Gene Simmons made perhaps the dumbest decision of anybody on any episode of The Apprentice in The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 3. Whether his decision was an intentional out because he didn’t want to be “stuck” doing this show is up for debate, but at the end of the day, it left Donald Trump with no choice but to fire him. Nely Galan, who I thought should have been fired the week before, became Trump’s primary target, but he didn’t even have the chance to fire her, which he was not happy about. The women are flailing about aimlessly, while multiple men are strong contenders, so now it’s a question of whether the women can overcome their three in a row losing streak.

Nely takes Gene’s move as an act of respect for her. Piers Morgan was just happy to have Gene out of there, as he was certainly good competition.

As the winning project manager last week, Tito Ortiz is able to give a check to his charity, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

This week’s guest judge is Vince McMahon of the WWE. He and Trump had a bet going not too long ago where the loser shaved his head, and Trump unfortunately won. I say shave, start all over, and see what happens anyway.

They will have two hours to sell Broadway tickets. Vincent Pastore and Marilu Henner are the two project managers. Both have experience in the theater. Marilu’s team is real impressed with her, and she takes control early. Of all the women, she’s the only one who stands out as actually having a chance of winning this thing. However, Vinny loses control early, as he’s got the typical strong personalities to deal with.

Stephen Baldwin wants to be the negotiator for their team, but Piers would rather have him on the phone calling his contacts. Instead, Vinny takes Lennox Lewis with him. Marilu picks Omarosa to negotiate with her. Though the negotations are tense, the women get both their top two choices and overall are happy with what they get.

Piers and Stephen continue to argue over the direction to take, and Piers calls him a shallow little man. Piers wants to hit big contacts up; Stephen doesn’t want to waste time with calling people. Despite their arguing, though, they’re picked to work together making calls, and they work together well, laughing at what happened earlier.

Nely’s on a mission to prove she’s not a loser.

Bob Saget steps away from 1 Vs. 100 for a while to make a cameo appearance here. Piers dresses up like King Arthur and is told he’s embarrassing himself, but he doesn’t care because it’s drawing attention.

Omarosa doesn’t trust Jennie at all, and Jennie’s once again been assigned a task that doesn’t let her show anything.

The guys have a scare at the last minute. Piers was able to get a pledge from Richard Branson at Virgin. With 8 minutes remaining, the people with the check have not shown up yet.

With less than two minutes to spare, the drama is over, and they show up with the check. The girls have a similar scare. Nely’s waiting for some money to show up with less than two minutes to spare as well. They don’t make it apparent whether this happened or not.

Vince McMahon raises concern that the women weren’t using the people they had appropriately, and unlike Stephen with his megaphone, they were having difficulty drawing a crowd.

The women made $31,000. The men made $33,000. Not a big blowout like it has been previously, but still another loss by the girls. Apparently, the difference was that Nely’s people didn’t show up until after it ended, and Trump doesn’t like this poor planning. Marilu suggests the problem is that they don’t have the same star power. While I agree that’s part of it, it’s ultimately coming down to skill set and implementing ideas.

Vinny’s charity is The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer.

Marilu believes that her team doesn’t work together well because people either take a backseat or try to be overpowering. Vince says Carol Alt shouldn’t have been put in the position of being inside doing credit card transactions. She said earlier she wasn’t given a good role. Omarosa picks up on this and says she thinks Carol flies under the radar. Carol responds that Omarosa’s a parasite that’s eating the team apart from the inside.

Nely wants Marilu fired. Yet again Nely’s suggestion makes no sense and will be ignored.

Marilu brings back Jennie Finch and Carol. Yeah, we saw this last week, too. Nely, an obvious target to be fired, isn’t brought back. However, unlike last time, there is actually some chance of the other two being fired. Of the three, though, I don’t see how the blame on this particular task can be placed on either of the other two, so in that respect, I can see the argument for Marilu being fired. Her only argument here is just that she’s the more valuable of the three on the whole.

Vince doesn’t think Jennie has the competitive spirit. Ivanka suggests that without Marilu, the girls have no chance, not that they do have a chance now.

Marilu brought back these two because she worked together well with Omarosa and Nely, even though nobody else works well with Omarosa, or even likes her for that matter.

This is a very quick firing. Trump gets right to the point and says this just isn’t Jennie’s world, and she’s fired. Not a big shock. This was pretty much the theme for the first two firings as well.

Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recap of The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 5, which airs Thursday at 9/8c on NBC.

For the second week in a row, Donald Trump took out the woman least willing to scream in the boardroom in The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 2 and fired Nadia Comaneci, who didn’t do much of anything last week because Nely Galan wanted her out of the way.

Jennie Finch says she would feel terrible if Nadia went home. Nely Galan breaks down crying before they return.

Jim Kramer is this week’s guest judge. At least I recognize the judge this week.

Gene Simmons as the project manager last week won $20,000 for the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Now he’s got another offer. Trump says it’s optional but that he recommends it. Yeah, right. Optional? Anyway, he wants Gene to be the project manager again, this time for the women instead. Gene accepts. He says he’s a “benevolent dictator.” Omarosa’s not impressed.

This week’s task is a marketing campaign, which will be judged on originality, brand messaging, and profit. So what if the originality and branding suck but the team makes three times as much?

Following in his footsteps last week where the Pedigree guy felt snubbed, Gene doesn’t feel like he should waste his time visiting Kodak either.

Tito Ortiz has been nominated as project manager for Hydra. His team goes to meet the executives, who stress affordable ink.

Nely and Carol Alt are nominated as the two people to go to Kodak from their team. Nely just keeps going on and on and doesn’t actually hear what the executives have to say. They bring this misinformation back to Gene, but he doesn’t care anyway. He says the Kodak execs don’t understand Kodak.

Piers Morgan comes up with a “knockout” deal campaign, featuring Tito and Lennox Lewis. Stephen Baldwin’s in charge of taking the photos. He gets on top of a table and shoots the guys laying down from above. They get off the table… and it goes flying. They have one laptop (and only one laptop) storing all their artwork. Along with the guys going flying, the cup of coffee next to the laptop does, too, thus ruining their previous artwork. They now have to scramble and hope they can get something done at the last minute. Jim Kramer thinks their efforts look like a dumpster.

Gene’s primarily interested in being the king of the women. What he’s actually doing on the task is unclear. I just hope his arm doesn’t get tired from patting himself on the back.

Alec Baldwin is there but not to beat up his little brother. He grabs two printers for $1,000 each. Piers is happy to have a Baldwin people actually know around.

As expected, the Kodak folks are not impressed by the sloppy presentation by Hydra, but they do like their slogan.

Trump wants to know why Gene didn’t go see the executives again. Gene just couldn’t be bothered like last week.

Hydra easily wins because they got exactly what the execs were looking for, and the reason why they got the idea is because they listened to what Kodak had to say.

As the winning project manager, Tito gets $20,000 for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.

Gene doesn’t believe his team could have done a single thing better. He still believes Kodak is wrong. Omarosa blames Gene refusing to go to the meeting.

Kodak didn’t like that Nely spoke so much and wouldn’t listen. Nely claims she did listen. Carol willingly takes the fall along with her rather than pointing the finger like she should.

Omarosa points out that Gene doesn’t even know the name of the product. She’s right.

Carol very reluctantly answers the question as to who should be fired. Once again, she slams herself, saying it would be either her or Nely. Is this chick giving up or something?

Jennie, Omarosa, and Marilu would fire Gene.

Nely would fire Jennie. Huh?

Gene is given the choice of bringing back two people. He wants to bring back just one. Omarosa. Okay, so Omarosa sucks. But what the hell is up with this? After initially saying bringing back one person is okay, now Trump says he wants a second name. He obviously doesn’t want to fire Gene, but Gene’s not giving him a great deal of choice. Trump indicates very clearly that Nely should be coming back. Trump desperately wants to fire Nely (he had his chance last week). So who does Gene choose? Jennie. This guy’s got some serious problems.

Trump reiterates that he can’t fire either Omarosa or Jennie because they didn’t do anything wrong. And Gene is fired. Well deserved. Putz. I considered him one of the favorites to win the last two weeks, too, but his ego’s just not big enough to fit in the same room with Trump’s.

Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recap of The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 4, which airs Thursday at 9/8c on NBC.

Omarosa was as bad as we expected her to be in The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 1. So of course, she didn’t get fired, despite sending her team off to die from the very first minute she took the project manager role. Instead, Tiffany Fallon was fired, supposedly because she didn’t call Hugh Heffner and ask him to buy a hot dog.

Omarosa and Carol Alt make a pact that what happens in the boardroom stays in the boardroom. Piers Morgan doesn’t buy it. Omarosa calls him an alcoholic for drinking some wine. He calls her a mutant and again makes fun of how she did on season 1.

Stephen Baldwin brings his mother’s breast cancer foundation a check for the total of the previous task, $69,000.

This week’s task is to create a 30 second commercial for the Pedigree Adoption Drive, created because 4 million dogs are put into shelters yearly.

Nely Galan and Gene Simmons are chosen as project managers. Gene says he’s ruthless and will fire anybody, including Donald Trump.

Nely starts off the meeting with stretching, deep breaths, seeing bright lights, and holding hands. Alrighty then. They first sit with the client, and one thing they’re told is celebrities are fine, but what they really need is stories about people with their pets.

Gene considers meeting someone from Pedigree to be a waste of time. Stephen Baldwin takes charge because he tells us he’s been in film for 20 years. He wants Lennox Lewis to be the star of the commercial, and they nominate Baldwin as the director. The guys believe celebrity’s important, perhaps more important than the pets.

Ivanka, whose usefulness in the show I have still yet to figure out, shows up to meet with the guys. Gene starts off by hitting on her. Then he rushes her out of the room and insults her by asking her if she’s going to share the information with the girls just because she’s a woman. Yeah, I expect some serious whining to come from her about that.

Piers wants to head down to the shelter. Stephen shoots this idea down, which upsets Piers because he believes Gene and Stephen are trying to control everything. Instead, they head outside in the streets of New York and try to shoot a scene. The crowds and honking horns prevent them from getting anything done.

Omarosa knows what she needs to do to keep from being fired. It’s not about performing well. It’s about skating from doing anything or taking responsibility (then being as obnoxious as possible in the boardroom should someone point a finger your way). So she avoids being involved in the creative.

Nely doesn’t believe Nadia Comaneci, who’s essentially been assigned to be a gopher, is any good.

Vincent Pastore wants to see the commercial before they leave. Gene doesn’t want to hear it and instead wants to go with Stephen and edit it themselves without input.

On the contrary, the women get together as a group to edit the commercial. At times, this produces too much potential for conflicting viewpoints (i.e. a couple of the women find the dog unappealing… and they pick now to say it instead of doing so before or at some point during the shooting), but Nely keeps things reasonably under control. Marilu, who directed the video, is also taking a lead role in the editing process.

After sitting around for a while, Piers, Lennox, and Tito Ortiz barge into the editing room because they want to know what’s going on. They’re promptly thrown out and not happy about it.

The women focus on the dogs with little effort at showing any celebrities. The men show Lennox prominently but have a good story with a voiceover by Trace Adkins to go along with it. Pedigree is impressed by both commercials but feels one of the commercials is much stronger.

After Trump mentions that Pedigree felt slighted by the men not taking some face time before shooting the commercial, Ivanka starts off the boardroom by saying “Wah! Wah! Wah!” as expected. Gene apologizes for what he said.

The men win pretty easily, and it’s well deserved. The ad the women did wasn’t necessarily bad, but as with last week, they just didn’t live up to the standard the men set. Better script and a better concept.

The women are criticized for having too many dogs, which is true. Too much squeezed into too little time. A theme for them, as they also did (wasted time on) radio and Internet ads, when all they had to do was a TV commercial.

As with last week, there is criticism over lack of celebrity. Marilu did the voiceover, but there’s concern nobody really recognizes her voice.

Jennie Finch reluctantly suggests Nadia (because Nadia wasn’t really given a task) or Carol Alt (have we seen her at all this episode?) should be fired. Carol picks Nadia as well. Despite Trump’s clear attempt to indicate that a good choice to bring back would be Marilu, Nely chooses Carol and Nadia. Nobody can figure out why Carol’s being brought back, but nobody’s real impressed with Nadia.

The judges question how Nely got so far off course considering this is what she does for a living. Trump wants to know why Marilu wasn’t brought back and says Carol definitely won’t be fired. Like last week with Tiffany, Nadia’s having difficulty fighting for herself. Before she can even spit out much of a defense, not that it appears she has one anyway other than that she wasn’t assigned a real task, Trump fires Nadia because he doesn’t see her as a leader.

Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recap of The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 3, which airs Thursday at 9/8c on NBC.

After last year’s poor ratings, lame have/have not concept, and Trump quitting the show (ironic considering he blasted a contestant for doing the very same thing), the show’s future for a season 7 was uncertain. However, the powers that be got together and came up with a celebrity concept that will allow it to go on for now.

The Celebrity Apprentice cast is composed of: Trace Adkins, Carol Alt, Stephen Baldwin, Nadia Comaneci, Tiffany Fallon, Jennie Finch, Nely Galan, Marilu Henner, Lennox Lewis, Omarosa, Piers Morgan, Tito Ortiz, Vincent Pastore, and Gene Simmons. These are all actual celebrities. Or so we’ve been told.

The teams are divided between males and females. Omarosa speaks up right away and volunteers to be the first project leader, primarily so she can cover herself and say she took a risk. People don’t have a lot of trouble saying they don’t know/like her. Nely Galan’s more interested in dressing up with hats. While discussing Spanish words, though, they decide on a team name of Empresario. For the boys, Gene Simmons comes up with the name Hydra, which for some reason the others like.

Omarosa gets her way and is elected project leader because she’s been there before.

The Trump spawn are back. At least bring back Bill instead of either of them. After a poor showing from LA in general last year, we’re back to New York as with the first five seasons.

Stephen Baldwin is the project manager for the guys.

The first task is to sell hot dogs on the streets of New York.

Carol Alt, who’s from New York, selects the location for her team. Omarosa wants to sell based on solid business concepts and would prefer to ignore the fact that the other people on her team are celebrities. She puts her foot down and refuses to listen.

The other team realizes that it’s not about the product. It’s about the fact that they’re celebrities. They want to sell the hot dogs in conjunction with autographed photos. Gene Simmons proves what the value is behind it, making a call to request a purchase of a $5,000 hot dog. He gets a yes pretty easily. After that, they make a bunch of other calls as well, with some success. Omarosa better start praying with her $5 hot dogs.

Eventually, after getting bigger and bigger offers, the women start to receive requests to pay more money, starting at $10, $20, $100, $200, eventually up to $500 for their hot dogs. Obviously, their celebrity plays some role, but they’re not hitting people over the head with it, allowing them to do more volume with sales of lower priced hot dogs.

For the guys, it’s unclear whether the phone calls they made earlier will pan out. Not willing to deal, they’re shooting people down left and right because, even though they’re willing to pay for the hot dogs, they’ve only got a few bucks to do so.

Despite the shaky initial start, they turn things around and begin selling hot dogs for $100 without much problem.

In the middle of the task, Marilu Henner decides to ignore Omarosa and starts making some calls to her contacts. A little late for that, but she meets with some success, selling two waters for $5,000 each.

Gene’s contacts show up as promised with some $5,000 and $10,000 buys. Piers Morgan gets worried that if the girls get just one big name, though, this won’t end up mattering. With 10 minutes left, Jennie Finch’s call to David Wright pays off, and he buys out the rest of their cart (for an undisclosed amount, so it’s obviously either way too little or way too much).

Empresario made $17,000. Hydra made $52,286. Considering Omarosa’s lackluster strategy, the girls did pretty well, but they got killed. Piers already identified Omarosa as the weak link on the other team. She defends herself by saying she learned from the first season, where they were criticized for using sex to sell.

All the money that was raised goes to Stephen’s charity, the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund, since he was the team leader of the winning team.

The winning team can watch the boardroom session from the TV in the house.

Omarosa says Marilu, who used her celebrity status (contrary to Omarosa’s orders), did a great job. However, Tiffany, for not selling herself, is considered a weak link. Hypocritical since she just got done saying she didn’t want to sell with sex. Hiding her team behind hats didn’t help make them look any sexier. Tiffany’s not particularly aggressive at defending herself. If that doesn’t cost her tonight, it will eventually.

Trump thinks it’s about celebrity, not hot dogs. Nely thinks Omarosa’s a good leader, even if she made a disastrous decision that lost them the task before it began.

Carol, who picked the location, which Trump doesn’t think is very good, says she deferred to the team leader on the decision.

With that said, it’s obvious that Carol and Tiffany are going back to the boardroom with Omarosa.

Trump asks Tiffany if she’s intimidated by the other two. He seems to want Carol to hate Omarosa and is unhappy with answers that she doesn’t. When questioned, Omarosa tells him he should fire Carol because Tiffany’s got an open mind.

Again and again, they bring up Hugh Heffner, saying that Tiffany should have called him (despite Omarosa insisting they not use their celebrity status). This is ultimately the reason Trump gives for his decision, and Tiffany’s the first person to be fired. Who did Omarosa or Carol call?

Not entirely surprising. Omarosa should have been fired early in season 1 as well, but he kept her around because he felt it would mean ratings. She’ll be around for a while, no matter how miserably she screws up.

Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recap of The Celebrity Apprentice episode 2, which airs Thursday at 9/8c on NBC.

Remember when I posted (yesterday) that The Celebrity Apprentice premiere date was changed? Never mind. NBC has decided to once again shift its schedule, this time back to its original premiere date of January 3.

NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice, which was previously scheduled to premiere on Thursday, January 3 (9-10 p.m. ET), will now debut one week later on Thursday, January 10 (9-10 p.m. ET). For its seventh season, the series returns to New York City as Donald Trump welcomes a celebrity lineup of candidates who will work to raise over $1 million for various charities.

Update: the show is back on track to premiere on January 3.

Third time’s a charm, as we’ve finally gotten official confirmation of the cast that will be in Celebrity Apprentice. The first list turned out to be typical Donald BS. The second list turned out to be largely accurate. Anyway, here’s the list of “celebrities” that will be appearing on The Apprentice 7.

Trace Adkins (Country music singer)
Carol Alt (Ex-model)
Stephen Baldwin (Actor, The Usual Suspects, both Celebrity Moles)
Nadia Comaneci (Olympic gymnast)
Tiffany Fallon (Playboy Playmate of the year 2005)
Jennie Finch (Olympic softball player)
Nely Galan (Producer, The Swan)
Marilu Henner (Actress, Taxi)
Lennox Lewis (Boxer)
Omarosa (The Apprentice 1)
Piers Morgan (America’s/Britain’s Got Talent Judge)
Tito Ortiz (UFC Fighter)
Vincent Pastore (Actor, The Sopranos)
Gene Simmons (KISS Singer)

In addition to this underwhelming list of celebrities you may or may not recognize, since NBC’s essentially dead on Thursdays anyway, they’re giving Trump his time slot back. The show will premiere on Thursday January 3 at 9PM. I always liked this time slot myself, as it was a great followup to Survivor.

Certain tasks will encourage the contestants to reach out to their contacts for assistance or donations, and a new twist will offer a “rotating seat” in the boardroom. Contestants will not be competing for a job with Trump but instead will be competing for money for charity.

Craig Plestis, Executive Vice President, Alternative Programming, Development and Specials, NBC Entertainment (Is this guy for real? Try putting that on a business card.), said, “You may think you have seen it all, but there will be lots of twists and surprises to sweeten the pot for everyone. We had so much fun shooting this and we know viewers are going to embrace this amped up Apprentice.”

Update: the list below was only a partial leaked list. The full official Celebrity Apprentice Cast has now been posted.

Another list of Celebrity Apprentice Cast members have been revealed, this time by TMZ. The previous list turned out to be wishful thinking.

The list, which may or may not be partially accurate, this time is:

Omarosa (The Apprentice 1)
Lennox Lewis (Boxer)
Gene Simmons (KISS Singer)
Tito Ortiz (Mixed Martial Artist)
Stephen Baldwin (Actor, Flinstones movie, both Celebrity Moles)
Carol Alt (Ex-Model)
Vinny Pastore (Actor, The Sopranos)
John Cena (Wrestler)
Marilu Henner (Actress, Taxi)

Yeah, I had to look half of them up. With a cast like this, it’s almost like doing a non-celebrity version.

TV Guide reports that Charisma Carpenter may be one of the contestants on the upcoming celebrity edition of The Apprentice. Charisma is most well known for her 7 year role as Cordelia Chase on Buffy The Vampire Slayer and later on Angel. She has also been featured in recurring roles Charmed and Veronica Mars.

I’d say this beats the three [bleep]ing messes previously reported as being possible candidates, although from a ratings standpoint, even a drunk out of shape Britney apparently brings in the viewers if the VMA’s are any indication.

Bill Rancic, the only Apprentice winner who seems to have lived to tell the tale of his victory, married E! News Live anchor Giuliana DePandi in Italy on Saturday, according to People Magazine. The couple met while she was interviewing him and has been engaged since December.

The ceremony was held in both English and Italian. Giuliana’s sister Monica was the maid of honor, while Bill’s late father was the honorary best man. Due to both of their schedules being busy, the honeymoon will have to wait for now.