Unforeseen Consequences

I watched the first two episodes of “Outsourced” the other day. This is a new NBC Thursday night comedy, centered around the adventures of a white guy from Kansas who gets shipped off to India to manage the call center for his company, which makes “novelty items” like foam fingers and fake puke.

I’d gone in with extremely dim expectations. I’d heard that the show was both offensive and poorly executed, and this sounded very plausible. The premise of the show sounds like it would require very skillful handling to execute well, and if executed incorrectly, it would be offensive. This turned out to be not quite true, but I still wasn’t impressed.

The show is definitely not as offensive as I had originally imagined. Maybe it was just the absence of one specific joke, that being an American (or other Western) character mockingly imitating an Indian accent. As a linguist, I have very strong and specific tastes in accent-based humor. The only joke I’m OK with is when a character tries and fails to imitate another accent, but they are actually trying to get it right and not doing it from a position of power (e.g. Stephen Mangan on “Green Wing” trying and failing to say “knob” in a Cockney accent – series 2 episode 4). None of this happened in “Outsourced” (at least not yet).

One interesting thing about the accents: several of the Indian characters have Indian accents that don’t sound quite right. This turns out to be because the actors playing them are American and British, of Indian ancestry. Check this, this and this out.

Anyway, that was a digression. The primary question here is whether I liked Outsourced, and the answer to that is no. It’s not hugely offensive or painfully bad, but there’s just nothing there. It’s a perfect specimen of lazy comedy, which was exemplified last season by “Hank”. Outsourced is not quite as lazy or sloppy, but Outsourced is made slightly worse by being lazy with its handle-with-care subject matter. Culture shock (which is what the first two episodes are mostly about) is a perfectly valid centerpiece for a comedy, but it requires equal measures of sensitivity, daring and cleverness to get humor out of it.

(If you know me at all, you can probably figure out what fantastic example of culture shock comedy I’m about to go to.)

“Lost in Translation” is a perfect example of doing it right. There are a fair number of moments that simply play on how odd various Japanese phenomena seem to Westerners, but there are three important things about this. First, the characters reacting to them are reacting not with overt incredulity, smug self-satisfaction or ridicule, but instead just perceiving them and reacting quietly. They don’t fall back on Dumb American Tourist archetypes. Second, the culture shock moments are mined for laughs in a very quiet, subtle way, almost as background entertainment rather than the primary center of attention. Third, the culture shock moments are, ultimately, a metaphor for the main characters’ situations. They’re isolated within their own lives and not really sure what to do, but they find shelter in each other and learn to deal with their situations together.

Outsourced, on the other hand, does nothing beyond the superficial with its culture shock moments. The most egregious example is That Guy From Office Space’s line (multiple lines, really) about Indian food giving you diarrhea. Again, if you know me at all, you’ll know that I appreciate a good poop joke as much as the next guy (probably more, in fact) but see… this is not even a good poop joke. It’s predictable and uncreative, as is the extended joke about sacred cows.

So those two jokes I just cited are from the pilot, and I did invoke my It’s Just the Pilot rule and move on. Regardless of the fact that pilots are supposed to be when a show puts its best foot forward and explains what the show is about, some good shows have had pretty bad pilots that ended up being nothing like what the rest of the show turned out to be (Scrubs). So I watched the second episode and it didn’t get any better. The second episode let up on the obvious culture-shock jokes, but is no better for it. It seems like The Office, Special Xenophobic Edition. The humor in episode 2 is based on quirks of the various characters, which is exactly what early The Office was about, but treating it as if the characters’ Indianness makes it fresh and hilarious all over again. So it’s funny when a guy talks too much? Well it’s doubly funny when he talks too much in an Indian accent! Ha ha! Anytime a joke is made at the expense of one of the Indian characters, even if it’s not a stupid culture-shock joke about religious headgear, I get a little uncomfortable. It’s not that making a joke about a character who happens to be Indian is offensive in and of itself — the offensive part is when the joke is supposed to be funny because of the character’s Indianness.

This all goes without mentioning the very obvious setups for Conflicting Love Interests and Ensuing Angst, as our Handsome White Hero immediately has Comfortably White Aussie Lady engaging in witty suggestive banter and Exotic Erotic Indian Lady touching him in the face. What’s going to happen there, I wonder? THERE’S NO WAY TO KNOW!

Despite all this whining, I don’t think Outsourced is beyond salvation. One can hope that it’ll burn through all the cheap humor pretty quickly and then have to dig deeper. This could easily not happen, though; they could just continue to produce The Office: Xenophobia for a while. If it keeps going as-is, then I wish the show a swift death.