Last night I watched the season premiere of OUTSOURCED. A tv show sitcom based on the movie of the same name from 2006. To say that this is an racially stereotyping American crap productiound would best sum it up. It SCREAMS “made for americans… By Americans…. “. The original movie was decent enough… Entertaining and true enough has a great premise that could be used in a tv show sitcom to entertain and educate both cultures about the differences in our cultures. Especially since the outsourcing topic has been a got button for some time now.
Instead… They bastardized it. When the manager from America goes to India, he gets on a bike rickshaw taxi and rides around to get to his office…. He clamors about the messiness of the streets… Yet the rickshaw he is riding in is very clean, shiny, and new….. The coworkers… As is typical Hollywood fashion….. Are all clean, well kept, and visually pleasing. I’m not saying they used only good looking models … They didn’t… But they did use images of people dressed decent, clean, washed, and all filling stereotypes that we have …..
Now, I work with indians and have not been to India myself…. But… The Indians I know don’t fit much of the stereotypes… Normally you would be hard pressed to find them populating so much of a stereotype cup as what’s presented in this show. That’s not to say some stuff dissent match…. BUT that’s the thing with all stereotypes… People fill bits and pieces of a culture with their mentality,… Personality… Every person might have one aspect from thousands of stereotypes…. But very few have more than a few… Randomly picked…
On top of that the jokes are very dry… They tried to fit American humor into a very thinly veiled light context.
Thing is… The movie was NOT about India and America… It was about the difficulties one experiences in having to deal with other cultures. At the root of the movie, I mean. Both sides… India and America had to deal. In the movie that underlying principle was more clear…. There was never a thought that one is right or wrong…everyone just struggled to understand each other.
In the show? Not so much. It’s pretty much one excuse after the other to make fun of each others stereotypes. Thinly. Un humorous… Dry… Boring. Mind you, I love racist jokes. But when funny.
Last thing.. The imagery… I have watched a few Indian Hollywood movies (no not slum dog millionaire… That’s a British movie and hardly qualifies…) And I get a feeling Bollywoodl and Hollywood both have a tendency to make things pretty and clean on screen. I won’t blame the show for being and doing what Americans always do…. But the original movie sought to show a more realistic view of both cultures…. Thus not fitting into those molds.
My point is… I get the sense they went with a good premise and retarded it to fit the typical american viewer… Based on American stereotypes. Without ever asking… Have Americans evolved past the 90s? And made it boring in the process.
Boo. Poo. And nay a shilling on this show
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Sounds like a very cheap production, intellectually cheap. The role of television used to be to educate, inform and then to entertain people. Perhaps the highest form is to be able to combine all three. Nowadays, not so much.