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Celebrity Apprentice brings back sleaze, fame to Sunday nights

Somehow, The Apprentice has made it to a 12th season, with the newest being the fifth “celebrity” edition. What started out as a fairly realistic look into the world of business became a parody of itself when famous people could just call up their friends in order to raise money for charity.

Add in the self-absorbed boss that is Donald Trump, and you have yet another TV series that is not much more than an excuse to watch people with more money than you act like idiots.

In this newest season of The Celebrity Apprentice, which premiered Sunday night, the “celebrities” include a real housewife of New Jersey, an American Idol runner-up, the daughter of a mob boss and the helmsman of the USS Enterprise. Only a few of these people are household names, which may explain the show’s ratings, the lowest for a premiere episode since the show began.

As always, the show features two teams (separated by gender) competing to raise the most money for charity through various business-related tasks. In the premiere the teams ran sandwich shops which, stretched out over two hours, is about as exciting as it sounds. Two hours is far too long for any reality show, and watching people sell sandwiches for that length is the epitome of boring.

The men, led by American Choppers’ Paul Teutel, Sr., ended up winning, raising more than $300,000. Eliminated from the women’s team was model Cheryl Tiegs, after she admitted to Trump in the boardroom that she didn’t belong on the show.

There is no tension on The Celebrity Apprentice since none of the contestants have any real stake in the results. They’re not playing for a million dollars or a future job; they’re playing for charities that they can already give large sums of money.

The Celebrity Apprentice is not much more than a vanity project for Trump and the contestants. None are A-list celebrities, and exposure on a primetime TV series is the best way to put their face out there. Unfortunately for these celebrities, their work on the show is so uninteresting it’s impossible to care about them.

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