Undercover Boss is an AWESOME show!

[LearningCurve]

I'd never seen this show before, but just recently caught up on it. Absolutely incredible. In every episode I watch, the perception of CEOs by the public is turned on its ear. In not one single case, did any CEO do anything but empathize with those who worked for him. It was solidarity at its finest.

I really think we need a show now called Undercover Politician. I feel our politicians are as equally misunderstood as the demonized CEOs. If people could only see them with the cameras running, they'd realize we are all on the same side.

In case it isn't obvious ....

[joshcryer]

1. Heh! They had a mayor on there once.

And the UK show tend to have more government workers than the US version.

[LearningCurve]

2. Haven't seen the one with the mayor

Somehow, this flew under my radar. A friend and I were talking about the 1 percent, and he suggested I watch the show to see how CEOs really act.

[joshcryer]

6. The big ultra corp guys are so fake.

But some of the smaller business people seem to be for real. I know there was a pretzel guy I liked.

The real story is the workers and how they bust their asses for the businesses.

That one guy who owns all the resorts and timeshares is a true venture vulture capitalist. And he thinks buying people houses and dropping thousands of his own cash was somehow making his image out to be a good guy. I do think his emotional response a few times was real (there was a Mexican woman who he was astounded lived in horrific conditions and he bought her a house and I think even got one of her sick kids help), but I don't think it overshadowed just how he really was in reality. It was a nice gesture though and I'm glad for those workers that did get help, but his business wouldn't be able to operate without having hundreds if not thousands of wage-earners at his beck and call, doing hard work to keep it going. For every worker he helped there were probably hundreds in a life condition equal to or worse.

[Luminous Animal]

3. It's crap. They pick out a sob story to which the boss responds and make the boss

look a hero. There is little solidarity with the workers; i.e structural change that would improve all the employees lives. There are handpicked, by management, exceptional but suffering employees with whom the boss is thrown in with and can sympathize with.

So the boss can shed some tears and be a hero to one of his workers but the rest of the peons can go to hell.

[joshcryer]

7. Diamond Resorts

Says it all really.

[LearningCurve]

8. That was the episode I saw before I made this post

My penis vomited in my anus.

[joshcryer]

9. That's a fucked up way to put it.

But yeah, basically.

[telclaven]

26. Did not need that mental image

[SeattleVet]

4. The first season was OK, but then it became *very* formulaic.

Just like Luminous Animal said. Within the first 10 minutes my wife and I knew what was going to happen, and who was going to be the 'uplifted employee'.

The first several shows were not at all like that, though.

[cprise]

5. I agree with the sentiment. It's PR for the 1%. n/t

[a kennedy]

23. I agree, and I don't watch.....all BS eom

[laundry_queen]

10. I watched a few of those

and at first, I thought, oh, that's nice that the CEO is willing to go through that and empathize with his workers....but then I realized most CEOs were just putting on a show and some of the 'gifts' to their workers were totally pathetic. One guy, I can't even remember who but it was a CEO of a very large corp, gave a super hard worker who was getting paid shit a promise of some 'management courses' so he could one day 'work his way up like I did' Come to think of it, everything he gave was crap. You could tell even spending any extra money on his workers pained him, and he was careful to pick gifts that looked like he wasn't giving anything away that they didn't earn, you know, because no one should get hand outs, they should work hard like HE did.

I think that was the last time I watched it. Not all CEOs were like that but many were so I had to switch it off.

[silverweb]

11. Some buy it wholesale.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]One guy I knew, who had lost his job and was struggling to keep from losing his home, practically yelled at me that CEOs and big business are "doing the best they can" to help little guys like him because he's seen it on that stupid show.

It was all I could do to keep from laughing in the poor schmuck's face.

Very successful propaganda for idiots.

[LearningCurve]

12. A comment like that is the reason I watched the show

This show was referenced as a rebuttal to a point I made about economic inequality. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that this was not the intent, it is achieving something deliberate propaganda could only dream of.

[silverweb]

13. It IS deliberate propaganda.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]The producers of the show aren't poor and they're not stupid. They sit around with their writers and with the CEOs they feature in their little scenarios, laughing as they work up these sad stories with "happy" endings.

They're laughing at the "little people" exactly the same way the Enron and Wall Street assholes did while they ripped them off and destroyed their lives.

It's just another hypnotic drug in the steady drip designed to feed the rubes' happy delusions that they want to cling to and to keep them in their place.

[LearningCurve]

14. I wouldn't rule it out

I'd rather believe, and mostly do, that this feeds into the narrative that captures the largest demographic. Hence, more revenue. I'd like to believe it is less worse.

[silverweb]

15. You're a kinder soul than I am.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]I'm getting old and cynical. lol

[LearningCurve]

16. I am getting older and cynicaler too

Seeing that show shocked me. It really has been something I missed, and after watching a few episodes, it seemed like I was watching any State sponsored official programming you care to fill in the blank with. These days, I go with North Korea.

[silverweb]

19. Keep the faith.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]We need everyone we can get to poke holes in the fantasy smoke screens they keep putting up.

Taking my cynical ass to bed now. Hang in there.

[PowerToThePeople]

24. incomming grammar nazi..... cynicaler? n/t

[quakerboy]

17. I watched a couple

For every employee who is empathized with and understood, given the size of the companies in question, there are hundreds or thousands who are completely ignored by these shows. And thats just inside the organizations in question, not counting the ones that are never even part of a PR show like this.

Then they turn around and make these awards that should honestly just be part of the job, if there was anything approaching economic fairness.

[LearningCurve]

18. And what we see is what survived the editing process

I truly suspect there was some cherry picking here.

[DrDan]

20. wouldn't the presence of a camera be some kind of hint as to what is going on?

I know - there is always some lame excuse as to why it is being filmed. But shouldn't the employees be at least a little suspicious when they are being filmed AT LEAST as much as the CEO.

yes - seems to be very uplifting that CEOs are that interested in the views/efforts of their employees. I just cannot buy the legitimacy of the show.

[LearningCurve]

21. Especially when ...

People reveal the deepest personal information, after meeting someone that day. At least every episode I've seen. "Hey I just met you stranger, but you should know, my Mom has cancer and my father died when I was 12, but not before leaving me with important values."

[customerserviceguy]

22. How much longer can the premise go on?

I mean, when the "new hire" trainee is fifty-something, and there's this camera crew running around, aren't most employees going to suspect something? Maybe they could get away with this for two or three years, but as enough people see the show, they're not going to be able to play stealth any more.

On the other hand, I think 99% of so-called "reality" shows are tightly scripted, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that every single one of the UB broadcasts were exactly of that nature.

[cprise]

29. Forever? This is just another twist on cheap, high-profile charity

In the decade leading up to the 2008 crash, the media was flooded with corporate and billionaire charity BS throwing around a couple million here and there.

As for "reality" contest shows, they are propaganda too. The participants are supposedly in a real life basic survival setting and they are to use democracy to regularly turn against each other and create an increasingly more exclusive club; Being "voted off the island" sounds like a death sentence... there are always people at the bottom of the bell curve to be cast out. That is quite a shift from game shows designed to promote consumer products.

[ejpoeta]

25. It's a 'reality show'. They shoot a bunch of footage and then cut it to fit a narrative.

I think this show came out when people were getting angry at the corporations and rich people. I have watched it and felt moved, but I do realize it for what it is..... just a way to humanize CEOs and corporations so people will feel better about getting screwed.

[telclaven]

27. Well, my favorite episode remains the Hootiers one

President didn't like how one of the bar managers was acting the fool and fired him. No sob story with uplifting ending there.

[LearningCurve]

28. There were some good moments, that was one

Another was the fitness center episode where the woman behind the counter got fired for being rude to customers and ignoring company policy at every turn.

[socialist_n_TN]

30. I was about to rant, then..........

saw the thingy.

That show is some of the most blatant capitalist propaganda I've ever seen and anybody who believes that bullshit, needs to buy my bridge in NYC. I'll sell it cheap! It's being FILMED for Dog's sake! I'm sure a CEO is going to show his true sociopath colors on screen for ALL the world to see. NOT!

[LearningCurve]

31. If all the CEOs got together and thought, "How can we change public perception?"

They couldn't have come up with a better concept than this show.

[socialist_n_TN]

32. Yep. And I'm not so sure a group of them DIDN'T get together......

and come up with the concept.

[LearningCurve]

33. I've had that thought myself

Pravda in its heyday never had such effective propaganda.

[bhikkhu]

34. Corporations as a "corporate culture" are socially dysfunctional, even sociopathic

but the individuals within them are a cross section of society as a whole; good-hearted, hard-working, honest, etc. That's one of the ironies we live with.