The Apprentice LA - Episode 13

Here in LA, it’s finale week. It’s been busy. It’s been chaotic. And at the moment, it’s terribly hungover in my bed here in my hotel room going back and forth between, “Oh god, what the hell happened last night” and “It doesn’t matter, nothing could ever be embarrassing again if under 4 million people witnessed it so who cares.”

And of course, we’ll get into the last few days in great detail shortly. First, though, we’ll dive back into the show, and back up 3 days to the last day of episode 12 (day 36 overall).

So, back at the Pondy, we’re all summoned to the Flop at 6pm, and told that there would be no more firings—there would be 4 finalists this year instead of 2. Then she told us that there would be 2 teams of 2 competing in the final task, and that each team had chosen 2 of us to bring back. This was odd—a 2 on 2 finale? What the hell? As had become customary, we were confused.

So she announces who the “helpers” will be. Nicole and Frank will be a team, and they are bringing back Tim [applause]…and Surya [applause]. James and Stefanie are a team, bringing back Aaron [applause]…and Angela [applause]. None of this was a surprise. Think about it—the finalists were all Arrow, and didn’t really know anyone on Kinetic. So the options from Arrow were Martin, Carey, Michelle, Aaron, Surya, and me. The first three were not happening, for various reasons. That left the last 3. For the final pick, James and Stef wanted someone with task experience, but Kristine and Heidi would be completely exhausted from the last task. Angela seemed pleasant enough, so they went with her. Seemed like a weird choice watching the episode, but given the options, it made sense.

I learned that at the Pondy, a lot of people had really wanted to be called back. I knew I was going to get a lot of air time throughout the season, so it didn’t even cross my mind to want to be called back, other than the fact that it would make you look like a strong player. In my case, it would have looked pretty bad if I hadn’t been called back, and if it weren’t for that, I would have preferred to lounge around at the Pondy for 3 more days. Remember how happy I had been two days earlier not to have a task the next day? Suddenly, I’m told I have to be in my suit at the van outside at 4:45am the next morning, to embark on a 40-hour task and undoubtedly work through the night—to try to win a task that I’m not really competing in. Not exactly something I was looking forward to.

Worse, I love to dive head first into a task, and get ultra-competitive and go all out to win. The problem is, Surya and I would have to be careful. On the way over the next morning, I remember saying to him, “This cannot be about me and you—we can’t come up with the central idea or have any kind of crucial role. We have to make sure Nikki and Frank shine here, not us, or the producers will make a big deal out of that to make them look bad.” And that’s just not fun.

Plus, I’d be fighting 40 hours to help the girl who had just read my note aloud and the guy who had just joined forces against me in the boardroom become The Next Apprentice. Yay!

One upside was the hilarious dynamic between Surya/me and Angela/Aaron throughout the task. On the way over, we kept saying things like, “you’re going DOWN” to each other, none of us really caring that much about the outcome, and when the two teams would run into each other mid-task, instead of the usual awkward, tense glances, the four us would give each other the finger, etc.

So anyway, we arrive at the house, and we’re held outside on lockdown for 20 minutes while they get the cameras in position to capture the moment when we walk in the house. Finally, we head in, and I give extremely awkward hugs to Frank, James, and Stef, while Surya and Frank endured the fact that Surya and Frank were on the same team (this sub-plot amused me). Nicole was nowhere to be found (they showed me stomping around the background looking for her like a madman). She finally emerged, and we hugged, and talked about how we know they’re gonna try to do the whole “Nicole and Tim seem more focused on each other than winning the task” thing to add drama, so let’s not give that to them—let’s stay away from each other during the task. This seemed obvious to both of us.

So the teams get in their vans and head to Universal Studios to meet the big guy. He arrives with Ivanka, Don Jr., and Don Jr.’s head.

The first thing he does is check out the four who were picked to come back—“Four great choices,” he says. He gave Surya a little extra nod—he really liked that guy.

We’re told that our task would be to create a 60-second video for Renuzit, an air freshener, that would be played in a movie theater in front of a live audience. This was weird for a few reasons:

1) We just did that exact task week 9, except it was for Softscrub instead of Renuzit.

2) It was the final task. For the past 5 seasons, the finale has always been based on each finalist running a huge event, like a concert, or a celebrity charity event. There were always 840 moving parts, and a huge crowd, and celebrities, and it was always this massive 1-on-1 showdown. And we were doing a one-minute air freshener video?? That was the final task? Pretty fucking lame.

3) It was 2-on-2, which was weird, and it was a creative task, which is stupid because the 2 helpers could come up with the idea, and then what the hell do you do? In the past, the final task has been all about management, and delegation, and logistics nightmares—tasks which call for real leadership. Throughout the season, the creative tasks required one good idea and good execution, more than delegation and leadership.

Then again, I had spent much of the past month showering in an outhouse, so I shouldn’t have expected anything reasonable anyway.

So we head to our set, which consisted of a bunch of different rooms and settings—the dossier insisted that we were not allowed to use any of the sets depicting a home (I’m not sure why). So we were limited to the rest—which included a courtroom, a hospital, and an office.

In our meeting with the executives, they had stressed two keys to their product:

1) Their demographic, which was the “Super-Mom”—the attractive, working mother who is “always prepared.”

2) The fact that the product gets rid of odors in the air, on the floor, and on fabric, by caging odors and basically dismantling them.

So, once on the set decided to go with the office and hospital room. The basic story would be that super-mom, who states at the beginning that she’s “always prepared,” gets called to the hospital where her son is injured. She makes him feel better by setting up the area around his bed just like his room at home. He replies that something is still missing, so she sprays the Renuzit (in the air, on the floor, and on the bed fabric), and he says, “now it feels like home.”

In theory, a good idea.

But a couple things went wrong.

1) This was a lot to do in 60 seconds, and we never quite got the whole “mom is turning the hospital room into home, capped off by the smell of Renuzit” thing across. It just seemed like she was making a smelly hospital room smell better (which is dumb, because it implies that hospital rooms smell bad, which wasn’t our original point at all).

2) After we settled on the story, Surya and Nicole stayed around to write the script, and Frank and I headed to the prop house. In the prop house, Frank started freaking out about the fact that we hadn’t added humor in at all, and we came up with the idea to have a smelly guy in the bed next to the kid. This, as it turns out, was a bad idea for two reasons: It distracted from our whole point that she’s making an ordinary-smelling hospital room smell like home, and somewhere along the line, smelly dude ended up looking like a homeless guy, which was not at all our intent (this was helped by Frank yelling, “Where’s da bum?! Bring him in!”, which of course made the edit and extinguished any doubt that he was just a smelly patient).

So, if our original idea was an A-, our finished product was a C+.

Anyway, some other notes from the day:

--When Frank and I arrived at the prop house, we were horrified to see that it was an antique prop house. Luckily, we didn’t need that many props for this, and we could make do with the clothing they had (we picked out a ragged old outfit for the smelly guy—which of course makes him look like a fucking homeless guy. I’m not sure why neither of us realized this at the time). I remember when Frank was freaking out suddenly about the idea in that prop house, it was exactly the way he freaked out in the SmartMouth task. Basically, he throws a ton of doubt into the air, and asks the people around him to either reassure him, or fix it somehow, but has no ideas of his own. However, I don’t think he did this strategically—I just think that he would genuinely get worried.

--We got back and Surya and Frank directed, and Nicole, who had written the script and would be doing the editing, stayed on the side to watch the shot on a monitor and give them input. I sat there with her watching, and took notes on timing, etc.

In reality, Nicole and I sat there doing what we were supposed to be doing, but they showed a couple clips of us laughing to make it look like we were sitting there flirting. This was frustrating to watch, because I had even said at the beginning that the editors would jump on any opportunity to do this. And we had stayed apart the whole time, except for this. So, as much as I’m bitching about them pulling that whole thing, I knew they were going to do that, and should have stuck by the original idea not to give them anything to do it with.

They also showed Nicole jumping up when the executives showed up, suddenly pretending like she was leading. This, hilariously, was not editing—that’s exactly what happened. And it was my idea. I blatantly said to her, when I saw them walk in, “the executives just arrived, head over there and direct with Frank,” not considering that they might expose this in the episode. Kind of funny. In an awkward way.

--After filming everything, we went to the editing studio, where Nicole did her thing with the editing. Frank was nervous about not participating, and annoyed her a little, but they played that up in the episode. After they finished, I added the music in.

So anyway, the next day, we headed to the movie theater, and played our commercial to a live crowd, before the movie. They seemed to like it enough, and there was loud laughter during the smelly guy part, and we left feeling pretty good.

We went back to the house, and talked with the other team, and waited around, until finally we were all called into the boardroom.

The assigned seats had me sitting apart from Nicole, and when we went in, one of the first things Trump said was, “Tim, I see you’re not sitting next to Nicole—what’s going on??” I was pretty sick of this bullshit, especially considering that he had just fired me for getting together with her, and now he was acting all disappointed in me that we weren’t sitting next to each other. Pretty fucking infuriating. So I said, “No, these are just assigned seats.” You never bring up anything to do with production in the boardroom, and as soon as I said this, both Trump and Ivanka immediately turned their heads away and started talking to one of the other cast members. HA FUCKING HA. What’s he gonna do, fire me again?

So they play both videos in the boardroom (the first time we had seen the other team’s video), and we all criticize each other’s videos for awhile. The bad thing was that both Ivanka and Don Jr. came out firing at us—this seemed like a predetermined response by both of them, and it told me that we had “lost” the task (maybe production decided they wanted us to be the losers, maybe Ivanka and Don actually liked the other’s more—there’s no way of telling). So the only question was whether these videos would play into the final decision at the finale. We had no idea whether they were going to fire people based on these videos or not.

However, Surya and I ended up with a definite edge over Aaron and Angela in the “helpers critiques of each other’s movies” battle. And almost every attack that came from Ivanka and Don was batted down pretty well by our team. At one point, Don Jr. attacked, “the mother has a Renuzit bottle in her purse, that’s not realistic!” To which I responded, “their video has a guy on trial for sanitary reasons—neither of us was going for reality, both were a metaphor.” To which Trump said, “Good point.” And this happened multiple times.

The scary thing was that these attacks weren’t even that good, as if production had already made a bigger decision than anything in this boardroom could sway…

He also asked the four helpers which of our two “leaders” we liked more. Both Surya and I said Nicole, and both Aaron and Angela waffled and said they liked both. I squeezed into my answer that Nicole and Surya are both people with exceptional integrity, while James and Stef seemed to consistently do whatever it takes to get ahead, honest or not (I left Frank out, as a little passive jab). A little vengeful observation by Tim! Cheers!

Anyway, after awhile, Trump dismissed the four helpers. We said good luck to everyone, and headed out. They took our mics off for the last time, and we got in the van back to the Pondy, having no idea whether he’d be firing people that night or not.

This was a funny van ride. Just moments earlier, we had been adamantly arguing in favor of our respective finalists and videos, and suddenly, we were all like, “Uh, I don’t really care—you?”

So we got back to the flop, where everyone was waiting anxiously to hear what had happened, and a few hours later, the four finalists returned, none fired.

And for the first time, ever, I could talk to Nicole, camera-free. After 6 weeks, this was the first time we had ever spoken without someone listening. How weird is that?

The next day, the 8 people who participated in the final task all went on long interviews, and then the whole cast went back to the house for a photo shoot. No mics, no cameras, no hedge (it had been taken down), no producers. Just the 18 of us hanging around the pool. Bizarre.

That night we all went out to a Mexican restaurant and got trashed together. Fun times.

The next day we did a bit more filming (those promo shots of us all walking together in teams in slow motion), and in the afternoon, 45 days after we had first arrived, vans were there to take us all to the airport.

It was over.

* * *

We had a long time to wait until the premiere. Normally, shows that air in January film in the fall. But because NBC had originally intended for the show to air in the fall, we had filmed in the summer (the air date changed just prior to filming). In the long months that followed, I stayed in decent touch with much of the task.

Nicole and I, naturally, have discussed and analyzed the thing to no end (we end up in a fight every time we talk about episode 10). After the filming, she and I both thought that she and James were the favorites, Frank a very distant third, and Stefanie with no shot at all. And it wasn’t just us, other cast members agreed that it seemed to be between Nicole and James. However, now, after watching 13 episodes, Nicole has not gotten a great edit, especially in the last two episodes, while Stefanie has looked great, if fairly invisible. Now, it seems, James and Stefanie are the favorites. Who the hell knows, though. Anything can happen. He might even hire two.

And now, with the finale looming in 40 hours, I’m here in bed, hungover, and I can’t believe this whole thing is over tomorrow. What a fun ride it’s been.

And so, I’ll now return to the present time, with a recap of the past few days—

Nikki arrived here on Wednesday, and on Thursday she, as a finalist, was told to be in NBC studios in the afternoon for a quick interview. I accompanied her, and we arrived to find James, Stefanie, and Frank sitting in the lobby.

Whoa.

So many things to say about this.

On the surface, it was cordial and secretly tense—a surreal combination of genuine excitement to see each other, and awkwardness because of the 394 different reasons that things were awkward. Underneath, it was bizarre—we spent the entire summer together and hadn’t seen each other since, except we had seen each other every week, except now it was in person again. It had all started 10 months ago, with the 5 of us sitting around together with a bunch of cameras around. Then we went back to our individual worlds as we became a TV show and we talked to everyone we knew about these exact people. And suddenly, there the 5 of us were again, sitting around together. Team Arrow reunited! Except not really at all! Now add in the extreme awkwardness of the fact that the four of them, currently hugging and smiling, will be tearing each other apart on national TV—live from the Hollywood Bowl!—in 3 days. Then, add a dash of “we all just watched James, Frank, and Stef triple-stab Tim in the boardroom,” and a pinch of “Oh yeah, Tim and Nikki are actually dating in real life.”

And then there was this—James, Stef, Nicole and Frank were ready for their interviews, looking shiny, in business attire. Me—sneakers, jeans, and a white t-shirt. I wouldn’t be partaking in an interview.

Because I had been fired.

The end result of all of this was a big vat of awkward cocktail. Luckily, the 9 distinct elephants in the room quickly drank it, since you know how long those thirsty elephants trek through the desert every year to get to that delicious water hole.

Anyway, Frank grabbed lunch with me and Nikki afterwards, the highlight for me occurring when we were all standing outside waiting for a table and someone came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re on The Apprentice, right?” with no acknowledgment of the other two. Good times. Of course, 3 seconds into lunch the three of us are right back in the exact same dynamic we were 10 month ago. It was a good time—I had kind of forgotten that Frank and I were pretty good friends. And yes, he’s just as animated and loud and absurd in reality as he appears to be on the show—maybe more so. He’s kind of like someone doing an impression of Frank.

So that was Thursday.

Friday night would bring new adventures.

Since most of us will be somewhat light on the drinking Saturday night to avoid being hungover during the live show, Friday night was the night. A bunch of us went to dinner, drinking heavily throughout, and then to a bar near our hotel (we’re all staying in the same hotel, even people from LA—production insists). The crowd consisted of: Me, Nikki, Jen, Aimee, Marisa, Frank, James, Aaron, Martin, Carey, and Surya. Naturally, there are stories.

First of all, it’s funny how all the guys look completely identical to how they looked on the show, and the girls are all almost unrecognizable. We have hair doing all kinds of fancy, weird things, and being all kinds of different colors, and with all their makeup and their clothes—they just all looked different at first. The one exception on the guys front—Surya cut his hair! You’ll have to see it to believe it.

Carey brought his boyfriend, Marisa brought her boyfriend, who was 8’3”, and James was there with his wife, who is kind of shy and adorable. We had a nice conversation, during which two of the elephants from yesterday morphed out of the wall to join us—the “we both just watched James trash Tim in his interviews and in the boardroom” elephant, and the “Tim is clearly rooting for Nikki on Sunday” elephant. I gotta say, I’m growing accustomed to these elephants, attached even. They’ve become like pets. And they’re relatively low-maintenance—all they need is grass, and their delicious water hole, and they’re happy.

Other amusing interactions included every Aaron-Aimee interaction, drunk Nikki interacting with anyone, and me, Frank, and James talking after we were all liquored up. First James imitated Frank’s racist interview in episode 13 (where he called James, who’s Korean, something along the lines of “that chinee with the spiky hair”). Frank laughed awkwardly while wishing he was 6,000 miles away. Then we reminisced about me being “wet behind the ears” and Frank being an “errand boy.” Then, I did an imitation of Frank trashing me in an interview about getting involved with Nikki. Yes, we all had a good, hearty laugh—we had all ripped each other apart just days ago in front of 10 million people! All for one and one for all!

The climax of the night occurred shortly after. The bar was a piano bar, where the music is purely provided by a singing piano player. Two of Nikki’s friends, Frank, and Aaron decide that it’s a good idea to get the guy on the piano to announce that “Tim, from the Apprentice, will be playing a song for everyone.” This was unbeknownst to me. About 13 drinks deep, I apparently agreed that this was a good idea, because 2 minutes later, I found myself stumbling up onto the stage, demanding that Frank holds the harmonica in front of my mouth so I can play it while playing the piano.

And suddenly, there I was, belting out Piano Man in front of the whole bar. One problem:

I was 13 drinks deep.

Here’s how it generally works—when I’m sober my piano-playing is a 9/10, my singing is a 5/10, and my confidence level is an 8/10. When I’m drunk, my piano playing is a 5/10, my singing is a 2/10, and my confidence level is a perfect 10/10. As I lay here in bed in my hotel room this morning, I have vague memories of skipping verses, messing up words, screaming into the mic “Frank, I need the harmonica again” at least 4 times, and undoubtedly doing a hideously sloppy rendition of the fancy piano solo (which sober I’m quite good at).

And it gets worse—Nikki, who was a scene of her own, came over to me while I was playing and started telling me this story about her friend’s sister pouring beer from the tap and getting her in trouble, etc. It didn’t seem to register with her that I was currently playing and singing for 200 people. So I’d be like, “And the waitress is practicing politics this isn’t a good time while the businessmen slowly get stoned seriously let’s talk about this in 2 minutes I’m really busy at the yes they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness okay yeah that sucks just give me a seco but it’s better than drinking alone [sloppy piano solo].”

All in all, a solid night.

And so now it’s Saturday. Tonight, Stefanie’s hosting another cast party following a rehearsal, tomorrow is a dress rehearsal, followed by the live show, which is then followed by a huge after-party. Which will leave me with one last Apprentice Blog recap to write.

Until tomorrow. Live from the Hollywood Bowl.