Television of the Weak: There's Only Two Things I Do Well Sweetheart, And Skating's The Other One

It's Marty on Celebrity Apprentice, Zeb on Lost, and Tucker on 24.

The Celebrity Apprentice – “Deep Seated in Security”
Martin Brown

Here’s something that’s awesome about The Celebrity Apprentice: I get the feeling that very few of the people participating in it have actually watched any of the previous seasons. There’s a really interesting tug between the self-editing that goes on with the contestants that want to see themselves in the best light, and the actual editors, who typically have no problem dismantling celebrity personas. One of the show’s major themes—one that comes through especially in this week’s episode—is that trying to be likable gets in the way of getting the job done.

Obviously, Exhibit A here is Rod Blagojevich. The former Illinois governor is not on the show to raise money for charity (though I’m sure that’s a nice potential side-effect), but as a form of damage control. His motives are transparent. Presumably, he believes that Mark Burnett, Donald Trump, and their crew are all there to help him clear his good name. As long as he gives them positive sound bites, he thinks, they’ll make him look good. If he had watched one episode before signing on, he would have realized immediately that no one is immune to the edit.

Instead of painting him heroically, the producers of The Celebrity Apprentice are representing Blagojevich as a man-child who can barely tie his own shoes—at least, not without doing some campaigning before putting the left loop over the right loop. Walking down a New York City street, he’s compelled to shake every single person’s hand. When anyone asks him a question that requires him to have any sort of opinion, the response is a stream of “um”s, until whoever asked the question just wearily moves on. When describing an argument with project leader Michael Johnson, he says, “I would have preferred more discussion. You’ve got to deliberate. When I was governor… And I believe I was a great governor, giving every child health care in my state, preschool for all the three and four-year-olds, didn’t raise taxes on people, seniors get free public transportation, and I had to work around gridlock to get it. But that’s not what’s happening here.” The only good that can possibly come from this is that now Will Farrell can play Blagojevich in the inevitable movie.

Watching Blagojevich’s inept politicking is painful, but it’s not nearly as painful as watching Summer Saunders try to lead her team. Saunders volunteers to be Project Manager for this week’s task, which involves creating an ad for Norton’s identity protection software. This results in a barrage of clips revealing her inability to form a complete thought, which culminates in her attempt to explain the ad’s concept to her photographer:

SUMMER: We need to EDUCATE people through a photo essay. We’re educating… um… um… uh… So, we have a picture… The first one is just a picture of myself? With a baby. So as soon as the… the… kinda the… um… Do you understand?

SUMMER (Interview): Oh my gosh, the meeting with the photographer. First of all, he looked at our concept. And I just would look at him, and he looked as if he had the blankest look on his face, like if he had no clue what I was talking about. And I was like: “I don’t really know what I’m talking about.”

PHOTOGRAPHER: Okay, I need you guys to really tell me what you want. So, as much specific information as possible. It’s really important to get your concept together for me, so that when I start making photographs, I’m following your direction.

SUMMER: Okay.

PHOTOGRAPHER: But I can’t follow your direction if you haven’t given it to me.

SUMMER: Okay, so I… So what you’re saying is that I haven’t given it to you yet?

Yet, watching Summer speak was only half as rough as watching her whenever Cyndi Lauper spoke. Lauper’s voice appears to cause Summer Saunders actual, physical discomfort. However, when Saunders has the opportunity to air her complains about Cyndi in the boardroom, she does it in the most passive aggressive way possible:

TRUMP: Summer, how do you like your team?

SUMMER: I love my team. I couldn’t love my team any more than I do.

TRUMP: Every one of them.

SUMMER: Yeah. I might have issues with things they do, but I love every single one of them.

TRUMP: What were the issues?

SUMMER: (Pause.) I love Cyndi Lauper. I absolutely love her. I love her stories.

TRUMP: What does that mean?

SUMMER: Well, we had X amount of time to get our stuff done, and her stories are so awesome! And I want to hear them!

CYNDI LAUPER: I was telling you stories while you were trying to work?

SUMMER: No. But you try and explain things and you… at the end you come back, and your end result is great! But in the process of getting there, it kind of gets us off track.

This is made even more excruciating by the fact that she apologizes minutes later for hurting Cyndi’s feelings.

Ultimately, Summer and her team end up winning the task, anyway. Michael Johnson—who it turns out is kindof a dick—is the Project Manager of the losing team, and takes full responsibility for their loss (even though he side-swipes Blagojevich and Bret Michaels in the process.) It is certain that Johnson will be sent packing until Darryl Strawberry volunteers to be fired. Despite protests from Johnson (who wants Trump to let Strawberry quit and then fire someone else) and the rest of the team, Strawberry admits that he’s tired and he wants to go home. Trump lets him go.

The funniest part of the whole thing is that he was playing for The Darryl Strawberry Foundation.

Lost – "The Package"
Zeb L. West

This is just an episode of random shit.

So, instead of ripping it apart piece-by-piece like I usually do… I think I’ll just post some crackin’ Hurley fan art, and intersperse a few random-ass thoughts.

The reason why I think these flash-sideways scenes are so useless is that they can’t possibly provide enough context for us to glean anything useful about the state of the relationships. For example, in the parallel universe, shouldn’t Jin and Sun still be stuck in their surly, loveless marriage, like they were in season one? At what point did Jin forgive Sun for subjecting him to the harsh regime of her father – all that shame and rage which made his character so fully formed is just kind of a swirl of question marks in the flash sideways scenes.

Sun gets hit on the head because she runs full-speed into a tree. She blames smokemonster Locke for this, and subsequently forgets English. Sun forgets the English language. She forgets how to speak English and she can’t speak English anymore (except she can still write it). She forgets English. Can’t talk English. Fucking brilliant writer-dudes. Did you google ‘plot twists’ on your iphone while you were taking a dump or something? Fuck you.

Everyone’s favorite sociopath, the deliciously creepy Martin Keamy, returns to die his third death on the show. Maybe he’s died more times, but he’s definitely deserved it every time. He’s almost got his operatic Christopher Walken quality, which is so totally unpredictable. Like a soft-spoken kind of madness, that just delights in malice. His lips are just so weird.

Tina Fey has another brilliant cameo as Charles Widmore’s pet geophysicist. She’s the best thing to happen to this show since Nathan Fillion came out of nowhere to dress up like a cop and fuck Kate. (Which, for her, was a demonstration of uncharacteristically good taste)

Tim O’Neill had a fiery rebuttal in the comments section of last week’s column. It made me think that the folks who desire a conclusive mystery (and frankly, I’m not imagining that they’d switch to some completely ambiguous ending at this point – far too late for that) don’t mind a long scene at the end where the detective paces around the sitting room, thumbing his ascot and puffing his calabash, monologue-ing a full chapter’s worth of post-coital exposition. I guess to me, it’s a fine way to end a mystery novel, but a terrible way to end a story!

I think you’re onto something there Damon Blake about Richard’s flashback standing out due to its difference, but I would have loved to have seen the one singular flash-forward in the first season to balance it out, so that it seems more like a choice, rather than a narrative convenience.

24 - "5:00AM - 6:00AM"

Back when the writer's strike was going on, there was some forty-year old dude who screamed at a picket line that all them writers "better not fuck up 24".

One doubts that Fox executives will have to worry about that kind of rage anytime soon.

As bad as this season has been--and sure, it's been a consistent disappointment, what with its low bodycount and the 'whoever's available' casting choices--there's always been a sense that some of that old magic could come right back. After all, 24 is a really easy show to fix, it's built completely out of base pleasures. If it wants to get better, it can, all that has to happen is for a situation to arise where it becomes necessary for Jack to kill people, torture a traitor, and force an innocent car salesman to sacrifice their life. That's the draw of the show--it's not about good writing, it isn't about good plots, it's about the twists and the fact that nobody watching it ever cared if the terrorists were successful or not. In fact, the show's usually at its best right after the bad guys do something really fucking horrible. (Michelle Dessler couldn't have shot a fat real estate agent if that British guy hadn't infected a hotel with PsychoEbola, Jack never would have wrestled a helicopter if the California Nuke hadn't exploded, and hey, the whole point of the Habib Marwan season was that Habib Marwan won 23 out of 24 times, despite wearing a flannel shirt for a good portion of that time period.)

Fortunately enough, this episode had a taste of that kind of spice, with Jack, Renee and some nameless woman throwing down on an American military spec ops team, killing all but one with little more than their best approximation of FPS techniques, and it doesn't look like Starbuck is going to be shy about choking her way through some of her coworkers, which is going to put her first in line for the torture seat, which has been hot and empty since the season began. (Of course, there's also the Future Dead Body played by Freddie Prinze Jr, who either exists so that he can eventually be killed in semi-heroic fashion, or will be revealed as a fellow traitor in a later episode, in which case he will eventually be killed in a semi-rawdog fashion.)

So the question becomes: who will survive for the eventual shitty movie? Jack's got the gig, that's for sure. But besides him, Chloe is the only character left on the show (excepting Agent Aaron Pierce, who is sure to arrive at some point in the next few episodes) who can seriously be considered as contender, meaning that everybody is fair game. Assuming that 24 plays to form, which it of course will, since playing to form is both the reason it got popular and the reason it's been cancelled, there's going to be a plot shift in the next few episodes that will serve as engine until the first commercial break of show's final episode, where an unexpected twist will dictate everything that happens until the final two minutes. (And those last two minutes are going to be the first time in a long time that 24 is completely unpredictable, unless they cut to Jack holding his granddaughter and smiling, which is just stupid enough to be possible.) In between all of that?

The bodies have to hit the floor. There's been no real domestic crisis working in the background, no slow burn marriage heading towards collapse, no dismantled family at violent cross purposes, making it all but required that multiple castmembers find themselves at the end of loaded guns--that's where the show always goes when the pulpier episodes at the end turn up. (24 is usually filmed over a ten month period, and the show's last six episodes--if not more--are usually the ones written the fastest, churned out with deadlines looming.) From here on out, it's time for blood.

-Martin Brown & Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Tim O'Neil]

I wonder - do you think the Lost folks knew where they were going, or were they at least partly making it up as they went along? Maybe this has been answered elsewhere. Based on what I've seen, a number of people online seem to think that they were just throwing shit on the wall and seeing what stuck all these seasons, so an incoherent finale would be basically a cop-out - whereas, I think, a more ambiguous ending would be fine if it was obvious that this was where they were heading all along.

The example I'll use is the Sopranos, which I think was on the whole a borderline mediocre definitely overrated show that was - after a lackluster last couple of seasons - nevertheless partially salvaged by a phenomenal, perfectly ambiguous ending. But it didn't feel like a leftfield cheat (to me at least), because the main questions that needed to be answered were answered, and the questions left unanswered were left unanswered for damn good reasons. I think there is a distinction between that and, say, the X-Files, which basically just blew up the whole thing because they had no fucking idea where the hell the show was going after a certain point. The questions left unanswered by the end of that show (for those who still bothered to tune in) were questions that the audience had given up any hope of ever having properly answered, so the ending was more a mercy killing than anything else.

Which one do you think Lost resembles more, at this point? (And yes, I confess, I am sort of feeling out here to see if there's any point in me ever picking up the show on DVD.)

[Matthew J. Brady]

Oh, god, fucking Blagojevich. I can't tell you how many times I heard him on TV saying that same shit about all the great things he's done. He can't go five minutes without listing his supposed accomplishments; it must be insufferable to be in the same room with him. That's what cracks me up about him: that he thinks if he did something good, it exempts him from any crimes. I still remember the press conference he held when he was about to get impeached; he dragged a bunch of people in wheelchairs up on stage with him to illustrate something or other about how he never did anything wrong. It was hilarious.

As for 24, what was the big plot twist that people should supposedly be upset about? I saw a local news blurb that said something along those lines, but never heard the actual report. Did the president say she was a socialist or something? And is that picture an actual screencap, or some promotional thing. Because it is also quite hilarious, either way.

[Dave]

Tim, to somewhat answer your question about Lost, I remember reading an article in Entertainment Weekly years ago where they recounted the writing staff explaining the season 1 finale to an executive. The writers tell him "So they open the hatch, and there's a guy inside sitting at a computer, and he has to enter this code every 108 minutes."

The executive quite understandably asks "what happens if he doesn't enter the code?"

The writers stare at each other for a few seconds, then turn back to the executive and say "we'll figure that out next season."

[seth hurley]

If 24 doesn't end with Tony & Jack cradling each other as they both bleed out I will be as angry as the people who are bothered that Lost wasn't planned from the beginning.

[sean witzke]

I hope the 24 movie is just a republican-ass remake of Spartan.

[Nathan]

"From here on out, it's time for blood."

Indeed my good sir, indeed.

"I hope the 24 movie is just a republican-ass remake of Spartan. "

I would pay good money to see that.