With last week's double firing of Allie Jablon and Roxanne Wilson having narrowed The Apprentice 5's field to the competition's two finalists, last night's The Apprentice broadcast set the stage for next week's live finale.
After teaming up to send their friend and co-worker Tammy Trenta home last week, The Apprentice 5 candidates Allie Jablon and Roxanne Wilson had no one but each other to go after when their team lost for the second week in a row. In doing so, Allie, a 30-year-old medical sales manager from Columbia, SC, and Roxanne, a 26-year-old appellate attorney from Austin, TX, appeared to annoy Donald Trump with their "disloyalty" to each other, resulting in both of them being fired.
Being a The Apprentice project manager is always a high risk prospect, especially when -- for whatever reason -- the ideas and plans that end up being executed are almost exclusively yours.
Sometimes you can be nice in business, but being nice to your competition after they have consistently beaten you is just foolish -- a lesson that Michael Laungani, a 29-year-old management consultant from New York, NY, learned the hard way during last night's The Apprentice broadcast.
For the second time this season, two The Apprentice contestants were fired for their failure on the same task. Citing her inability to lead Tarek Saab, Apprentice star Donald Trump fired Charmaine Hunt, a 27-year-old real estate consultant from Nashville, TN, during last night's boardroom session. Then, citing his inability to be led by anyone (logic that would appear to conflict with the reasoning behind Charmaine's firing), Tarek, a 27-year-old hi-tech manager from New Bedford, MA, was fired as well.
Andrea Lake, a 31-year-old sticker company owner from San Diego who had shown herself to have something of a brash and abrasive personality, became the ninth person fired from The Apprentice 5 after she became cross with her team and they turned on her in the boardroom.
After struggling early last season, the ratings of Donald Trump's The Apprentice series rebounded towards the end of its run, giving NBC hope that the franchise which was once the network's crown jewel of reality TV might recover from both The Apprentice 3's disastrous casting and last fall's failed Martha Stewart spinoff. However, if The Apprentice's revival is to succeed, it will have to do so in its new time night -- Monday nights.
NBC has revealed the identities of the eighteen candidates who will be competing on The Apprentice 5, the upcoming fifth edition of the Donald Trump reality show that will premiere Monday, February 27 at 9PM ET/PT.