The Apprentice

I was suffering from Post-Vacation Malaise last night so I was mindlessly flipping through the tv channels and came upon The Apprentice on NBC. In this show 16 people; 8 men and 8 women, vie for the chance to become Donald Trump's assistant. Normally, I just flip on past this kind of stuff, but something caught my attention and I hung on for a while.

In the first episode, the contestants were divided into two teams based on their gender. What caught my eye, and the reason I watched the show for a while, was that I wanted to watch the differences between how the men and women interact with their teammates.

This episode featured an interesting challenge. Each team was given $250 to start a lemonade stand. The team who made the most would win.

The teams ended up interacting as I suspected they would. The men displayed a certain macho - mine's bigger than yours - attitude toward each other, but generally buried their egos in order to sell the Lemonade. (There was one guy who couldn't seem to handle this and he instead tried to talk one potential customer into buying a glass of lemonade for a thousand dollars.) After getting a restaurant owner to donate some equipment and purchasing the rest of their supplies they seemed like they were off to a good start.

The women bickered and back-stabbed each other over who would control the team. They got lost trying to meet up after determining a location and one of the members actually took some time off to go get lunch. This burned up a lot of time so they ended up doing something quite expected. That's right, they resorted to sex.

The women chosen for this show are all attractive and most of them seem to know it. Although they had much less time, they sold their lemonade for $4 or $5 a glass by doing things like giving the customer (guys) a kiss or including their phone number. The halter top and other sexy outfits didn't hurt either. This article does a great job of describing the whole -using sex to sell- dynamic in this episode.

My wife asked me why the men didn't use sex to sell their lemonade. I knew this would never work because, "women don't care about sex", at least not like the men. Unfortunately she didn't contradict me on this point. The poor guys worked hard and managed to double their money, but they ultimately lost. The women quadrupled their money. How depressing.

For their effort, the women's team "won" a trip to The Donald's Penthouse. Of course, it's filled to the gills with the same kind of stuff that Saddam Hussein seemed to prefer in his palaces. The episode was interesting enough, but I just can't handle the arrogance of Trump. Apparently, he's the Executive Producer of the show.

A good part of the show seems to revolve around Trump and how he's such a shrewd businessman, judger of personality, etc. I'm not sure I buy that and even if it's true, it's hard to watch. The fact that the women were able to succeed by acting like glorified prostitutes didn't sit too well with me either. I don't know. Maybe I'm just bitter because the guys lost.