When you ask the reality television gods for more drama, it’s rare that your prayers aren’t answered eventually. But the turnaround from last week’s somewhat lackluster premiere of The Celebrity Apprentice to this week’s tension-filled episode was almost whiplash inducing. Dee Snider broke a finger, Victoria Gotti cried, and Tia Carrere had a nip slip. In short, things got good.
Like all the most entertaining Celebrity Apprentice episodes, trying to parse out “Getting Medieval” is sort of like remembering a particularly bizarre dream. (They were all at Medieval Times? And like, Dee Snider was in drag? And whoa, Clay Aiken was there, and he sang for some reason?) Slinging sandwiches might have frazzled a few nerves, but apparently, that’s nothing compared to this week’s task. Trump gathered the troops to announce with much literal fanfare that teams Forte and Unanimous had to put on a show at New Jersey’s most revered cultural institution and mead-purveyor: Medieval Times. Arsenio Hall described the dinner theater meets history lesson dining experience in glowing terms, adding, “I’ve been to Medieval Times more times than I’ve been to LA strip clubs.” Which, man, I hope not. This week’s advisor was none other than James Lipton, whom I personally find difficult to distinguish from Will Ferrell’s impersonation of James Lipton. Apparently, Lipton is a knight, complete with his own set of armor, which he amusingly offered to use in a jousting contest with any of the contestants. You could see Dee Snider mentally accepting that challenge with gusto.
Both teams settle on project managers with the most experience putting on their own show, which means Lisa Lampanelli for Forte and Penn Jillette for Unanimous. Last week, Lisa came off a little bit like a kindergarten teacher, and this week it became clear why: Her management style is sort of strict schoolteacher meets no-nonsense showrunner. Her idea for the team is to make a Real Housewives spoof called The Unreal Housewives Of Camelot, playing on Teresa’s home turf notoriety. It’s a solid idea, and Lampanelli has the comic chops to pull it off and a team full of actresses and singers willing to throw themselves into the roles. But whereas Patricia as manager tried to keep her head down, work hard, and trust people to do a good job to some extent, Lisa is more hands-on, which rubs some of her teammates the wrong way.
It’s partly the nature of the challenge. Making a show that quickly required Lisa to come up with a concept to execute quickly, and too many suggestions in different directions can make a sketch half-assed and terrible. In comedy, it makes sense not to tamper with an idea beyond a certain point; otherwise, the whole show turns to mush. Doe-eyed Dayana, who is clearly Trump’s new favorite pet, kept making suggestions about gearing the show more towards children, and felt summarily cast off by Lisa. But the real problem was Victoria Gotti, whom Lisa assigned as stage director to either keep her out of the main action or crack the whip at the sound guys, depending on whom you ask. Lisa and Victoria have had a little bad blood from the start, and Victoria took “stage director” to mean “you have nothing to do, and we don’t want you here,” unconvinced by Lisa’s ad nauseum insistence that it’s “the most important job in the whole show.” The first day, she sulked and threatened to abscond to the men’s team. Her most egregious instance of failure to help out was when Lisa was writing the script and asked Victoria to research medieval slang only to look over and see Victoria type the phrase “mid-evil,” despite the masses of Medieval Times signs that were around her. So much for that whole Victoria Gotti, writer, thing, huh? The second day, she stepped up to run the sound and lighting cues, but missed several of them, and still looked aggressively bored and offended by the whole thing.