Last night's finale of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart capped off a season where we learned a very important lesson -- don't try to copy an already good show. You'll just end up with a disappointment. Not that the show didn't have its moments. (or that I didn't watch every last second of it) But if Jim hadn't been one of the contestants, there would have been very little to watch.

Right away in the finale we could see that this was going to be stretched out just like the finale of Donald's show; at least they only stretched into one hour. As we saw the two tasks play out, it looked like Bethenny's event was actually going much better. Bethenney, while she didn't have control of her team, had complete control of the event. I loved the moment when Carrie and Jim were sitting and talking about how Bethenny hadn't even started the VIP event, and Bethenny walked in to tell them that she had taken care of it and the VIP event was done. So in all reality, her team did very little. We know she took care of the entire VIP event. We saw her decide that more money needed to be raised for the charity and adding a silent auction. And we saw her team (especially Jim & Carrie) constantly sitting around complaining instead of working. The circus seemed to be a great success, and it was Bethenny's doing. Sure, at the very end she didn't really thank her team, but that didn't bother me that much. They were so rude to her -- why should she be over the top in thanking them?

Over at Dawna's fashion show, two things jumped out at me. First, why did so much of the responsibility get delegated to Amanda? If Martha liked the event so much, perhaps she should have hired Amanda instead. Second, from the editing, it seemed like there was a lot more to Bethenny's event than Dawna's (although that could be a product of the editing). While the fashion show looked good, it's unclear what else Dawna did -- was there a VIP event? Was there a charity element to her event? What did Dawna actually do?

On a side note -- I loved Dawna's to-do list. Way to show the world that making lists is a great way to keep organized, and does NOT make you strange (darling husband of mine, I hope you're paying attention!!!)

Anyways, we get to the conference room, and the one thing that Martha really points out are the programs -- Bethenny's which looks amazing and Dawna's which looks like she printed it off of her computer moments before the event. At this point it seems like Bethenny is the winner -- her event was so well planned, and raised a lot of money for the charity (and why didn't Martha mention this -- was she unaware that Bethenny added an entire element to her event?). But of course, the decision won't be made right away -- they'll have to wait until the live show.

So the two finalists could not be any more different; I think we all knew that it would really just come down to a matter of which type of person Martha wanted in her organization.
But if they were being judged on performance, I don't know how Martha could not hire Bethenny. This brings me to my point with the live finale -- it allows Martha (and Donald on the other show) to watch all the footage. And, alas, Bethenny rubbed a bunch of people the wrong way. So in the end, Martha opted for the safe choice in Dawna. That isn't to say that Dawna isn't a good choice -- she is. It's just that Dawna is like any other job applicant -- she'll be a good employee. But Bethenny would have brought something different to MSLO. Oh well. At least we all know that we'll never have to watch another episode of this less talented little sister of Trump's show again.

And with that, I'm off to watch holiday specials and re-runs until January. Happy Holidays...