Donald Trump, YOU Are Fired!

Sunday night, three other people nationwide and I watched the season finale of The Apprentice: Los Angeles. Somebody needs to put that show out of its misery. It has lasted way beyond its shelf life. What sucked the most about the finale this time around, aside from the fact that the person selected as The Apprentice had been all but invisible the whole season, is that you didn't even realize it was the finale.

In an effort to shake things up, like he did with the three-way final tribal council on Survivor last season, Mark Burnett had a four-person final challenge and boardroom. The remaining four candidates had to divide themselves into two teams and would then select two of the previously fired candidates to join their team. They competed in a task where they had to film a commercial for some air freshener spray. It was strikingly similar to another challenge earlier in the season. It also lacked the feel of the mega event which characterized the final challenge in seasons past, where the remaining two candidates would be the boss of their teams, rather than just a project manager, and had to manage some event with a million pieces going in different directions.

By contrast, this time around, the challenge was no more intense than what they had done the previous 13 weeks, which made me think that it was a "semifinal" challenge, with the people on the winning team squaring off against one another for the ultimate honor. But instead, The Donald told the four remaining candidates that they would return "next week" for something "different" (by which he meant the exact same they do at the end of every season) -- a live final boardroom in front of an audience. Somehow, without seeing how the candidates performed on their own, The Donald managed to narrow the final four down to a single person (actually, it wasn't that hard -- he just had to choose the person who didn't suck, and you had to figure it would be a woman this time).

I really should stop watching this show. Then again, I've seen every episode of all six seasons, beating out my other favorite shows 24 (two episodes missed in six seasons), Survivor (four episodes missed in 13 seasons), and The Amazing Race (missed season one and two episodes of season two, but none in nine seasons since then), so it's kind of hard to stop.

And, just to show how irrelevant the actual finale was, the bigger news today is that one of the runners-up will be posing for Playboy. Now, that's a show I will be watching.