Undercover Boss: Now Simply Evil
Undercover Boss, CBS's cruelly ingenious propaganda-vision extravaganza, is enraging enough in its very premise—that the boss is your friend. But last night, the show stooped to its lowest level: using a dead child to help polish a corporate reputation.
Remember: the entire show is a farce. Undercover Boss is a skillfully-assembled advertainment opportunity, in which a company is guaranteed massive exposure and priceless editorial sympathy in exchange for the negligible price of an executive getting his hands dirty for a few days.
So in this clip, the undercover CEO of GSI, an e-commerce business that, it's safe to say, has never in its history scored such a PR coup as it did last night, sits there and looks sympathetic as one of his customer service reps explains how his daughter died. Which makes him great at his job, at GSI! Later the CEO gives the guy $10k for his wedding, a sum that would not even pay for two weeks of representation from whatever PR firm helped them secure this golden opportunity to charm the general public. After all, the CEO believes that losing a child is heart-rending—just like you. (There was, of course, a thorough search conducted to find this particular employee, who would be able to relay this particular story, on camera, to a man who was, unbeknownst to him, the founder of the company he works for.)
Evil.