Monday, September 27, 2010

Outsourced: I think we all saw this coming [Cancel Watch]




For all the hate NBC gets, their Thursday night comedy lineup is pretty solid. Last season’s 8pm-10pm run of The Office, Parks and Rec, Community and 30 Rock was always good for some laughs. The Office may have been down, but Parks & Rec had one of its best seasons, 30 Rock came back strong, and Community was possibly the top new show on TV.

With a lineup like that, one might wonder just why NBC gets so much hate. Well, the start of this season showed us exactly why. NBC had the genius idea of replacing Parks & Rec with a little show called Outsourced. The premise: life working in a call center in India. The main character is a white guy who went off to management training only to return and find that the call center he worked at in the US had been moved to India. He is forced to move there and manage the new center. What a fucking hilarious idea for a show. Listen, I find racist racially based humor as funny as the next guy, but this is pretty weak. You can’t tell me you’ll get more comedy out of a bunch of Indian people taking calls from rednecks than you will out of the Parks & Rec cast.

NBC demonstrated just how piss poor their premise was in the season premiere of Outsourced Thursday night. The show came off as clichéd and poorly written and acted - just not funny. The fact that they named one of the main characters manmeat shows that this show doesn’t have any staying power. That shit wasn’t funny from the moment he introduced himself, and you’re going to try to get laughs from that for the entire season? The entire episode was forgettable, and the only real positive I took away was the cute blonde Australian chick (love the accent) who will probably hook up with the main character at some point this season.

So Outsourced is exactly what we all thought it would be – played out, overdone humor that will not last. This might be the second strongest Cancel Watch so far (behind Chase of course) in this young fall season. Apparently all the red-dots were really excited to watch this show – and I bet they all thought it was downright hilarious because none of them have any idea what is funny. I once watched The Blind Side with a bunch of guys, one of whom was straight outta Pakistan, and this dude was dying laughing at shit that not a single white person would ever think is funny. So unless NBC can get every programmer and IT employee to watch this show, they are in trouble.

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