Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Wall of confusion
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 6 | Aired on 02.23.2005
Trump asks what the problems were between Audrey and Craig. Audrey carefully explains that Craig "seems to think it's okay to speak in a manner that's demeaningful." Oh, yes. She said it. "Demeaningful." And Craig makes a great little face, too, like, "Hm. Don't hear that every day." You should, really, shouldn't you? It's kind of tragic that that isn't a word. I don't know if it needs to be that word, exactly, but it would be great for "having a quality in which a seemingly unimportant remark is actually secretly significant because it is so cutting." Like, "He was in the middle of rattling off a bunch of pointless compliments to me, and then all of a sudden, he said something really demeaningful." I would use that. I would have used it in the last week, in that sentence, as a matter of fact. She goes on to say that Craig treats people like they need his permission for things. Craig defends himself as having only picked on Audrey after Tara told him to supervise the painting. Audrey points out that she wasn't told that Craig was in charge until after he had already been bossing her around. Craig sort of agrees, actually, and says he told Tara that if she's going to leave people in charge, she should let the rest of the team know who's in charge of what.
George now asks whose concept it was, and Tara takes responsibility for the concept, for the most part, as she should. He asks whether she came up with it after she met with Sony or before. I kind of think this is a big nothing, because there's nothing wrong with having something in mind that you might do before you finish your meetings with the client. But George gets her to admit that yes, she had the basic framework in place before the meeting with Sony, so I guess that's...a demerit, or something. And then George gets all weird about the line "Tear it up," which I think was the least of the problems with that design. A little dated, maybe, but given the look of the ad and the way the cars were tearing through that barrier thing, it's certainly not an unforgivable foul-up, the way some of the rest of their work was. Tara insists that it was a "hip-hop allusion," and NotCarolyn condescendingly grins that isn't a phrase from GT4, which...eh. I don't think a generic tag line like that is such a big deal. I'm not sure you can't put "Go For It!" in the ad for a game unless it appears in the game somewhere, you know?
Tara points out to Trump that he likes to say they should go for the "win-win," and she says she thought that she could do a good ad and still make a piece of art that would be good for the community. She insists that she wasn't trying to choose the community "elements" over the selling of the game. NotCarolyn is very insultingly smiley again as she says, "It was a Sony ad, not a community ad." I think Tara gets that now, so it's probably time to stop flogging it. Audrey is asked for her feelings about the ad, and she says that the ad didn't project Sony's wishes; it projected what Tara thought the community wanted. ["Which probably is Sony's wishes, in the end. They want people in the community to buy the game. This wasn't her mistake; her mistake was not knowing the product's specs, like, at all." -- Sars]