As much as I disliked the movie Outsourced, I am willing to give the TV show of the same name and premise a try. The show is about a US company that makes wacky novelty items like foam fingers and whoopee cushions. They decide to save money by outsourcing their call center to India, and a hapless American employee gets sent to India to manage the office and teach the employees about American culture. Here’s a preview of the show. Will you watch it?
Tag Archive for 'TV'
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Last night at the Fashion Forward event organized by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, I got to meet one of my favorite TV assistants – Andrew Mukamal, assistant to Kelly Cutrone both in real life and on her show Kell On Earth. Andrew is just as funny and nice in person as he is on television. Here’s me posing for a photo op with him. Of course, he looked fabulous and, of course, I was rocking my best “I had a hangover and rolled into work this morning looking like a bum” chic.
In case you live in Antarctica and hadn’t heard, Mel Gibson is back in the news for leaving a series of expletive, threat, and racial slur-laden emails on the voicemail of his now ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. This week on The View, cohost Whoopi Goldberg rose to Gibson’s defense, saying that he isn’t racist and his real problem is that he is an alcoholic who says crazy things when he has been drinking. The comments raised so much fury that Goldberg reportedly got tons of phone calls and emails from angry viewers. On today’s show, she claimed that some people had called her home and yelled at her assistant, who was the one answering the phone.
I don’t know if this actually happened or if she’s exaggerating for effect, but let’s all take a moment to remember one of the rules of assistant karma: even if you are really mad, do not take it out on the assistant. Goldberg is the one who made the comments. Her assistant is probably overworked and underpaid, and in addition to dealing with all of his boss’ shit he now has to get yelled at by strangers because his boss said something on television and people are mad about it. I can’t tell you how many times I got yelled at by people my boss had offended, and you know what? It made me vow never to do it to someone else. Do not continue the cycle of assistant abuse. Just yell at Whoopi instead. Or stop caring about what celebrities say on TV.
Not every relationship works out – whether that’s husband/wife, parent/child, or boss/employee. But when that relationship dissolves in public, it’s even messier than a regular breakup. Lately, I’ve been watching as stylist to the stars and reality show centerpiece Rachel Zoe has used the fashion media to trash her former assistant, Taylor Jacobson (pictured at left in happier days), who was fired at the end of the last season of The Rachel Zoe Project. Anyone who watched the show saw the obvious tension between Taylor, who’d worked for Zoe some time, and Brad, the second assistant who was hired just as the reality show kicked off. Taylor hoped that hiring Brad meant she’d be promoted into a more managerial position or taking on additional responsibility, but that didn’t really pan out. Naturally, Taylor was frustrated by what she saw as stasis.
Zoe told WWD that “I hired Brad, this little angel, and then Taylor just went in for the kill. And I, like, did not see that coming. I always knew what she was capable of, but who knew that was going to happen with the camera?” Not content to let the mean-bitter-Taylor-picks-on-poor-adorable-angel-Brad storyline rest, Page Six ran an item claiming that Taylor had stolen clothes from her boss. I’ll quote Zoe herself (also from the WWD interview) when she talks about what Taylor’s up to now: “I don’t care what she does.” I also don’t care what Taylor does, but I do care about the fact that Zoe, who I previously respected as an entrepreneur, is talking shit about a former employee in the press. Taylor, to her credit, has barely made a peep. In fact, I didn’t know where she was working until the WWD article mentioned her new job (it’s for a denim company called Kasil).
Is it right to steal clothes? No. It is right to pick on an employee just because you don’t like them, even if you are just taking out your own issues on them? No. And is it right for the boss, the person with the power and the influence, to publicly talk shit about a former employee? No. Rachel Zoe is not some random woman scorned – she is a well known figure in the fashion world who works with celebrities, has tremendous clout, and makes a lot of money. When she goes after Taylor, she looks like she’s kicking someone who is already down. It may be that every single thing she says about Taylor is true, but I don’t care. She’s saying these things in order to promote her reality show and get more people to watch it, and I find that tacky. It would be another thing if Taylor applied for a job somewhere and someone called Zoe to ask whether they should hire her – you’re allowed to say “No, I would not recommend hiring her because she did X and Y when she worked for me” to someone else in the industry if they call about a job reference. But to give interviews to fashion industry publications trashing a former employee, even if you’re 100 percent in the right, just comes off as gross and uneccessary. Zoe has already won: she’s the one who is famous, has a TV show, and gets paid a lot of money to help celebrities pick out clothes. Continuing to smear Taylor is the equivalent of Patti LuPone using a public platform to insult a community theater actor.
I’m sure that Zoe, as she says, is just out to “set the record straight.” The record wasn’t crooked in the first place. However, the new season of The Rachel Zoe Project starts in August. I’m certain that’s totally a coincidence.
Cross-posted at The Gloss
Flavorwire’s list of their favorite assistants from pop culture is pretty good. They have some of the usual suspects in there (Betty Suarez, Smithers, Jessica Zajicek), some up-and-comers (Andrew from Kell on Earth, who I keep meaning to do a post about), and some unconventional picks (until this list came out I thought I was the only person who preferred Emily to Andie in The Devil Wears Prada). But there’s one assistant they single out who I have sadly not ever done an ode to here on STA:
PAULA DEEN’S GAY ASSISTANT BRANDON.
That guy is so awesome. Gay Southerners are among my favorite people ever.
Ever wondered how they pick the people who end up on reality shows? Phil Wallace, a recent USC business school graduate, independent sports consultant, and founder of AwardsPicks.com (also, full disclosure: he’s my cousin), made it through several audition rounds for the next season of The Apprentice. After doing several celebrity seasons, the show is returning to its regular-people format next year and will focus on people who have been affected by the recession. Phil sat down with STA and talked about his experience auditioning for the show.
- I heard about the show from a couple of people, and someone contacted me about auditioning. The Apprentice is totally my guilty pleasure TV – I watch the regular and celebrity editions, and I always thought I could do really well on the show. I spoke to a casting agent on the phone for ten or fifteen minutes – she asked about my work history and my salary history. She told me that I could either do a home video or an in-person interview next, so I decided to do the in-person tryout. It was at a hotel in L.A. near Universal. She told me she would put me on a VIP list so I wouldn’t have to stand in line. She also said that I was trying too hard to impress her and to remember it’s a recession-themed show, so you need a downtrodden story.
- LA was the fifth city they did auditions in. One of the other cities was Detroit, so I am pretty sure they wanted a laid-off autoworker. They also did New York, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.
- The application was pretty short, just one page. It asked for work and salary history, and a proudest accomplishment. There was also a part where they asked you to tell something embarrassing about yourself. It also asked why you thought you would make a good Apprentice.
- I got there at 7:30 AM, and auditions were supposed to start at nine. The line was down the street. I’d guess there were 400-500 people there. There were people who had camped out overnight or arrived early in the morning. Because I was on the list they moved me to the front of the line. I was with some people who arrived at 5 AM. There were a bunch of people in the VIP group from Pink Slip Mixers – they’re a networking group for people who just got laid off. Most of the people in my group were from Pink Slip Mixers.
- I was in a room with six other people. They had us fill out our applications in advance, so you handed the application to a casting agent, who then put you in a boardroom-type setting. The agent’s name was Gina. She sat on the other side of table from us, and asked, “Why are we in a recession?” Everyone started talking over each other. No one was moderating. It was a mess. Because our group was all from the VIP group, people who really wanted to be on the show, it was insane. Everyone recognized they needed to speak up and everyone realized they needed to shine, so it was bound to be just a giant shouting match.
- It was six of us guys and one woman. She has her own online talk show, and was able to take control of the room a couple of times. There were moments where one person talked and everyone listened and some where we [informally] split into smaller groups of three or four and just talked with the people near us. We naturally retreated a little bit and talked to people who were sitting close by, since we were all talking over each other. One guy decided to be “the questioner,” so he just started to ask questions. It actually really helped, because we were disorganized. The casting agent ignored us and read our applications the whole time.
- Most of the people were middle-aged. One guy was in his 30s and had been a franchisee for a fast-food chain and said he just got a job at McDonald’s. I don’t know if he meant managing another franchise or flipping burgers. He and I went back and forth a bit because he wanted to blame the recession on Bill Clinton and I wanted to blame it on Goldman Sachs.
- This went on for about 20 minutes. Then Gina stopped us and asked some people who they would fire and some who they would hire. The Clinton guy said he would fire me. She asked why, and he said “I didn’t like his points.” She asked which points, and he finally admitted he couldn’t remember. When it was my turn, I said I wouldn’t fire the other guy just because we disagreed politically. I was sort of trying to defend myself in case the casting agent actually thought there was legitimacy to the other guy wanting to fire me. I said I would fire a guy who was also named Phil because there couldn’t be two Phils on the show. In seriousness, though, I said that he was the guy who had a lot of experience – probably the most experience, he had been a VP of Operations somewhere – but didn’t speak up that much.
- Gina wrote some numbers on our applications and said she’d call within the week if we were chosen for an individual interview. I never got a call, so that was the end of that.
As the entire universe apparently now knows, NBC bungled it big time when it came to letting Jay Leno retire and hand the reins of The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien. In addition to the obvious lessons we can learn from this disaster, such as “Jay Leno sucks” and “Conan O’Brien is hilarious,” FedLine (aka the Federal Times’ blog) points out some management lessons that we can learn from the mishandling of the whole situation. Let’s hope some TV executives take these tips to heart.
Lesson #1: Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent.
In other words, if your most talented people know they’ll be stuck in their jobs a long time because there’s nowhere for them to go internally, they will leave. And it will be your fault for not providing enough incentives.
Lesson #3: If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already.
One of the most embarrassing parts of the whole late night fiasco was the way that it was handled so publicly and that it took seemingly forever to resolve. That worked out nicely for Conan’s audience, who got to enjoy weeks’ worth of him taking potshots at NBC and putting together hilarious skits about wasting the network’s money, but it only protracted the whole situation. Good for viewers, not so good for NBC.
And while we’re on the subject of the lovely Mr. O’Brien, let’s all take his incredibly classy goodbye speech advice to heart:
As any regular STA reader knows, I’m a big Conan O’Brien fan. Even though I wish he would still go back and write episodes for “The Simpsons,” I’ve been totally grossed out by the way Jay Leno and NBC have treated Conan during his stint on “The Tonight Show.” One of the upsides of the whole late night war, though, is all the awesome television coming out of it. Conan has not pulled any punches, making fun of NBC and Leno as much as he can before leaving the network. This clip, though, was one of the best yet: a crossover with fellow NBC star Jack McBrayer in character as 30 Rock’s Kenneth the Page. And what was Kenneth doing at the Tonight Show? Giving a studio tour, of course.
Tyra Banks announced yesterday that her self-titled talk show would be ending this season. That announcement was reportedly news to the show’s crew, whom she neglected to inform separately. Many of the show’s crew were from L.A., where the show had originally been based before Tyra worked out a deal to get more money for herself if the show was in New York. [In case you're wondering, she did not offer additional pay or moving expenses for the crew who opted to move cross-country with the show.] Now, several former employees have dished to the New York Daily News about Tyra’s reign of terror:
“There had been high turnover of employees for years,” a past crew member says, insisting that many people quit after just a few months because it was “pretty difficult to work for Tyra.”
“She and the higher-ups on the production staff could be extremely brutal,” the source says. “She really is a diva.”
“When the show moved from L.A. to New York, several staffers weren’t even directly told about the change – they heard through the grapevine that it was going to move locations. Even so, a lot of those people gave up their lives on the West Coast so they could continue working for the show. Now they’re out of luck.”
I thought in spirit of today’s post I’d pull some old Tyra-related stories, including the one about the truth behind her “apartment makeovers” and this one about a former assistant suing her. Enjoy!
Conan O’Brien was interviewed on his very own episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio, even though he isn’t an actor. One thing I really liked was that he talked about some non-showbiz stuff that he did, including a brief stint as a Capitol Hill intern. Conan worked for a short time as an intern to his district’s congressional representative, but his main memory of the experience was “making lots of copies.” He also cops to having had a bit of an entitlement problem, admitting he didn’t want to work his way up through the ranks but rather skip straight to the top. Oh, Conan, you adorable former “Simpsons”-episode writer, you. Why people preferred watching Jay Leno to this man is an absolute mystery to me.
