Original Desmond

I also hate the Indian call centre thing in real life so to see it depicted on tv isn't that cool

Pretty poor show, may give it one more go because of Pippa Black (she was a star on our hit soap Neighbours here in Australia)

The assistant manager and softley spoken girl are pathetic characters.

Trevor

Painful to watch. Completely unfunny. Then again, I hated the first couple episodes of Community and it grew into my favorite sitcom. But I don't see that happening here. It was awful.

MrSmearkase

One and done in the Smearkase household

fuzzbox

Obviously it's a TV show and some liberties have to be used, but didn't anyone pick up on the fact that they FIRED the US call center before they bothered TRAINING the Indian call center?

Of course, we are talking upper-management decisions, so that could be expected. But then again, I stopped after the second commercial break.

-jason

SpanishTechno

I thought it was pretty enjoyable for a pilot. They did kind of blow through the training and Americanization in the first episode, everyone's making sales now so where do they go from here? I'm not exactly hooked but I'll see where the show goes.

kstublen

Pretty good review here of the pilot, and by good I mean insightful, not favorable.

I love how everyone that dislikes this show (myself included) hates on it just a little bit more because it's delaying Parks And Recreation's season premiere.

JCWBobC

Back in 2001 I worked in the customer service dept. for JVC during the day and at the outsourcing company for JVC at night & on weekends to make extra money. One night the manager, of the outsourcing company, told me he was going to Manila to set up a call center. I was shocked because at the time I didn't even know Manila had cities or had people that spoke English enough to take calls from customers on how to set up their electronics.

Once he go it up and running JVC, Sony, and a bunch of other companies went with the Manila call center so the NJ one had to close down because they didn't have any clients.

I was the direct contact to the Manila call center and all they would do is tell customers to call back during the day or escalate the call to me to have someone call the customer back. I think JVC just wanted to be able to show they answered a certain number of calls per day even if they weren't actually helping the customer.

JVC outsourced calls to Manila until around 2005 when they decided to move the customer service dept. to Texas so they could hire, in their words "cheap mexican labor" at 1/3 the cost of the regular employees. Everyone lost their jobs and JVC, which was one of the top 3 electronic companies in the world, is somewhere near the bottom of the list now.

The opening scene reminded me of how they told us we were losing our jobs except we had the Japanese head of JVC tell us in very bad English & he kept trying to make jokes, which made no sense but every one laughed anyway. I thought it was an okay episode but I think it would have done better if they did it back in 2003 or 2004.

The Bus

ks, that review is spot-on. The show is just awful.

In some pilots, you can tell that the creators were aiming for an intelligent, funny joke and it just didn't click: the timing wasn't right, or the character wasn't well developed enough for the joke to work, etc.

In Outsourced's case, the jokes were bad to begin with, and they were executed poorly.

Sessioner

I couldn't be happier that this show is getting panned.

Jason

So it takes place in India, a country that a lot of Americans have little exposure to, and it deals with Indian call centers, which most people despise. So the comedy can either be hopelessly obscure or it can be hopelessly cliched and based solely on stereotypes.

Why was this made again?

conscience

I actually liked the pilot a lot. I don't know why anyone would be upset about them making fun of anyone because the pilot pretty much made fun of EVERYONE.

Aphex Twin

http://theweek.com/article/index/207...sourced-racist

cdollaz

Although I hated the show, I did like the part where the guy calling in said "Is this freaking India...". I could totally relate to that part.

CreamyGoodness

Good, cancel it.

bunkaroo

I think it's hilarious the demographic they are likely targeting with this waste of space is the exact demo who is losing tech jobs to India. Yeah real ****ing funny.

Can't be gone soon enough.

DJariya

Watched this on Hulu today. IMO it wasn't as god awful as most of you made it out to be. I laughed a few times, but for mostly stupid stereotype jokes.

The character that I don't get is the one who is scared of talking on the phones. What call center would hire someone like that? I found the character Gupta really unfunny. Also, I know this show is probably shot at Universal, but the opening scene where Todd arrives was so obviously shot on green screen and it looked pretty cheap.

Manmeet: "No sir, you have called Detroit, the city of motors and black people." Again, stupid stereotype joke.

I agree with Jadzia, I didn't like how they made fun of Indian food as making you sick and giving you the runs for days. It's not my cup of tea, but I know alot of people who love it.

I assume the main storyline will be Rajiv, the assistant manager, constantly gunning for Todd's job and hoping to see him fail.

kstublen

Rajiv said he hired her for the sole purpose of later firing her to scare the other employees. She was also the brunt of the caste system joke, saying that she was of a lower class and didn't even belong their in the first place.

JasonF

I finally got a chance to watch this tonight, by which I mean that I watched the first 10 minutes then gave up on it. Really, really bad. Which NBC executive thought it would be a good idea to greenlight a racist comedy about outsourcing at a time when unemployment is at close to 10%.

TheKing

Well whoever it was is probably going to get a promotion. It's getting better ratings than Community and 30 Rock.

That, and I really hate when people throw around the word racist just because a show deals with a different culture in a humorous manner (Or at least attempts to be funny).

I'm not about to say that the show is good, it's not. It's clearly a level far below the rest of NBC's Thursday lineup. But calling it racist is is just lazy criticism. And this show has so many more valid criticisms to throw about...

JasonF

To be afir, I watched the remainder of the episode and last night's episode and I saw much less racism after those initial 10 minutes. But the first ten minutes seemed like nothing but "Ha ha, aren't those Indian people funny!? They have funny names! They eat funny food! They are strange and bizarre compared to us white people," with a side of "Isn't it funny when lots of people lose their jobs?"

But if this is doing well, I guess it goes to show I am not a good candidate for Jeff Zucker's job.