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 Outsourced

(June 20^th, 2010.  -  Editor)               Ben Rappaport, Rizwan Manji, Sacha Dhawan, Rebecca Hazlewood, Parvesh Cheena, Anisha Nagarajan, Diedrich Bader and Jessica Gower star in he half hour comedy Outsourced. 

The all-American company, Mid America Novelties, sells whoopee cushions, foam fingers and wallets made of bacon, has moved their call center to India. Todd Dempsy (Rappaport) is the new company's manager who learns that he's being transferred to India to run the operation.  Overwhelmed, Todd discovers that his new staff needs a crash course in all things American if they are to understand the U.S. product line and ramp up sales from halfway around the world. But as strange as America seems to his eclectic sales team, Todd soon realizes that figuring out India will be more than a full-time job.

Series star Ben Rappaport is a likeable and funny guy, but I don’t think he has the talent or the writing behind him to pull this comedy out of the dumps. With the exception of the other two Americans in the cast, Diedrich Bader and Jessica Grower, the balance of he cast seems to have been selected for how they look as much as for any character they play. That visual style of comedy will get old very fast.

The only hope for this comedy is if they overcome the stereotypes and ethnic slurs and start writing real comedy for these actors. If the cast is not revealed as individual human beings, the audience has no chance to develop an attachment to any of them. They must be portraying real people who are funny.

Expectations of the network are likely to be low, giving this effort perhaps a few extra weeks to get things right before they are replaced. Perhaps they can use that time to surprise me, but I doubt it.

 

  -  Editor.

 

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