Apprentice
Apprentice

Episode Report Card
Jacob Clifton: B | 639 USERS: C+
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Lesson Twelve: Use Your Words

Synergy. Tammy tells the ladies about how she's doing the presentation and she hates using notes, but she has to because of all the technology. Which her entire setup is about minimizing, because she's in the weeds without aid. She interviews: "The vision is mine, the layout is mine..." And here's the vision: black walls, red carpeting, tiny statuettes everywhere, spotlights on the floor, flat-panel screens everywhere, mismatched chairs, papasans and fucking floor pillows and jank-ass-looking loungey crap. It looks like a gay fifteen-year-old's idea of their first apartment, it looks like $200 in the Ikea closeout aisle, it looks like the UPN's version of Big Brother, it looks like "A Crappy Movie Theatre Piece of Bullshit By Doug" from Trading Spaces like a hundred years ago. There are various little separate living room areas, with just enough sharp edges and crappy furniture to keep it from being a womb with cable. Which is sad, because that would have won so fast, if you think about it. It's got a name too: "Xbox 360: Entertainer Of The Year!" Jay and Stephen enter and fear and stare and take notes at the jankiness and bad idea-ness of the place. She goes on and on about how it's a "space that's warm and open." Dumb. This is a high-ticket item, not a day spa. Boys are so fucking easy, Tammy! What's the problem? Matte black and chrome, DVD player smell, moderately sexy edges and lines. You know that room at Best Buy or whatever where you test out the speakers and it's glassed-in and like something out of Wonka? There's a reason those places are lit like a romantic Italian restaurant or bordello. You have to fetishize something before you can spend that much money on it -- one word: Melania -- because those kind of extravagances are not made with the rational part of the brain. I always thought that you should market SUVs to women as Tank Girl behemoth boyfriend-beasts, the same way you sell more Corvettes if you fit them with bras. Instead, Tammy's like, she wanted to make it "comfortable," and make them feeling like it's not "too high-tech for them." Again: taking the rhetoric of the marketing over the concrete reality of the demographic. Nobody with tech fear is going to buy this shit, no matter how aggressively Jay and Stephen lie about it. Induce the tech fear -- "Can you handle this?" -- and boys will line up to defeat it. She gives them a tour, which is stupid and negligible except for how the theme is different awards for movie-watching and gaming and whatever, it's dumb, and Roxanne and Allie looking at each other bored and grossed out the whole time. For reals, I'm telling you that there is one station which just shows a succession of people holding the Xbox with smiles on their faces. What does that even fucking mean?

Apprentice

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