Escape From Pianosa

I may have told you this weekend with great excitement about a groundbreaking new sitcom that takes places in a terrorist training camp. The terrorists were all named Abdul, and everyone was portrayed as an hapless idiot–a terrorist parody. Edgy but hilarious.

And unfortunately, not real. Turns out it was an April fool’s day hoax from NPR’s On The Media. I’m disappointed, as I was looking forward to the show…

Sadly, Aaron’s bid to be the next Apprentice has come to an end. You can watch the final episode here.

Aaron was the latest victim of an unforgiving format that tends to ignore past performance and focus squarely on “what have you done for me in the last 24 hours?” Despite having won two weeks in a row, Trump (and the producers) came down on Aaron. This seems to fit the pattern in which the losing project manager gets canned, barring any really obnoxious or poor behavior by one of the losing team members.

The only thing that really bugged me was how they set it up, to portray him as quiet and ineffectual. The big deal about not speaking up the ‘week’ before in the boardroom was ridiculous. Trump thoroughly dominates the boardroom and having the winning PM in there with him is so gimmicky. I mean, as part of a job interview, you’re encouraging the prospective hire to criticize his team members and create drama? Ah yes, teamwork. As in the team working together to boost ratings. That’s reality TV for ya…

Last night I went to a premier party for Season 6 of The Apprentice. My good friend Aaron Altscher is on the show this year and his parents threw a big bash to celebrate. He was also kind enough to link to me from his site. Something tells me he’ll be sending me more traffic than I send him!

We’re all super excited for him and so far it looks like he’s been playing the game well. Early on, you want to fly under the radar, something that Aaron managed quite well in the first episode. And something that Frank seems to have trouble with. NBC has dubbed him “The Mouth” and you’d be hard pressed to come up with a better nickname.

Being the project manager is always hard when you just met everyone on your team and you have no idea what their strengths might be. And the PM is almost always on the hot seat for the losing team, unless one of the team members screwed up royally, putting the PM in the awkward position of blaming his team for the failure. I’ve never been to B-school but something tells me that “When things go bad, blame your team” isn’t something they teach you in leadership class.

On the other hand, all that fighting makes for some good TV… I’ll be interested to see how Aaron handles this sticky situation if it happens to him.

I’ve been having TV envy lately. OK, not really because I don’t watch much TV–although I don’t hold it over anyone’s head. I actually like a lot of TV shows but not enough to make them a priority–except for The Wire and pretty much anything else HBO produces.

Anyway, I went to look at a house yesterday and what do I see in the living room? A humongous flat-panel TV that must’ve cost at least $1000. And what else did I see in the living room? Nothing. As in no furniture whatsoever. No furniture upstairs in the bedrooms either. I can understand the desire to have a very large television, but at the cost of furniture? I don’t pretend to know what’s best for other people, but that certainly boggles my mind.