Advanced Review: Outsourced

Among some of the new shows NBC will premiere next week is a comedy called Outsourced. Basically, the idea of the show is about a catalog-based company, Mid America Novelties, that sells American novelty goods including whoopee cushions, foam fingers and wallets made of bacon, whose call center has suddenly been outsourced to India.

The cast of NBC's "Outsourced"

I think this show is trying to be funny but for the life of me, I didn’t get the joke. Todd Dempsy (Ben Rappaport) is the manager of the call center who must either move to India to head up this department or lose his job completely. He finds himself overseeing a team who doesn’t  understand the products being sold. “Why do Americans want these things?” Dempsy gives them a crash course and by the end of the show, everyone is selling and promoting the products like pros.

On Dempsy’s team are Gupta (Parvesh Cheena), a socially awkward employee; Manmeet (Sacha Dhawan), a young romantic who is enamored with America; Asha (Rebecca Hazlewood), a smart, striking woman who finds herself intrigued by Todd; Rajiv (Rizwan Manji) the assistant manager who wants Todd’s job; and Madhuri (Anisha Nagarajan), a wallflower who suffers from extreme shyness.

Diedrich Bader and Pippa Black add to the cast as employees who have also been transferred to India as department heads for their respective companies.

Honestly, after this pilot episode, I have no idea where they intend to go from here and I don’t really care. I give this this 1 out of 5 cheese-head hats.

Outsourced premieres Thursday, Sept. 23, at 9:30/8:30 central, on NBC.