By Ryan Sexton, Assistant Entertainment Editor
If there was anything to say about the new CBS series “Undercover Boss,” is that it was a good enough episode to snag five college student’s attention for an hour after the super bowl. To be even more ludicrous, the pilot featured the COO and President of Waste Management going undercover in various jobs involving trash disposal, recycling and administrative duties in the company — yet the clicker remained untouched.
The show was emotionally fraudulent, with edits that seemed like some shots were done or set up for emotional impact. One has to figure though, that to compete with “Extreme Makeover: Home edition,” producers have to somewhat up the ante. Larry O’Donnell, President of Waste Management, was an unimposing, easily disguised menial worker. He looked a lot like an older L.L. Bean model or an insurance broker, and his attempts at empathy were sometimes real, and sometimes seemed like primo PR work. Donning a hard hat, Larry worked with a woman at a WM recycling plant that penalizes her pay 2 minutes every one minute she’s late for punching in from lunch, a female trash truck driver who has to urinate in a can on her truck route and is tailed by pickup trucks to watch her route time, and a man on Dialysis who runs around like a nut at a landfill picking up trash. Another woman he works with for a day is on hourly pay for juggling three administrative jobs simultaneously, and is forced into putting her dream home on the market and downsizing.
When all is said and done, O’Donnell invites the workers he met to a “business meeting” down in Florida. All appeared slightly bewildered when exiting the kidnap limo that dropped them off at O’Donnell’s business complex. Each had a one-on-one interview with O’Donnell, where he revealed who he was and pledged to help each one’s situation in a unique way. The man on dialysis was given several paid days off a week to go to a hospital and help others on dialysis, and the thin-walleted, hard working mom was given a salary and a bonus, allowing her to stay in her house. But the real benefits for the other workers were conspicuously absent, and the show was starting to seem like a PR parade for WM, a company that O’Donnell himself admitted was neurotically obsessed with productivity over employee satisfaction.
Despite his appearance on the show, there wasn’t much in the way of proactive steps outlined for the improvement of the company or its treatment of employees. It seemed apparent that when the cameras were gone and the money disappeared, that the man cleaning the WM port-a-potty’s would still be vacuuming feces alone all day, and that the older woman in Syracuse would still be frantically sifting through recycling, looking for “cardboard, plastic, cardboard, plastic” until her back ached. CBS liked those people plenty for that hour though, raking in 38.6 million viewers in need of emotional assuaging in the wake of the nights Super Bowl.

Larry O’Donnell, President of Waste Management undercover on the job (Photo courtesy of CBS.com)