One thing has become very clear about this season's edition of NBC's The Apprentice -- being project manager is an extremely "high risk, high reward" position. Continuing a four week run in which the project manager of the team that failed to win the episode's task was eliminated from the competition, Networth's Kristen Kirchner was fired during last night's broadcast of The Apprentice 3's fourth episode.
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Stating that it was time to "step up to the plate" despite her lack of any formal advertising experience, outspoken attorney Erin Elmore volunteered to serve as project manager for her college-educated Magna team. Quickly pouncing on a campaign suggested by conservative Memphis district attorney Bren Olswanger, Magna opted to go with a controversial "vegetable porno" concept involving a beautiful straight woman, a cucumber, and what would eventually be revealed to be an hunky gay man.
Over at high school-educated Networth, Kristen, a Los Angeles real estate financier, aggressively campaigned to serve as project manager, claiming the fact that her boyfriend was a director made her uniquely qualified for the assignment. Kristen quickly agreed to adopt a humorous concept suggested by John Gafford, only to subsequentially usher him offsite when it came time to film the commercial. Telling him that "we don't need you here" and confiding to the camera that her personal work style involved doing everything herself so that things would turn out "better," Kristen sent John off to work on the commercial's musical score -- resulting in a mangled video that contained none of the humor present in John's original pitch.
After the productions were done, Deutsch convened a meeting to announce which group won the task, only to surprise both teams and The Donald by stating that both efforts "sucked" and neither team succeeded in winning. Deutsch's decision forced Trump to declare that neither team would enjoy a reward benefit and both teams would join him for that evening's boardroom session, with everyone but Angie (the project manager of the previous episode's winning team) eligible to be fired.
In the boardroom, Trump forced each project manager to select two other candidates to join them in facing possible firing. Attempting to deflect attention from her domineering management style, Kristen selected Audrey Evans and Tana Goertz, the duo who she blamed for mismanaging the models and making it impossible to shoot all footage that John's original concept required. Magna manager Erin selected Michael Tarshi (still in the doghouse due to the perception that he failed to contribute anything significant to the previous episode's task) and Bren -- the person who originally suggested the "vegetable porno" concept.
In in the end, Trump decided that -- similar to his determination in The Apprentice 3's first three episodes -- Kristen's poor leadership was inexcusable, making the former Murder In Small Town X contestant the fourth Apprentice 3 candidate to be fired.
