Larry O’Donnell ‘Undervocer Boss” review

As a recruiting tool for a worker uprising, Undercover Boss is first-rate: Who, numbed after hours of watching the Super Bowl, would not want to put Waste Management COO Larry O’Donnell’s head in one of the toilets he cleaned out?

The post-Super Bowl, huge-audience time-period is usually used by a network to launch a new sitcom or drama. This year, we got a literally crappy reality show about highly-paid executives who deign to take off their expensive suits, tell their assistants to hold their Blackberries, and spend a week doing some of the work of their vastly lesser-paid employees. Wow: not fun, for either the pampered exec or for us as consumers of entertainment.

In its premiere, Undercover Boss informed us that O’Donnell is the head of “a $13 billion-dollar business,” and early on we saw footage of the honcho and his family golfing and water-skiing. Then O’Donnell donned a Waste Management jumpsuit; the cover-story for the camera-crew accompanying him was that WM employees were told this was a “documentary [about] someone trying out for entry-level jobs.” Read more