Indeed, Undercover Boss doesn't just present plucky, morally upright employees who invariably do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts. society as divided between oppressors and the oppressed. One could just as easily argue that it complicates the increasingly pervasive black-and-white portrait of U.S. Like the rags-to-riches stories written by Horatio Alger, it's easy to dismiss Undercover Boss as a capitalist morality play that glosses over the deeper injustices that define American life. Both young men are deeply uncynical, and convinced that hard work is their ticket to a better life. Then there are the ambitious youngsters, like the theme park attendant who worked full-time while attending college classes on the side, all in the hopes of one day becoming a theme-park CEO himself, or the devoted White Castle employee and aspiring chef who created a delicious salsa he adds to his sliders. It turns out that this same employee had been homeless for long stretches of his adolescence. One employee turned the work of gathering products for shipping orders into a kind of game that required great agility of mind and body. , several employees during the holiday rush demonstrated tremendous creativity in accomplishing their demanding and often repetitive tasks. In my favorite episode, on the founder and CEO of In every episode, there is at least one story of triumph over illness, a death in the family, or some other personal catastrophe. Rather, they live somewhat souped-up versions of an upper-middle-class life, only with much longer working hours and more money in the bank.Īs the CEOs venture into the ground-level workings of their firms, they find themselves inspired by the hard work and dedication of the army of workers, some of them freelancers, they've only encountered as spreadsheet abstractions. Granted, these men enjoy high salaries, yet they're not living in vast Xanadu-like palaces. And that's exactly what you'd expect from companies in competitive sectors, where eking out a profit is a daily struggle. Rather, they tend to be well-worn, modest affairs. One is struck by how the corporate offices are not the gleaming, slick edifices seen in popular cinema. Broadly speaking, one gets the impression that these men-and unfortunately all of the CEOs so far have been men-are hard-working, conscientious people who've devoted their lives to leading large, complex enterprises. Yet there's no denying that they help the audience move beyond the caricature of heartless, rapacious chief executives. Some find these displays garishly confessional. In the most recent episode, the president and COO of Roto-Rooter describes his hardscrabble upbringing and the pain caused by his father's alcoholism. Others, like the charismatic head of Herschend Family Entertainment, a company that owns and operates family-oriented amusement parks, described work-related stress that nearly tore his family apart. Some, like the corporate chieftains of Hooters and White Castle, were the inheritors of a family business, and both men described how they've grown more mature and responsible over time and how seriously they take their family legacy. A harried executive gives a brief sense of his life and his achievements so far, with special reference to humble origins or other hardships overcome. Undercover Boss, in its own strange way, is doing exactly that.Įvery episode of Undercover Boss so far has taken a similar form. The defenders of the market economy often forget that they need to make a cultural if not a moral case for its virtues, not just half-hearted arguments from efficiency. The dynamic, creative, roiling forces that have made us spectacularly wealthy have brought with them dislocation and distrust. Capitalism is going through a rocky transition, in the United States and throughout the developed world. Web site, it's clear why the show has proven so compelling and so addictive: It is a cultural Rorschach test. While scouring the comments on every episode of the show at the show's
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