“Shut it down! Shut it down!” TBTS looks at Outsourced

Outsourced is perhaps one of the oddest additions to the nighttime television lineup this season. The show, if you haven’t seen it (or previews for it), follows Todd, as he moves to India to manage a call center for Mid America Novelties, a call center that had been, until recently, based in America.

 If NBC hoped to capitalize on the work place-themed sitcoms that have revitalized its Thursday night lineup, Outsourced sort of makes sense. The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, and, to a lesser degree, Community derive their humor from the awkward tensions that exist in the office (and really, isn’t college sort of like a job?). I am a huge fan of 30 Rock, not so much a fan of the others, and I can tell you that when it first started, it was smart, but not nearly the show it’s become. The same can be said for the other Thursday nighters. Point being, sometimes a show might have a stronger concept, but need time to flesh out its characters and develop. I’m all for that. But, admittedly, after being inundated with the promos for Outsourced, I thought it looked DOA.

After watching the pilot, I found that all of my initial fears were realized—turban jokes, “funny” accents, a shy, soft-spoken Hindu woman who manages to come out of her shell just in time to sell an American some fake vomit. Total wackiness.

 Most discussion of Outsourced has focused on the obviousness of jokes built around racial and cultural stereotypes. And to be sure, these are legitimate observations (after watching the pilot, I was reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketch where Ricky Gervais introduces American audiences to the Japanese Office—“It’s funny…because it’s racist.”). There are a number of ways to approach these sensitive subjects and do so in a gut-busting, if uncomfortable, way. Sadly, Outsourced wasn’t even close.

 But there’s another aspect of this show that leaves me scratching my head, and that’s the apparent cultural vacuum in which NBC conceived of and created it. At any point during production, did anyone stop to wonder whether it was a good idea to create a show about Americans having their jobs outsourced to another country? In the middle of the worst recession in a century? Where unemployment hovers around 10% and discussions about a “lost American decade” are more and more frequent?

 What might have been funny four or five years ago, a sly take on the world’s new economic realities, just seems completely out of place today. And offensive. And where writers might have worked the economic situation into the show, the recession gets no more than a brief nod at the beginning of the pilot. It’s like they’re completely oblivious to their primary audience: Americans sitting at home on a Thursday night, looking for a few laughs so that they can forget their troubles—whether they be related to the recession or not—for just a few minutes.

 At the end of the day, I see another scene from another NBC Thursday night staple, 30 Rock, a scene I can only hope is being played out in an executive suite at this very moment. It is season one, and Jack is watching his tribute to fireworks in lower Manhattan implode as post-9/11 New Yorkers call panicked to ask about the explosions and smoke they see. “Shut it down!” Jack yells, realizing how utterly ill-conceived his idea was. “Shut it down!”