(Pardon the dated-ness, but I was in some conversations about this last weekend and now I have a compelling urge to set my thoughts down somewhere ... which is the whole point of having a blog, right?)

So I was really enjoying the Celebrity Apprentice this season up until it turned into wrestling. I thought Trump was running a skill-game. Sure he made the occasional decision based on dramatic impact / ratings (usually keeping a controversial contestant around for a couple shows longer than they deserve), but in the end it seemed like by and large the best players won. However this season the best player, by far, was Annie Duke and yet in the end Joan Rivers was crowned victorious.

As far as I can tell, Trump just plain decided that he wanted Joan to win. She's a friend of the family, she's contemplating a reality TV career of her own, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure she and her daughter Melissa were just playing characters for the entire length of the show. Joan and Melissa (and the editors) did their best to turn Annie into a heel, and I can kind of see why Annie might rub some people the wrong way, but from my seat it was Joan and Melissa who were just embarrassing awful people. Annie was brutally effective at winning pretty much constantly, and she was also pretty consistently professional, especially in the board room. Meanwhile, Joan's attacks were personal, uncalled for, and her dismissive attitude toward poker players as a class pissed me off. Like I said, in retrospect I think Joan must have been playing a character the whole time ... I just don't believe she's really like that.

The point where I starting to suspect something was rotten was an episode about two-thirds of the way where Joan was a project manager for a task where each team has to auction off jewelry. Joan's team lost, which is always a very dangerous occurance for the PM, but Trump never even seemed to consider firing her. The loss got blamed on their jewelry selection and so the young, pretty professional golfer woman (Natalie Gulbis) who did the selection got fired, but here's the thing: Joan knew exactly what kind of jewelry should have been selected (big, dangly things that would show well on a runway), but she never gave that information to Natalie. She delegated a task that she knew how to do to an unqualified person without giving that person any guidance. And this loss is Natalie's fault? I'm not buying it ... and I was genuinely surprised, at the time, that Trump did buy it.

Like I said, I thought I was watching a skill-game. Previous seasons have featured some really smart game-playing, from the woman who won a Central Park taxi-service challenge by figuring out to sell advertising for the side of the taxi to Gene Simmons who broke the format wide-open last year by figuring out to hit up his rich friends for donations.

In the end, though, this series seems to have degenerated into merely another reality TV show. I feel sorry for Annie as I don't think she ever figured this out. In the last minute of the finale Trump does his summation and looks at her and says "Annie ... I think you know what I'm going to say." Her eyes lit up and she leaned forward with a big smile expecting to hear good news ... only to have Trump rip off his mask and reveal Vince McMahon. Oh well, I don't watch professional wrestling and I guess now I don't watch any reality TV either.