Swimming with Sharks in the Great Recession

January 19, 2012 4:50 PM

[NOTE: The episode previewed in this article actually will air this coming Friday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. So there's still time to swim with Sharks. - DB]

By David Sicilia

Sometimes a TV show -- even a reality TV show -- can break the bonds of its premise. Shark Tank, which returns to ABC Friday, Jan. 20 at 8 p.m. ET, had a pretty good premise to begin with. The season premiere, though, serves up a couple of engrossing surprises.

For newcomers, the show's formula (created in Japan as Dragon's Den by Nippon Television, and imported two years ago) is that wannabe entrepreneurs get a few minutes to pitch their ideas to five "sharks" -- wealthy businesspeople looking for new investment opportunities. After the pitch, the sharks circle and bite: What are your materials costs? What would prevent anyone else from offering the same service tomorrow? What were your first-year revenues? How do you plan to distribute this?

The capital-hungry contestant comes in with a proposal -- an offer to sell, say, a 25 percent stake in the enterprise for $85,000. The sharks are Barbara Corcoran (real estate); Robert Herjavec (tech); Daymond John (branding and fashion); Kevin "Mr. Wonderful" O'Leary (venture capital); and Mark Cuban (HDNet/Dallas Mavericks), who appears determined, on this show and elsewhere, to celebrity brand himself a la Trump. "Queen of QVC" retail innovator Lori Greiner will also circle the tank during three upcoming episodes.

One by one, the sharks either bail out -- the trademark terminator phrase on this series isn't "You're fired," it's "I'm out" -- or they counter-offer, as in, "I'll give you $50,000 for a 40 percent stake in your company." Losers walk away with zilch. Almost no one gets what she or he originally asks for. For those in between, we get to wonder who got the better deal. In the program's first two years, the sharks collectively sank (sorry) some $4 to $5 million of their money into new ventures.

The fun is in:

1) Vetting the business pitches along with the sharks. Who would ever want to buy that?! Or, how do I sign up?

2) When the sharks get snarly. In this episode, they call one pitchman "nuts," "absurd," and "insane."

3) Watching the sharks nip at each other. Think American Idol, with investment portfolios.

4) The real-time negotiations. One segment in this week's season premiere is high art. These sharks are not about to be oversold or out-negotiated, and it is a numb-skulled contestant who thinks otherwise. So watch as Mark Cuban outmaneuvers Dave Greco, who wants $90,000 for a minority stake in his corporate salesmanship system. Cuban offers a less generous package, adding, "You should take the deal and shut up." Greco does neither. None of the sharks like Greco's mobile apps strategy. In the end, bits of Greco flesh float in a reddened sea.

The way the show is pitched, we are supposed to hate the sharks.

"The only thing that really matters," announces the opening title sequence, is "money." And the sharks are not merely rich, they're "filthy rich." All this amid the Great Recession.

But the sharks are reasonable people, good at what they do. We can learn 11 times more about business from this program than from The Apprentice -- 111 times more than from The Celebrity Apprentice. While Trump and his slicked-back minions and addled has-beens are off conducting group therapy, the sharks here are asking shrewd questions.

Speaking of the Great Recession, the season premiere, in its final segment, turns downright riveting.

It features Donny McCall and his "Invis-a-Rack" -- a hideaway rack for carrying long things over the bed of a pickup truck. Folds up and hides away in seconds, as Donny demonstrates.

A soft-spoken, polite man from North Carolina, Donny tells the sharks how his wife didn't like the ugly permanent racks he was using, and "the Lord handed me this idea." The product will be made only in America, Donny insists. He wants to create jobs back in his hometown, where unemployment and suffering run deep. He can barely get the words out.

The sharks sit in silence.

But then they push him on the outsourcing question. What are his current production costs per unit? Suppose he could produce the Invis-a-Rack overseas much more cheaply -- cheaply enough to be picked up by a major distributor? Donny gives a couple of reasoned justifications, but his deeper motives are clear. God, country, community.

As the sharks continue, we, the audience, hear compelling arguments about the realities of globalization, and how an entrepreneur needs to first make sure the business is a success before he tries to change the world. Daymond John even has a slogan for this: "Make it, Master it, Matter." In that order.

Our heads are with the sharks, our hearts with Donny.

Suddenly, Robert Herjavec is talking about how his father, who passed away last year, had toiled in a factory his whole life. Herjavec -- an American success story -- knows exactly what Donny is feeling and trying to do. He, too, can barely get the words out as his chin quivers.

This moving and informative set piece on global capitalism could not have been scripted any better. It's a compelling piece of television.

In the end, does Herjavec, or do any of the other sharks, buy into Donny McCall's venture?

Dive in.

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Two Experiments: Prohibition, and Its History on Screen

October 2, 2011 7:58 PM

By David Sicilia

History is complicated. No one has done more to bring "serious" history to television than Ken Burns. In his latest nonfiction miniseries, Prohibition, he and co-producers Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein again marshal a small army of academics, writers, and researchers (photo and text) to explore a key epoch in US history -- the nation's nearly 14-year-long experiment in outlawing booze.

With the luxury of six hours of screen time, do these serious devotees of history do the topic reasonable justice? Or is the screen in some ways fundamentally antithetical to the portrayal of the history's contexts, complexities, and contingencies? The short answer is: yes. In some ways this is an impossible mission -- but the series still succeeds admirably within those limits...

Now for the somewhat longer answer.

Visually, it is hard to imagine other documentarians improving on the historical footage assembled here (for details, see my TVWW colleague Eric Gould's companion piece HERE), or editing it more seamlessly and smartly.

Too, talking heads are used to good effect, from gray eminences William Leuchtenburg, Geoffrey C. Ward, and Martin Marty to younger hands, none more refreshingly engaged and insightful than Catherine Gilbert Murdock. The periodic color intercuts of mixed drinks during voiceovers were, for me, the only production missteps in this series, which is televised Sunday through Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings).

As writers of trade (i.e. popular) history books will testify, telescoping from broad canvas to mid-level episode to richly-figured individual story is a fine way to hold the reader's interest while setting colorful narratives, facts, and anecdotes in their proper context. It is hard to do, and this series does it brilliantly.

What, then, about those ever-pesky complications of history? On this score, the series does a superb job in the first part, and scores well above average in the second and third installments. The reason for the fall-off, I suspect, is that as the story moves onto more familiar territory, the series creators found it increasingly difficult to lean against received "wisdom" about Prohibition, some of it misguided.

The brilliance of part one -- "A Nation of Drunkards" -- is that it all takes place before the passage of the Volstead Act in 1919. Good history always begins before the beginning, and the importance of doing so with this episode -- the only time in U.S. history when the Constitution was amended to restrict rather than expand the freedoms of citizens, and the only time an amendment has been repealed -- cannot be overstated.

What is especially tricky about the story is that the temperance movement had very deep roots, and was interwoven with several other leading 19th-century reform movements, including anti-slavery, anti-immigration, and the women's movement. Prohibition explores those vital connections.

It also lays out the centrality of taverns in the after-hours culture of working-class men -- as places not only to drink and socialize, but also to bank, vote, join a union, christen a child, or attend a wake. As chummy as this sounds, drunkenness emerged early (long before nationhood) as a major scourge on American life, cutting a vast wasteland of lost jobs, battered wives, abandoned children, and premature death. Whether or not Americans were poorer at holding our liquor, we have out-consumed other "modern" nations per capita by a long shot, so to speak.

Given this long troubled history, why did prohibition come when it did, not sooner or later? And given America's deep-rooted anti-statism, why did it come at all?

Part 1 succeeds with these questions by setting longer currents of change -- 19th-century reform, changing gender roles, the spread of capitalism -- alongside a series of specific precipitating events. The Anti-Saloon League, for instance, borrowed its organizational structure from giant corporations that were becoming commonplace. The flood of "new" immigrants was increasingly associated in rural America with drinking and other forms of urban vice and decay. In World War I, all things German -- including most American-based brewers -- were tarred as unpatriotic. As 1920 approached, rural politicians feared losing power through Congressional reapportionment, and pushed hard to pass prohibition.

Many viewers probably will be surprised to learn that by the time prohibition became national law, liquor already had been outlawed in half the country on the state and local levels, and that the federal government was earning as much as 70 percent of its tax revenues from the sale of booze.

Part 2, "A Nation of Scofflaws," shows "wets" at their creative best in evading both the spirit (sorry) and the letter of the law, whether through millions of new prescription "medicines" or the well-known homemade stills and speakeasies. The centerpiece of this episode is the colossal failure of enforcement -- because many officers at all levels, like most Americans, were ambivalent about the law, and because government resources were meager.

With the feds initially assigning a mere 1,500 agents for the whole country, the outcome was pretty much foreordained. Still, drinking declined for a while, thanks to millions of real and aspiring teetotalers.

Make no mistake, for all its facility with multiple perspectives, Prohibition has an editorial viewpoint: Prohibition was a bad idea. This is ushered in by Part 2 and underscored by Part 3, where organized crime steps into the enforcement void with unchecked violence (especially in Al Capone's Chicago). Speakeasies dot the land, even serving women as a site of "liberation" by breaking the gender barrier in watering holes.

Whereas women had been a driving force for prohibition, now millions take the other side, led by wealthy New York socialite Pauline Sabin. We never learn why Sabin founds the leading women's anti-Prohibition organization, other than that she liked to throw really great parties at her Long Island mansion. Capone aside, Part 3 is thoroughly New York-centric. This makes for good film, but after Part 1 we never get a sense of how Prohibition was playing out in rural areas, the West, or the South.

As with its treatment of Al Capone's empire, Prohibition reverts to well-worn interpretations of Al Smith's defeat in his 1928 bid for the presidency. True, he was a Catholic and a "wet," but he was also a champion of workingmen and urban reform, major dimensions of the contest not mentioned. Nor does the series do so well with the end of Prohibition. To be sure, the onset of the Great Depression brought a need for new jobs (before Prohibition, brewing and distilling had been the nation's fifth largest legitimate industry), but to this is added the point that governments no longer wanted to spend heavily on enforcement. Yet Part 1 already had emphasized how little local, state, and federal governments were spending on enforcement.

Then comes the wind-up: Alcoholism remains a social plague, but Americans, and their government, do poorly when trying to "legislating morality." I'm not sure that's what was legislated. I prefer some of the insights offered by historian Catherine Murdock, and others along the way, such as: If the prohibitionists had been willing to compromise, some of the saner aspects of their bold experiment might have held.

To its credit, Prohibition opens up a host of questions much bigger than the final bowtie on the package can possibly contain.

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Naugahyde Aphrodites: NBC's 'Playboy Club'

September 17, 2011 9:45 PM

By David Sicilia

Think of The Playboy Club as Mad Women After Dark. Except that -- like a Playboy centerfold and unlike Mad Men -- NBC's new prime time soap opera set in the original Playboy Club (Chicago 1960) is pretty much all surface.

Would Hugh Hefner approve? The inquiring viewer need wait only seconds into the season premiere (Monday at 10 p.m. ET) for Hef's voiceover. Going all philosophical, he intones, "It was a place where anything could happen to anybody." Hef does this again (mercifully, executive producer Brian Grazer spares us the bath-robed specter) at the end of the show. "I was a rebel," says Hef, slathering it like whipped cream on D cups. "Come on in. You can be anyone you want to be."

The same could be said of cities or your local Hair Cuttery. But there's a dollop of truth to the rebel bit. Playboy magazine and its offspring (including the Clubs) helped usher in a new middle-class zeitgeist that challenged postwar nuclear family norms, touted recreational sex (yeah, I know, some good articles, too), and most of all, mined a new vein of consumerist hip. Cocktails, stereo systems, Bruno Maglis, Italian roasters, and girls with even better curves and handling ability. Soon, women-of-the-silk-sheets got their version -- New Cosmopolitan Magazine aka Cosmopolitan aka Cosmo.

To its credit, NBC's Playboy Club centers on the Bunnies, and not only for their drool-worthy bods. Their Faustian bargain is to earn bucketloads of cash while fending off gropers and salving jealous boyfriends. In short: Money v. Love. But of course, they want respect, too! If neither hooker nor secretary, then what? Who ARE these naugahyde Aphrodites? Some are hard-bitten and cynical. But many are babes in the woods, Little Red Riding Hoods among wolves. In case we miss the point, the backstory for blonde lead character Maureen (played serviceably by Amber Heard) is: orphan from the Midwest.

My favorite part of the first episode was learning about the code of conduct proscribed during six weeks of Bunny boot camp. Gum chewing -- no. Correct posture -- yes. Humping keyholders in the janitor's closet -- no. And so on.

There's a subplot for everyone, most of them seemingly crafted to show how socially enlightened this citadel of sexploitation was back in the day. One for black folks: "You can't discriminate against these babies," says a chocolate Bunny as she jiggles her boobs. One for gay folks: Hey, look, it's a meeting of the Mattachine Society. Even one for folks who love mob shows.

The men are all basically scumbags, except the lead male, Don Draper-wannabe Nick Dalton (Eddie Cibrian, CSI: Miami). Like the Bunnies who flit about him, he is a princess-whore hybrid. "He's everything you want," one Bunny confides to another, "and he's everything you don't." One of the scumbags puts it more colorfully in the show's most memorable line: "You're the only man I know who puts his hand up a girl's skirt looking for a dictionary."

I came away not with a dictionary but with two questions. First, now that I know the Bunny Rules, why would I tune in again?

Second, can you really kill someone with a stiletto heel? Spend your hour watching MythBusters. They might have the answer.

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HBO's 'Too Big to Fail': To the Financial Precipice... Or, Redeeming Hank Paulson

May 25, 2011 11:00 AM

By David Sicilia

[In which our resident TVWW business historian and professor takes a very informed view of HBO's telemovie about the financial crisis, and pronounces it complex yet invaluable. "Watch Too Big to Fail more than once," he concludes. "You'll need to, and it's worth it"... -- DB]

When it comes to the recent financial crisis, television has been slow on the uptake.

Last year, Charles Ferguson won an Oscar for his documentary Inside Job. And publishers already have stocked a small library of collapse-genre titles, with another appearing this week (All the Devils Are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera).

Drawing on one of those titles (Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves), HBO has given us the first made-for-TV movie on the debacle that nearly imploded our banking and financial system. It premiered Monday, and is repeated, among other play dates, Saturday at 9:45 p.m. ET on HBO.

Too Big To Fail's production values are sleekly worthy of its well-heeled cast of investment bankers and government top dogs, and its pacing captures the weekly, then daily, then hourly compression of harrowing events. It is a remarkably successful take on a complicated and potentially bewildering subject.

Like Watergate, the financial meltdown was not one event, but a cascade of interconnected events with a sprawling cast of characters. The movie navigates this thicket by centering the story on Treasury Secretary Henry "Hank" Paulson (played by William Hurt) and, for the first half, on the decline and fall of Lehman Brothers.

Paulson's reputation did not fare the mid-2008 events well. In key press conferences, he projected deer-in-the-headlights bafflement. His, um, brief request to Congress for $750 billion of bailout funds -- three pages with no strings attached -- was attacked for its odd mix of desperation and chutzpah, and went down in defeat. Many also took note that the billionaire and former Goldman Sachs CEO allowed one of his former investment banking rivals (Lehman) to slide under the wheels of the bankruptcy bus.

In the hands of actor Hurt and director Curtis Hanson (Lucky You, 8 Mile, L.A. Confidential) Paulson is portrayed as brilliant, sure-footed, wise, and politically astute. Even though the government already had rescued Bear Stearns, everyone expected the same for Lehman, and that Paulson would turn around and do the same for insurance behemoth AIG

Paulson, though, is committed to a "private sector solution." Lehman Chairman and CEO Dick Fuld (played pitch-perfect by James Woods) is incredulous. In one of the few near-schlocky scenes, Paulson assembles the head of the major banks and tells them to pony up a billion or so each to help rescue Lehman.

We have seen this before -- in every mafia flick when the heads of the Families gather for a crisis summit. The Big Deal is proposed. A couple of outliers protest. Then one says "I'm in" ... dramatic pause....

The film takes a risk by starting midstream with the Lehman episode. Halfway through, it slows for a clunkily staged lesson in the mechanics of the housing crisis. Some, though, will find this Securitization 101 interlude useful.

Most of the time, Too Big To Fail propels forward at a fairly advanced level, especially when we watch Paulson and New York Fed Chairman Timothy Geithner (Billy Crudup) orchestrate mergers among the giants, jockey with foreign governments, and turn Goldman and Morgan Stanley into commercial banks in the blink of an eye.

Fannie and Freddie, Bank of America, AIG, Warren Buffett (Ed Asner), the Japanese, the Chinese, the British, the French, General Electric -- whether Paulson was in fact the lynchpin, and juggled it all while (spoiler alert, literally) throwing up only once, is a matter of some dispute.

We come away understanding that each bailout case was different; that finance is now more concentrated than ever; and that not every Wall Street investment banker was a greedy scumbag. Which is a lot more than I saw in the ostensibly more sophisticated Inside Job.

Watch Too Big To Fail more than once. You'll need to, and it's worth it.

When Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (played by Paul Giamatti) turns from milquetoast professor into a prophet of doom to explain that finance has the power to create and the power to destroy, and warns that the world as we know it will cease to exist within days if Congress refuses to act, that wasn't cheap melodrama.

It was the spot-on truth.

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Advice for ABC's 'Secret Millionaire': More Cash, Less Blubbering

March 6, 2011 4:30 PM

By David Sicilia

When I saw the trailer for ABC's Secret Millionaire, which premieres Sunday night at 8 ET, I immediately thought of John Beresford Tipton. Those of us of a certain vintage will recall the late-1950s TV series The Millionaire, about an industrialist as shadowy as James Bond's foes, who, through a stolid intermediary, "Michael Anthony" (played by Marvin Miller), handed over a check for $1 million to an unwitting stranger.

We watched to see how the lucky millionaires reacted, at the moment of gifting, and how it changed their lives thereafter. And to wonder: What if it happened to me?! Many viewers didn't know, or care, that Tipton -- and his money -- were fictions.

Brilliant, I thought. Networks now regularly dole out a million bucks a pop on game shows, or at least the promise of it. ABC, with its new effort, has simply outsourced the prize money!

For each episode of Secret Millionaire, a mega-rich person will go undercover (a la CBS's new Undercover Boss [which I wrote about on this website HERE]), scout among worthy causes, and fork over a Tiptonian million at the end of each episode.

Girl, was I off.

Secret Millionaire is not a retreaded, albeit non-fiction, version of The Millionaire. It is, instead, two other shows: one a moving documentary about poverty in America, the other a maudlin tearfest.

In the first half-hour, we meet our Mr. or Ms. Moneybags. After this petit Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous-like segment ("I not only have one house on the beach, I have two houses on the beach!"), our millionaire is transported into one of the nation's urban hellholes -- Detroit, say, with its 35,000 hollowed-out dwellings and one murder per day; or Western Heights, Tennessee, outside Knoxville.

She or he is then issued a clunker car, a lousy (and lousey) apartment, and $40 to $50 a week for food and other essentials -- the cash equivalent, we are told, of local welfare or food stamp allotments. Our slum tourists go grocery shopping, once, and that takes care of that. Soon, one is suppering on popcorn.

Good thing this descent into poverty is slated to last only six days. In that time frame, no need to refill the car's gas tank, buy clothes, or see a doctor. A full hour of "America on $6 or $7 a Day" would have been harrowingly potent; viewers would have scattered like cockroaches on the linoleum.

The creators of Secret Millionaire, in some sense to their credit, move on, rather than playing shock and gross-out with our pampered protagonists in a kind of class-based version of Wife Swap. Instead, we take to the streets for what is the most interesting and revealing segment of the show.

The post-apocalyptic urban landscape of burned-out houses, hollowed-out economies, and the evening cricket-song of drug shootouts is always arresting, so to speak. But even more arresting is the array of voluntary organizations toiling with their fingers in the dike.

-- "Special Spaces" refurbishes the bedrooms of gravely ill children.

-- "Joy of Music" donates free musical instruments and lessons for poor kids, some of whom emerge as prodigies.

-- "Young Detroit Builders" has refurbished or erected 800 homes for the poor. (Beyond the obvious benefit, it gives young people employable skills in the building crafts.)

-- "Be a Man" volunteers patrol a Detroit free-fire zone, Guardian Angel-style.

-- "Really Living" drives sick folks to the doctor and provides other help for the homebound. It was at that point I thought, oh, dear, what government agency does that?

-- There's even a conventional soup kitchen, "Love Kitchen," less conventional for being run by the sweetest and most generous African-American 82-year-old twin sisters, named Helen and Ellen, you will ever meet.

Thank you, dear benefactors, for not choosing from among the three organizations and one needy family you visited undercover for your financial largess. Thank you for giving to each of them, in varying amounts. The poor already play Survivor every day.

But those amounts? Spoiler alert -- or, rather, I'll just say that this show needs to find either richer people or those more willing to dig deeper for a full hour of primetime hero-worship.

These first two millionaires are likeable folks -- don't get me wrong. I'm betting, though, that their tax-bracket cousins give similar or much greater amounts every year to charity as a matter of course, if only for tax deductions. I suppose it is good to have these guys doing it on TV. Their money helps these good people, their organizations, their communities, and maybe their donations will shame others into action.

But tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, after we go to bed feeling good about these saints and their new benefactors, Detroit will still be Detroit.

Second half-hour, time to shut off the set. Unless you want to watch Dani Johnson -- who catapulted from welfare to millionairess in TWO years by launching a business from the trunk of her car (happens all the time in America, right?) -- cry from her flashbacks of previous destitution.

Or the volunteers cry as they tell their personal stories.

Or everyone cry when the secret millionaires show up for a second day on the job.

Two days -- wow!

Or everyone cry because everyone else is crying, like some kind of contagion of witch possessions in the nunnery.

And at the moment of giving, well -- well, you can imagine.

These climactic scenes made me feel oddly squirrelly, like the moment of truth in Undercover Boss. Wait, you're not really who you said you were? And there is something simultaneously beautiful and unnerving about giving to those who cannot reciprocate.

Philanthropy in America, notes the editor of a three-volume study of the same name (Dwight Burlingame, ed., Philanthropy in America: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia) "is very much a story about the interests of others as well as self-interests."

Whether motivated by self-interest or genuine altruism (the latter a surprisingly slippery phenomenon to authenticate -- see Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior [1998]), this new breed of tele-philanthropists has paid relatively little for an emotional rush, its life-long comet tail, and forty-seven minutes of fame.

And, of course, these secret millionaires' very public exposure on television isn't exactly going to hurt sales for their firms.

Two ideas. First, if this show survives, turn it into Secret Billionaire. There are scads of them now, and last year, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, they gave away less than in recent memory.

You want your hour in the spotlight, Richie Rich, you fork over a million bucks.

Second, how about giving the prize money from every game show to charity, whether or not a "celebrity" is playing? Again, a million bucks a pop, in some cases.

Like Tipton, only with real dough.

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Everybody's a (Food) Critic

March 4, 2011 2:39 PM

By David Sicilia

At a time when tens of millions of Americans are out of work and countless others clutch their jobs in white-knuckled insecurity, must Charles Darwin script every reality show?

So it seems. The same ruthless culling-from-the-herd that now gives us our pop singers, our weight losers, our island survivors, clothes designers and homemaker entrepreneurs will now produce a restaurateur. Ten will begin America's Next Great Restaurant, but only one NBC competitor will win the financial backing to open a mini-chain with outlets in New York, Minneapolis and Hollywood.

So the standard elements are there, every one of them (but there is some redemption, if you'll stick with me to the end). Each contender must run the season's obstacle course from concept to full execution -- advised, rushed, judged, winnowed, and backdropped with the same god-awful bum...ba-bum soundtrack that throbs through every reality show.

In the premiere Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on NBC, the wannabes design logos, interview and select chefs, and compete for customers from among the thousands who flood Hollywood's Universal CityWalk at lunchtime. Hey, over here! Try mine! A restaurateur must be part huckster, no doubt abowdit.

That's how one of the contendas talks, the one seemingly swiped from Jersey Shore. The coiffed hair, the biceps, the accent, the 'tude. Naturally, the pool of competitors must present annual-report-photo diversity: women, African Americans, Asians, probably a gay guy, even a guy from India. "The gloves are off," warns Mr. Jersey Shore, after telling us his favorite movie is Scarface. His brand name? Saucy Balls.

Am I, as an Italian American, offended by this zillionth TV repetition of the stereotype? It depends how good his meatballs taste.

The primary role he plays, of course, is not Jersey but the guy who, sloshing in the Darwinian soup, is over-the-top competitive, not to be trusted, and -- as we cheer on -- voted out. Except we want to keep scratching the itch, bring him back. With, count 'em, seven executive producers, little wonder the show is utterly formulaic.

What redeems Next Great Restaurant is, first, that we all love to discover new restaurants. But more than that, it's the judges. We aren't told much about Bobby Flay, Curtis Stone and Lorena Garcia, other than that they are investors, though some viewers may recognize them as celebrity TV chefs. They certainly know their stuff, foodwise and businesswise. Through them we gain valuable glimpses into what is arguably the world's least glamorous glamour industry, getting to vicariously taste, smell, prod, judge the artwork, the presentation, the kitchen logistics. When eating out, everyone's a critic; these folks make us better ones.

The fourth judge is the star: Steve Ells, founder of the Chipotle juggernaut. This is no hefty apron-wrapped kitchen jockey. Ells has the lean, soft-spoken intensity of a financial analyst (which perhaps he is, and which might mostly explain his chain's great success). The genre on trial here, we learn from Ells, is "fast casual." When he tells one of the hopefuls that his food is "awful," we sigh with relief. We have our Simon Cowell.

So it's fun to watch, especially if you're hungry. (I was.) Whether NBC's Restaurant continues to offer a realistic view of the grueling world of commercial food preparation and service, we'll see. Like others who spent some years in the business, I'll be looking for evidence of those endless double shifts, of the manager washing dishes when the lowest paid worker fails to show, of customer grousing -- and of the sweet paternal satisfaction of serving, and pleasing, a room full of strangers who amid the haze of sampled wine suddenly feel like family.

But is this how new restaurant chains are born? Let's return to our contestant from India (Sudhir Kandula, pictured at right). On the show, his food was panned. Yet the investors and firms positioned to launch a new chain -- which has more to do with the rapid deployment of dedicated construction crews, structured finance and low-wage labor management -- may take notice.

Immigration from India began to surge after the passage of a milestone immigration law in 1965, and the pace has quickened in recent years, making South Asians one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in America. They bring education and assets. They eat out. Meanwhile, other Americans are being exposed to and acquiring a taste for these magically spiced creations. There are as yet no chains serving "fast casual" Indian food. Do we need another Italian joint, Mr. Jersey Shore? No disrespect to your mother, of course.

A giant corporation is sure to step in. Not because the Indian contestant and his borrowed chef did or did not serve a tasty curry rice dish to tourists hungry after their tour of Universal Studios. They'll step in because the demographics are there. Who knows, maybe one of them will steal the idea from this season premiere. I, for one, am rooting for the nice man and his Tiffin Box dream.

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CBS's 'Undercover Boss': Corporate Cross-Dressing

January 20, 2011 4:40 PM

By David Sicilia

As the U.S. economy limps along and, intones the somber narrator of Undercover Boss on CBS, "public distrust of wealthy CEOs remains high, more and more bosses are looking for radical ways to reconnect with their workforce."

This reality show's answer each week is to dress up the "boss of a major corporation" as an entry-level worker, and send him or her incognito to see what it's REALLY like out there.

Cross-dressing in corporate America does not cross gender lines, it transgresses class lines. Execs become peons, and, on occasion, lowly worms are catapulted into the executive suite...

Oh, those cameras? Ah... this is a contest. A reality show with two guys competing for the same job. Yeah, that's the ticket.

So it is a reality show that masquerades as a different reality show, yet another British import in the genre. The original, of the same name, premiered on Britain's Channel 4 in 2009. One of its executive producers, Stephen Lambert, is a repeat offender, having successfully shipped Wife Swap and Faking It across the pond from the U.K. to the U.S.

Undercover Boss (Sundays at 9 p.m. ET, pre-empted this weekend by CBS postseason football coverage) is comfort food for a nation starved of secure, well-paid jobs and corporate leaders who put the interests of customers and workers before their own.

Speaking of food, consider a recent episode built around the mega-fast food chain Subway (34,000 outlets in 95 countries). The boss in the episode is Don Fertman, 56, Chief Development Officer -- that is, the honcho most responsible for populating the globe with Subways at rabbit-birth speed.

The chain's founder and CEO, Fred De Luca, is presumably too well known among the rank and file to pull of the hoax. So Fertman, the suit, sheds his suit and -- sporting a fresh goatee, hair and beard dye, and a paper hat (okay, in this chain, baseball caps) with coordinated t-shirt and apron -- becomes a "sandwich artist" (I kid you not) in training named "John Wilson."

Why the dye job? Because a store manager might recognize the corporate CDO? Not a chance. I'm thinking it's because a fifty-six-year-old guy "looking for a new career" on the fast food line is even more dispiriting than a forty-something-looking guy.

Remember the Albert Brooks character in the ennui film classic Lost in America, interviewing for a crossing guard position after being tossed from his high-paid ad agency job? That was 1985, when currents of downsizing and outsourcing already were running strong. Same pit of the stomach jab for me -- a middle-aged white guy -- when Fertman a.k.a. Wilson straps on his first apron.

But Undercover Boss is no downward mobility nightmare. Rather, it is a tale of redemption at every level -- surface level, anyway -- from board room to sandwich prep table. In this episode, boosterishly dangerously close to infomercial territory, fast food employment is not the occupational dead end of a hollowed-out, post-industrial economy, Instead, it is the site of rich community ties, economic independence, and salvation through upward mobility. And these top bosses are loveably flawed, approachable, attentive, and benevolent.

Take CDO Fertman. No high school dork to MBA to corporate bean counting for this guy. In fading Polaroids we see his rock band, The Crayons, and learn of his young adulthood decline into alcohol and drug addiction, then his resurrection, aided by a fateful opportunity -- his first Subway job.

Over the course of a week, "John Wilson" will relive a painful first-day-on-the-job at four different Subways across the country. (Alas, the bejeweled opportunities missed by not sending him to Dubai!) Each of his four new bosses, the store managers, will push him far beyond his abilities, which turn out to be astonishingly limited, unless he's just playing slow to garner sympathy.

His first boss is a sixteen-year-old-looking nineteen-year-old who lives with her dad (mom walked out Day One) and is paying her own way through college. Working at Subway. Right. She takes no guff from her sluggish new middle-aged charge. "Oh, funny guy," she shoots back at "Wilson" when he tries to joke around on the job.

Also featured is an African-American woman manager who took a temporary job at Subway, and stayed nineteen years -- and seems to know and care about her customer's lives better than the neighborhood rabbi. ("Wilson," in pathetic contrast, cannot converse and build a Turkey Breast Classic at the same time.)

When the manager in the third store, a young man who might be from the Middle East, tells the camera, "John is just not up to par. He is just not cuttin' it," we want to cheer. By now we love them all -- for how they bake our daily bread, efficiently and politely, for how they do it our way. Except for the new guy.

No one, though, outshines the fourth store manager. A foster child, he has risen quickly to managementhood in his Subway, which is attached to... the local African American church! And now he is raising four foster children of his own.

The minister of this church/Subway duplex implausibly gives the new sandwich maker a personal tour of his pulpit. In America, fast food lives in harmony with all races, creeds, and religions. At the end of the week, "Wilson" turns himself back into Fertman. He betrays none of the grinding exhaustion reported by author Barbara Ehernreich, who, for her wrenching 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, similarly toiled in the cellar of America's low-wage service economy. In her minimum-wage jobs, Ehernreich found it impossible to rent decent housing and keep a clunker running, much less attend college or support a family.

When Fertman reports to De Luca and other unidentified uberbosses, they listen, they appreciate, they take away lessons. We are led to believe that this week-long experiment -- like, say, the million-dollar strategic planning reports the firm has commissioned over the years from pin-striped consulting firms -- will redirect its corporate mission.

Then come the store managers, to meet the real "John Wilson." The once feisty and hard-driving manager of the first store now genuflects before the corporate-headquarters version of Fertman. You want her to make him put the damn apron back on and to whip him into shape.

Instead, be bestows corporate largess, giving each a game-show-prize moment of ecstasy. You will play an expanded role in corporate development, he tells them one by one -- by making a training film, or funneling line-worker ideas up the corporate chain, and the like. And we appreciative executives at Subway are giving you thousands of dollars -- for a charity, for college, for the church -- and thousands more to spend on yourself.

But most important of all, the workers are told, you have been noticed, and appreciated. This show is only secondarily about benevolent management. Foremost, it is an inspirational trope for the hundreds of millions who put in a decent day's work in crappy jobs.

"I am just so ecstatic that somebody actually recognized that I do a good job," reflected one of the managers. How wonderful. How sad. She is smiling and seems grateful, but her "actually" speaks volumes.

Undercover Boss doesn't exactly offer a vision of a classless society. In the end, Fertman is the boss, and Fertman is paternalistic. But he is a likable and, in one version of Christianity, a fallible and benevolent Father. His disciples, the young managers, are saints. Surely, off camera, they were heavily prescreened. The corporation hardly is prepared to promote and shower gifts upon every store manager who works hard and does a good job.

For all the editing for uplift, the camera still catches teenage managers checking their watches and barking orders about how many seconds it should take to make a hoagie. Frederick W. Taylor, who invented "scientific management" and "time and motion" studies to speed up industrial work at the turn of the twentieth century, would have been pleased.

And we can be sure that Fertman wouldn't have made the grade -- then or now. As one of the young managers put it succinctly, this new guy Wilson "sucks."

Fertman is probably good at his regular day job. Why did I come away thinking he should be a first-rate "sandwich artist," too? And store manager, for that matter. Both Fertman and his cross-dressed alter ego are likable fellows, to be sure. But his lackluster work outside the executive suite did little to diminish my personal slice of "public distrust of wealthy" executives.

With top U.S. executives now paid many hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid employees in their firms, can't they at least put in a respectable showing at the entry level? Do they truly add a thousand times more value than the noble grunts on the front line?

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