Maybe it was the editing. It had to have been the editing. Because there's just no way any group of 9 promising, well-educated business people could possibly be as incompetent as the "book smarts" team on tonight's season premiere. Nobody made a good decision during the entire task. The "street smarts" team, on the other hand, appeared impeccably on the ball. Given the nature of the teams and the story Burnett obviously wanted to tell, the editing is clearly a huge factor here. But no matter how you edit it, Danny's a loony tune. An incompetent loony tune who had no answers for any of the questions posed by the Burger King executive. This guy cannot possibly be long for the show.
What irked me most, however, was how they never explained how the NetWorth team was able to afford to purchase plane tickets as a promotion and not have it count against their bottom line. Did the teams each get a budget? Because the Magna team sure didn't seem to spend anything. Those kind of details are frequently omitted on The Apprentice, which makes it very hard for viewers to evaluate what's happening. Not that viewers seem to care...
Posted by Peter at January 21, 2005 12:25 AMI wasn't paying attention, but the show was on in the background. I did hear something along the lines of "Whoever's team has the highest revenue wins". I assumed that was a slip, and should have been profit, but it sounds like they just looked at the # of burgers sold * the unit sales price.
Posted by: Jeremy Friesen on January 21, 2005 06:24 AMMaybe I'm wrong but I think it did count against them. I believe they only won the task by around $50 (like approx $580 - $530) and yet sold a
significantly greater number of burgers (like 180 to 110). Carolyn and George certainly cited both of these numbers but my memory of them could be very off.
I agree that I don't trust the editing this season.
Posted by: Aaron on January 21, 2005 08:14 AMI was also waiting for the other shoe to fall. I saw Tana's face light up when George announced the results, and I was waiting for it to darken when he subtracted the cost of the Vegas tickets. But it was never brought up. I don't recall there being any mention of a budget, but I could be wrong.
I think Peter is right. I believe there is a "lesson" that Burnett/Trump are going to be cramming down our throats in the coming weeks -- that the Street Smarties are better business folk than the Book Smarties. I feel bad for the Book Smarties. It's obvious they didn't realize coming in that they were going to be set up to fail.
Oh, and Danny, heh heh. Send this guy a copy of TuneBaya, pronto!
Posted by: Stephen Glenn on January 21, 2005 10:58 AMI think the whole thing is kind of dumb, anyway.
Look: the Street Smarts people have at LEAST four years of hands-on "real world" experience over the Book Smarts people. And why that's especially HUGE is that almost ALL of the challenges on the show are, essentially, hands-on challenges. They're all about *producing* - about getting very short-term results.
So whereas Education may give you a leg up in the actual corporate world, Experience is what's gonna count in the trenches - especially short-term.
I don't see this as fair fight at all.
Posted by: Dave on January 21, 2005 11:35 AM