- Network: CBS
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 7, 2010
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Critic Reviews
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The personalities are so appealing, and the jobs are so humbling, that this would have been a great one-shot documentary. Can they keep up the impact week after week? Or will we suffer from empathy fatigue sooner rather than later?
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It'll bring a smile to your face and, yes, warm your heart a bit.
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If one can get past the certainty that, like most reality shows, the reality here has been sanitized for everyone's protection, one should enjoy meeting these salt-of-the-earth workers with good hearts, the kind of people who normally are everywhere except on TV.
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Undercover Boss isn't spectacular TV. But its real appeal lies in the exercise itself: watching a CEO meet actual workers and realize they work hard at jobs often made harder by petty rules and policies.
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The lineup of episodes has been rich in their revelations, moving in their testaments to the lives of the employees and, especially, to the meaning to them of their daily labor. There is above all no simulated emotion in what those workers say, no artifice—a new and revolutionary turn for the genre.
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A contrived, yet effective, piece of feel-good television.
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Undercover presents a wonderful tribute to the working man and woman. Middle managers are the villains here, sitting at desks and docking workers for clocking in late at lunch. The hour ends with the predictable reveal.
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The presence of camera crews is explained by saying it's for a documentary about entry-level jobs, allowing the CEO to secretly interact with several parts of his company before the big reveal. There's some power in that, but the premiere's emotional crescendos come across as surprisingly muted.
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A "reality" show so huggy-weepy that it will put even the most enraged domestic abuser to sleep.
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I want to root for a reality series that uplifts, but for this one to work, it either needs to be more fun or more real. [15 Feb 2010, p.43]
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Undercover Boss, a CBS reality show that turns the tables on management, seems tailor-made for the anticorporate rancor of the times, but if anything, it paints too rosy a picture of white-collar benevolence.
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Instead of being uplifting, Boss feels opportunistic and condescending in a way that something like Dirty Jobs never does.
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You'd have to have ice water flowing through your veins not to enjoy this elaborate P.R. experiment in spite of yourself.
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What we get instead is a hollow catharsis for a nation already strung out on the futility of resenting those who occupy CEO suites.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 23
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Mixed: 4 out of 23
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Negative: 6 out of 23
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Dec 10, 2012Empty posturing of millionaires...
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BrettR.Feb 8, 2010
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May 26, 2015