What Went Wrong With Outsourced

1. Todd and other Western characters had an air of entitlement, while the Indian characters were secondary in an Indian/American comedy; the Western characters were the foreigners needing to learn about Indian society, but the native Indians were treated as sidekicks, or worse, like children needing to be educated in the Western ways.
2. India was treated as a backwater country, whereas America was held on a slightly higher pedestal. Possibly, this is because many of the writers might be more familiar with America, and also, it be a tone that’s a carry-over from the film version of Outsourced. But still, it’s highly insulting to a country that has the tenth largest economy by nominal gross domestic product (GDP), fourth largest economy by purchasing power parity, has become a newly industrialized country and is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, boasting such industries as automobiles, software, biotechnology, aeronautics, and other scientific areas,  aside from their fast-growing IT and business process outsourcing fields.In Mumbai alone (the place where I believe the tv show Outsourced is set), there are fast-paced IT, engineering, healthcare and  financial career fields. Mumbai is also the financial center of India due to being the location of both of the country’s major stock exchanges. Mumbai is also the home of Bollywood, so acting opportunities are also big. Many major ad agencies are also located in Mumbai. Sure, India has a very large group of people who are unskilled and still faces the upward challenges of eliminating poverty, illiteracy, and less-than-favorable public health conditions, but India is not as backwards and out-of-touch with Western society as Outsourced makes it out to be.
3. The humor of the show–particularly the pilot–was crude to both countries involved. The humor made Americans look like self-absorbed idiots and the Indians look like simple-minded country folk. Neither of which is true. The joke that Indians no nothing of Western culture is null and void in the first place–does India not have India’s Got Talent, a show that is a spin-off of the original Britain’s Got Talent? Do they not have Indian Idol, a version of (again) the original British show Pop Idol? (Keep in mind America also borrowed the models for those two shows for America’s Got Talent and American Idol.) And what about the huge market they have for American television shows and films? The idea that the Indian characters in Outsourced have never seen an American movie is almost impossible to imagine. The reverse is also true for America. On the whole, we are intellectually and culturally-stimulated people, too–do we not have the Bollywood-esque Broadway show Bombay Dreams as well as a growing market for Bollywood films? And did we not have American made films like The Namesake? Each culture has their own set of jokes and idiosyncrasies, sure; not every expat knows everything to expect from a foreign culture. But that doesn’t mean that two countries’ popular cultures can’t overlap at any point. And lets not pretend that America doesn’t consume their fair share of Indian cuisine. For Todd not to have eaten an Indian dish or snack ever is almost preposterous in today’s society. The same holds true for the Indian characters on the show; there are McDonald’s restaurants in India.

There might be a few more issues in the pilot and the show as a whole, but these are the biggest ones I can think of. Am I holding the cast at fault? No. In all of the reviews I’ve done thus far, I haven’t held the cast at any fault because they aren’t the ones to be blamed. The main problems were created below the surface, during the show’s initial planning and writing stages. Here’s how the people behind the show could have fixed said issues, though:

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