'The Apprentice': Martha speaks!
Maybe the Apprentice: Martha Stewart mini-scandals, involving two contestants who already had strong ties to some Apprentice notables, stem from Stewart’s hands-off approach to personnel issues. Martha, hands-off? Yeah, right, hard to believe — but in the forthcoming Fall TV Preview issue of Entertainment Weekly, Stewart says that’s how she operates. (Warning: A spoiler in Stewart’s Q&A with EW’s Jessica Shaw excerpted below reveals the first task assigned to the Stewart wannabes.)
How is your managerial style different from that other Apprentice star, Donald Trump? It’s extremely different. First of all, I don’t ever remember having fired anyone.
Ever? I leave that to others.
So the boardroom won’t be a scary place? We don’t have a boardroom. We have a conference room. And we don’t work at night. We work during the day. Donald’s always there looking so hunched-over at night. At night I’m doing other things.
What’s the first task? It’s taking two well-known children’s stories, Jack and the Beanstalk and Hansel and Gretel, and adapting them for the modern child. The contestants had to rewrite the story, have an artist illustrate it, edit it, print, and promote, all in a very short amount of time. The children’s-book business is gigantic. I’m certainly an active proponent of that industry.
Let’s take a moment to note that Stewart’s ankle bracelet is due to come off today. At last, she’s free to turn her life around and become a productive member of society! Don’t look for the bracelet on eBay, though. ”Well, I paid for it, so I guess I get to keep it,” Stewart tells Shaw. ”It will go in the archive somewhere. I’m looking forward to that.”
Contrast Stewart’s hiring approach with that of the Donald, who tells the New York Times he handpicked 17 of the 18 contestants on his upcoming Apprentice season, which debuts Sept. 22, the day after Martha’s. (In fact, producer Mark Burnett falls on his sword and takes the blame for last season’s less than satisfying book-smart-vs.-street-smart casting dynamic.) Both the Times and the New York Post offer breakdowns of the career backgrounds of Trump’s new picks, who include an ex-stripper and a former Miss Oregon. Trump says he picked the latter, Jennifer Murphy, over the objection of the producers. ”They said she was too beautiful,” he tells the Times. ”I said, ‘Excuse me, there is no such thing as too beautiful.”’ Nice to know Trump won’t stand for discrimination against attractive people.
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