really big items and they managed to get most of them. You asked for next to nothing and that’s what you got.

Leslie: You showed enthusiasm for this project and you did well enough in some of the negotiations. Obviously it was not enough, since your team lost. But, I think I can give you a “pass” this week.

David: Uh, oh. Your cover has been blown. Charles noticed that your main contribution to most tasks is to stand around and do nothing. So did many of the other team members. Even Merv Griffin noticed that you didn’t do much more than take notes. And, in the conference room, most of your own teammates pointed to you and said that you didn’t do anything useful this week or in any other week.

You really put the noose around your neck when you told Martha that you just wanted to run the Internet portion of her business. You may be great at that, but that’s not the job that Martha is hiring for.

But, it was ultimately your lack of experience that did you in. Your pretty boy looks got you this far in the game, but, once all the really poor players were gone, your looks didn’t count for much and Martha realized that you really hadn’t ever helped the team.

I must point out that I warned you that this would happen, way back in week one. You never really stepped up and provided anything useful to the team, and that’s why you have been sent back to school.

Marcela: You were the project leader. You did recognize that you couldn’t negotiate with all four celebrities yourself and needed to delegate. And, even when you were present at the negotiations, you wisely let the people who had the best connections do the talking.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough. Perhaps what you should have done was to watch over the negotiations and then try to squeeze just a little bit more out of each celebrity.

This whole task was about getting the most out of each celebrity and putting together a package that was incredibly appealing to the bidders. You assembled rather bland packages and your team lost because of it.

You mostly got lucky that David’s inexperience finally caught up with him on the same week that you were on the chopping block. Oh, and by the way, your team doesn’t really like you. You were the last one picked to be on the team. Sure, you were able to make a good salad dressing and save yourself for a week, but your team will kick you out whenever they can.

Now, everybody get the hell out of my office. I’ve got real work to do. I’ll call in the ten remaining players for another performance review next week.

Bill (bing@paxentertainment.com) is a huge reality show fan. He often wears his Survivor dog tags. He’s wearing a set of Guatemala tags right now, as a matter of fact.

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