Outsourced: continued
I recently got bored and started watching Outsourced again. It turns out I’m going to need to revise my opinion from before.
To recap, my opinion from before was that although it’s not spectacularly bad or egregiously offensive, there is simply nothing particularly appealing about it. It’s not funny, and it has nothing interesting to say. It goes for cheap jokes rather than insight; it is lazy and predictable. I formed this opinion on the basis of the first two episodes (I’d formed it after the first one, but I invoked the It’s Just the Pilot Rule).
In the next two episodes, things went seriously downhill, for three different reasons.
FIRST, it cranked up the cultural insensitivity. Jokes about Indian names returned in episode 4. They did one in the pilot, but I thought (silly me) that the writers just had to do it once, to get it out of their system. Nope. Then both episodes 3 and 4 went and made all sorts of jokes about arranged marriages. Our White Hero furrows his brow at the absurdity of it all. He points out that Asha’s helping Rajiv with his love marriage contradicts her own preference for an arranged marriage (whereas this is not a contradiction at all). Repeatedly, Our White Hero is presented with some (supposed) facet of Indian culture and asks “are you kidding?”, then rolls his eyes and gets a sympathetic nod from his asshat American friend. His toolishness continues to rise. He’s completely unlikable. Generally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a TV show that has an unlikable main character (British “The Office”, “House”), but the rest of the show needs to adapt itself to match. Outsourced, by contrast, seems to think that Our White Hero is likable.
SECOND, it has decided that some of its characters don’t really need personalities; they just need to show up when a joke needs someone to deliver it. Case in point: the plot in episode 4 about the three employees having a mini-feud against the besuited rival call center employees. Not only is it a perfect showcase for the show’s tendency to make jokes that have already been done to death in other shows but assuming that the characters’ Indianness makes it funny all over again, but it goes against the characters of both Madhuri (who has been established as way too unassuming to get involved in a prank war) and Office Space Guy (who has been established as someone who isn’t a complete lunatic and thus wouldn’t think burning down a rival call center is a good idea). But the writers wanted to write this plot, and they weren’t going to let silly things like established characters and personalities get in the way. Pah! Characters are for pansies. Real comedy writers make jokes about Indian people imitating American accents!
THIRD, its characters are not going anywhere. Culture shock comedy, by nature, requires some character growth in order to work. That’s what makes the whole genre work: the point is not that other cultures are weird, it’s that other cultures cause people to change in interesting ways. Not so on this show. Our White Hero’s just continuing to be more of a dick, and in fact is just going to become more of a dick as he ignores Comfortably White Aussie’s inexplicable interest in him, and continues to be a big stupid-head about Unattainable Indian Lady — even after he gets lonely, decides to take the easy way out, and cashes in for some White Aussie lovin. (That last part hasn’t happened yet, but it’s pretty obvious that it will, because this show is nothing if not predictable.)
Just as a random point, I would like to point out that the five main Indian characters on the show are played by three Americans and two Brits. I know this means essentially nothing in theory, but it does means that they all (except Anisha Nagarajan, as far as I can tell) have flawed Indian accents (their natural accents being American and British). This is starting to bother me more and more.
After all this, I’m done writing about this show. Unless (God forbid) it gets worse, anything I say would be repeating myself, and nobody wants to see that.
