New York:
Back in superpower times, cultural clashes took place on this side of the ocean and the joke was on the foreigners. Andy Kaufman memorably played Latka, an oddball Eastern European on "Taxi." Bronson Pinchot was an émigré from a Greek-like island on "Perfect Strangers," a sitcom about Balki Bartokomous, a guileless shepherd who collided with the American way of life.
"Outsourced," which begins on Thursday on NBC and is based on a 2006 movie with the same title, reverses the premise to place an American naïf out of his depth in the developing world. Todd (Ben Rappaport) is a manager at Mid America Novelties in Kansas City, who is sent to Mumbai to run a call center staffed by Indian employees.
Like Balki, who loved and mangled American pop culture, Todd loves and mangles Indian civilization. On his first ride in an auto rickshaw, he is scared but exhilarated by the surging, heedless traffic, exclaiming, "It's like Frogger, but with real people." He is stunned to find a sacred cow wandering freely on the street and even more amazed to learn that his new employees don't understand a reference to "The Bad News Bears."
In other words, "Outsourced" could be perfectly awful.
The fact that it's neither embarrassing nor deeply offensive -- once it gets rolling, the show is actually quite charming -- is a credit to the cast and the writers. The show mocks Todd's blithe, well-meaning ignorance as much as it lampoons Indians trying to sell catalog items like fake vomit and "jiggle jugs."
Todd has to explain the Christmas mistletoe tradition to Asha (Rebecca Hazlewood), a refined and beautiful employee who has trouble grasping the point of a holiday mistletoe belt buckle. After he explains, she is still bewildered, asking, "This is how you celebrate the birthday of the son of your God?"
The dialogue is punctuated with Bollywood music, and there are some sophomoric cultural jokes, but "Outsourced" tries not to be too demeaning. Todd keeps a framed picture of a fancy executive office as an inspiration. In an early, rough version of the pilot, his deputy, an assistant manager named Rajiv (Rizwan Manji), explains his own aspirations, saying, "My dream is not to have to use the toilet after my father." The new version rightly scraps that line and has Rajiv say instead that if he gets a promotion, he will be able to move out of his parents' apartment and finally marry.
Todd has some difficult encounters with the locals, but the biggest boor in town is a fellow expatriate, a typical Ugly American named Charlie (Diedrich Bader), who runs the All American Hunter call center and spurns the locals and the native cuisine, importing peanut butter and processed American cheese.
Todd is more open to discovery. And his employees quickly reveal themselves to be an endearing assortment with a fair share of misfits, including Rajiv, who is closer to Sammy Glick than Gunga Din; Madhuri (Anisha Nagarajan), a shy young woman who doesn't speak above a whisper; and Gupta (Parvesh Cheena), the talkaholic office pest. Basically, Mid America Novelties is a recession-era version of Dunder Mifflin -- if "The Office" had downsized and relocated to Mumbai.
At this point, Indian phone banks are something of a worn-out punch line, but "Outsourced" tries to build a bigger story around the opening joke. And that's liberating. South Asians are no longer an exotic minority that needs to be sheltered from comic stereotypes; for one thing, there is no easily recognized stereotype. The Indians, Pakistanis and other characters with roots on the subcontinent vary widely -- and it's hard to think of a show that doesn't have one.
Archie Panjabi won an Emmy this year for her role as a sexy, enigmatic private investigator on "The Good Wife." Adhir Kalyan plays an acerbic, Oxford-educated personal assistant on "Rules of Engagement." Mindy Kaling is a boy-crazy singleton on "The Office," while Aziz Ansari is a sleazy small-town bureaucrat on "Parks and Recreation." Sendhil Ramamurthy, who was a geneticist on "Heroes," is now playing a playboy C.I.A. operative on "Covert Affairs." And so on.
The influx of South Asian talent echoes this country's changing demographics. According to the Census Bureau, the South Asian population in the United States grew more than 100 percent from 1990 to 2000. More important, the children who were born in the United States after the wave of immigration in the mid-1960s are fully assimilated and a growing force in entertainment and politics -- and sometimes both, as was the case with Kal Penn, who left his role on "House" to work in the Obama White House. (He has since returned to acting.)
Audiences in the age of the Internet and "Slumdog Millionaire" have evolved as well. "Outsourced" is a comedy about Indian capitalism that mostly makes fun of American decline. That's a healthy sign -- television may be the one American industry that is not on a downward slope.