TV Review: Undercover Boss

So I watched that show Undercover Boss a couple of times. It's the one where some CEO of a billion dollar company puts on a smock and a name tag and pretends to be a normal person for like a week. Then at the end, s/he usually learns Valuable Life Lessons about Blue Collar People and gives them some sort of token gift while everyone claps and faith is restored in Corporate America.

This had the potential to be good ("Let's see what a jerk this guy really is! He can't even operate a cash register!"), but just plays like an extended PR piece. It might as well be called CEOs Are People, Too. Maybe they are, but in the wake of all of this banking bailout/economic crisis nonsense, I'm not in the mood. I'd rather watch a show called Underworld Boss that portrays heads of companies as Satanic minions while minimum wage employees poke them with sharpened hockey sticks.

The Blue Collar types they get to be on the show all go in every day with a smile and scrub toilets like its going out os style. At least one Average Joe per episode seems to be on dialysis. Let's see some real employees, grousing about their paltry salaries (a topic which I've not seen raised yet) talking on cell phones and demanding more smoke breaks.

At the end, the CEO meets with the Magical People he's learned from all week and reveals his true identity. Sometimes he's just like, "Thanks, you're super." Then there's usually some sort of company meeting in a warehouse where the CEO reveals that s/he has been an Undercover Boss for the past week and has done all manner of the mundane, dead-end jobs that everyone in the room does every day (gasp!). They usually show outtakes where the Blue Collar Types are telling the Undercover Boss that he's not cut out to be a tow truck driver. This is to of course, give the illusion that the CEO has a sense of humor about himself and that the regular folks actually somehow have the upper hand.

Another annoying thing is that usually the Blue Collar people on the show are like, "I never dreamed this would happen to me." What? Shaking the hand of a guy who makes 9,000 times your income and probably works half as hard? Let's give everyone a raise instead of just giving Hector every Tuesday afternoon off for his medical treatment.

I'm not buying that marginally bettering the lives of a handful of employees makes the companies or the CEOs profiled any more altruistic. Am I just a jerk?