Mean. Brutal. Demeaning. Embarrassing. Humiliating.
And that was just the first 30 minutes of Fox’s new hoax reality show, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss.
These reality shows based on a giant joke being played on one person or a group of people has evolved into sort of a sub-genre of the larger reality TV genre. Naturally, these types of shows are a little bit rarer because of the intricate planning required to put them together and not ruin the joke, but they are popping up more and more nonetheless. The most notable hoax shows are SpikeTV’s The Joe Schmo Show and Fox’s sensation from earlier this year, My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé.
While those shows’ “contestants” probably felt embarrassed and foolish after the joke was revealed, when those that took part in My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss see the show that they voluntarily became a part of, they will likely want to crawl into a cave and hibernate for the upcoming winter to avoid any future shame.
The humiliation begins almost immediately in the first episode as while William August, the star of the show, is explaining the premise in a long, drawn out, unnecessary diatribe, the 12 contestants are being driven around Chicago aimlessly cars in several stuffy, uncomfortable armored cars.
During this prolonged introduction, August introduces himself as the character he’s playing, N. Paul Todd, the founder and CEO of a multi-billion dollar venture capital company called IOCOR. He explains the set-up, which is very similar to NBC’s more popular and better produced reality show, The Apprentice. Overall, there are 12 contestants, six men and six women, vying for a cash prize of $250,000 and an opportunity to take a high ranking position at IOCOR. One person will get sent home after each task.
While explaining the premise of Obnoxious Boss, he also outlined the hoaxes. August is really N. Paul Todd; IOCOR is a fictional company and the word is actually Latin for joke or con and the people that are there to compete for a real position are being taken advantage to pull one of the biggest hoaxes ever. Also, in what the geniuses at Fox are calling the biggest shock in the history of reality television, it is revealed the N. Paul Todd character is not making the decisions about which contestant gets eliminated every week, but there is a famous mystery boss that is actually making all that decisions. He/she will be revealed later in the show. Let’s just hope it’s not Fabio. The cash prize is real though. At least the show isn’t a total scam.
Of course to help make the joke better, the network has built up these people as “the best of the best” and that all of them are “ivy league graduates.” After all, Harvard, Yale and Columbia graduates can get the wool pulled over their eyes too. While the network doesn’t provide any legitimate bios on the contestants, it’s evident some of these people actually come from good business backgrounds including Elli, who’s 26 and a president of a marketing firm and Douglas who, at 24, is already an equity research analyst.
When the contestants finally arrive at a large building with a plush, lavish lobby the contestants finally meet August’s alter ego, the angry, bitter, obnoxious, harsh, sexist rich guy, N. Paul Todd. He belittles several of the contestants right after meeting them basically saying that whatever they had done in the past didn’t mean anything before arriving in Chicago. But by that point, those there have bought into the hoax hook, line, and sinker. They think they are hanging out with a billionaire and vying for a position at a huge multi-billion dollar company.
The mood does lighten considerably a little later though when Todd hosts sort of a cocktail party with champagne and hors d’oeuvres that the contestants are very impressed with. But the embarrassment continues as between comments from those competing about how wonderful the food is and how “expensive” it tastes, the audience learns that the champagne is from the corner store and the hors d’oeuvres are simply made with bologna, SPAM, spray cheese and various other cheap food items mixed together. Interesting trick in psychology, but horridly uncomfortable when someone plays that trick plays out on national television.
Similar to The Apprentice, each episode of Obnoxious Boss will have a task that the two teams will compete in a “task” with the losing team going to the “board room” where one of the people from there will be told by Todd to “Get the hell out of my office.” The first task was a short and relatively painless as the men were instructed to name the women’s team and vice versa considering a lesson in “corporate sabotage. The women named the men “Concad” (supposedly a mixture of being the men being “con-artists” and “caddy”). Meanwhile, the men took one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history and reworked it to form a more female appropriate name. The result: “Femron.”
After that, the teams were given their first task: panhandling.
Yes”¦begging”¦like dressing as derelicts, hitting the streets of Chicago and begging for money.
The rationale: To get to the top, you have to experience the very bottom too. The 12 players aren’t pleased, but they seem to realize that if they want to win, they need to play. It gets pretty mortifying at that point.
The women eventually embrace a strategy to get people to give them money so they could send their younger sisters to cheerleader camp while the men try to get people to donate money to a fictional charity they named “Help Chicago.” The women won the task and as a “reward” they “got to” sleep on a mattress filled with feathers and stacks of money while the men were forced to sleep in tents in a bad part of Chicago as their punishment. The women were uncomfortable on their mattresses and the men cooked hot dogs over a flaming trash can. It wasn’t a fun night for anyone and the running commentary by August that ran with the pictures of the contestants showed that loud and clear. And even worse (or better depending on your view), one of the men was going to be sent home.
The ceremony where one of the contestants was going to be told by Todd to “Get the hell out of my office.” remained relatively tame until it came down to Robert, a 28-year-old mortgage broker from New Jersey and Daniel, a 29-year-old automobile finance manager from Dallas in the “board room.” Todd told Robert he was too short and then he sent Daniel home supposedly because his suits appeared too expensive. Classy.
There are groups of people that will find Obnoxious Boss very funny. Although, to be frank, these are probably the same people that would probably laugh at a sweet old lady getting mugged, a raging house fire or Andrew Dice Clay.
Obnoxious Boss‘s predecessors like Joe Schmo and Obnoxious Fiancé generally were tamer in nature. The object of these series was always to keep the joke or the hoax in play but to do it in a way that wasn’t degrading, embarrassing, or mean spirited to those that were having this long, drawn out prank played on them. Joe Schmo especially made a point to poke fun at reality television in general, not demean the people they played the joke on.
Unfortunately, in a weak effort to attract viewers looking for “train wreck television” (a crash so bad that you have to stop and look), Fox has chosen to take the hoax show sub-genre of reality television and make it unnecessarily obnoxious, boorish, disrespectful of the people involved and just bad television in general. There are fun guilty pleasures out there and then there are those that just make you feel guilty for ever watching them to begin with.
Sadly, My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss devolved from something that could have been fun guilty pleasure involving a long-running joke into a ridiculous, mean spirited hate fest that goes way beyond the already blurry line of tasteful reality television.
And even more aggravating, Fox has shifted around its all quality comedy Sunday lineup to make room at 9 p.m. for this rubbish? All this does is attempt to provide a quick fix to a schedule whose ratings fall off dramatically after The Simpsons every week.
Do yourself a favor, watch Desperate Housewives instead”¦
— Coogan
