I’m charmed by MTV’s Underemployed, a quirky little drama that debuted last night with an extremely smart premise. It follows a group of soon-to-be college graduates with high ambitions: as Glover (Sarah Habel) says the night before school ends, “We have to get together and celebrate our complete world domination!” But because of the vagaries of the economy, the rise of unpaid internships, and some of their own realistically bad decisions, find themselves adrift after they leave school. It’s a charming, even sexy show at times, but it’s also an example of a slightly strange trend: a show that’s absolutely about the recession, but that has a hard time naming social conditions for what they are.

A logical reason that Sofia (a very strong Michelle Ang), a gifted writer, would be working in a donut shop where customers yell things at her like “What do you mean you’re out of maple bacon bars, you little bitch? Having maple bacon bars is your job!” rather than interning at a magazine is the economy and the contraction of the publishing industry. But Underemployed sets up Sofia in a beautifully twee apartment (the characters all seem possessed of great real estate) and treats her unemployment as a symptom of a larger confusion about what she actually wants to be doing with her life, her writing an extension of inner confusion. It does better with a plot about Sofia’s sexuality: her friends tease her about having survived college a virgin, but when she’s asked out on a date by an attractive African-American lawyer who is the boss of one of her college friends, the show doesn’t have to state out loud why she didn’t have sex with a man somewhere along the way. The expression of joyful surprise on Sofia’s face when she has her first orgasm feels wonderfully sweet and revelatory, especially in a television environment that seems to believe that there’s a direct relationship between raunch and insight.

Then, there’s Glover, whose sex life and job struggles are also intimately related. After she asks her boss if, after a year of unpaid internships, she can finally be paid, Glover’s handsome boss asks her to lunch, and they end up sleeping together. But when it turns out that the boss has a girlfriend and no intention of doing right by Glover, who ends up blackmailing him into a reasonable salary and a parking space. It might have been nice for her to mention, as interns are arguing in courtrooms over the country, that even if he hadn’t slept with her, unpaid internships that involve substantial work rather than educational experiences may well be illegal. And it would have been even better if Underemployed hadn’t set him up to be a potential love interest in the future, doing the right thing personally and dumping his girlfriend after he was forced to do the right thing professionally and pay Glover.
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Undercover Boss, the CBS show based on a British program of the same name that began airing in the United States in 2010, may have been the programming decision that was most responsive to the recession. By disguising the CEOs and other top executives of major American corporations and sending them out to the front lines of their organizations, Undercover Boss played to the fantasy of showing your employer what your life is really like and how hard your work really is. At a time when executives can seem impossibly distant from the average worker and from viewers at home, Undercover Boss makes CEOs seem accessible—and sometimes, the boss’s experiences end up translating into company-wide changes in policy. Such was the case at Kendall-Jackson Vineyard Estates, where president Rick Tigner went undercover and into the company’s fields and processing facilities in an episode of the show that aired last weekend. I talked to Mr. Tigner at the Television Critics Association press tour about what he learned about immigration reform, sustainable wine production, and being the face of a major company at a time when America doesn’t love CEOs—and why he decided to start a language program for his workers and give them more vacation time. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide to go on the show in the first place?

Caroline here, who works for the company, she was actually researching how to, you know, give an award to one of our employees. And so she was going on the CBS site, they have some sort of employee-recognition program, and with that she saw the Undercover Boss program and then connected the two. And really, I think as a company, you know, our culture of helping employees and understanding their story just connected.

You came on the show after going through a rough period, you mentioned through ’08 and ’09. Was there a sense that this was sort of a positive way to show that you were coming back or to show that you were reaching out?

It’s interesting. When you go through a difficult time and you have, you know, lay-offs, or we call right-sizing or downsizing…The reality was is that, you know, we still want to do the right things for our employees…When the show was offered to us, you know, it would have been a great thing for us to help the morale of the company.

Now you said when you went on the show that you found that some of your directives hadn’t made it all the way down the chain of command.

When I did the show, there’s always these concepts of “Do people understand that it’s quality first?” You know, it’s one of our visions and values…But on that one division—our distribution and trucking division— you know, that part had not gotten through. You know, so there was a management issue, I think, or communication issue there…the management is not necessarily overwhelmed, but just they were so busy trying to drive that business, so that some of the level of service at the driver level, they kind of lost sight of it…I worked with an employee who actually, you know, I would argue—maybe not the most stellar employee on that particular day. He also just had a bad day, you know. Didn’t mean he was a bad guy, and doesn’t mean he can’t be a great employee.

One thing I thought was interesting that you mentioned was finding you had some communications issues with your Spanish-speaking workers. You said that wasn’t something that had occurred to you before. How much did you know about the actual sort of ethnic composition of your workforce?

I have a very good understanding of the composition, but I really probably had not enough knowledge that our frontline managers didn’t have the ability to communicate with them. Now, the person I worked with was one, a new employee, and a young employee, so she hasn’t had enough time or experience necessary to learn Spanish. She might have over time. Don’t get me wrong. We have a lot of other people who are frontline managers in production who speak Spanish. But the reality is we have some that don’t…Being someone who I think—I always think I’m a pretty good communicator, who had the inability to communicate on my very first day I did the show. I was like, “Wow, this is a problem.” But it’s a problem that’s addressable…

I can’t make you learn another language. It’s difficult. I can’t force you to do it. You have to want to do it…It’s been six months since the show. And right now we’re just in the process of implementing the whole project because it took time to hire the training manager, to get all of the Rosetta Stone licenses, to work on the tuition payments because we’re doing more than just one type of training… And then also for the Spanish-speaking employees, who actually get paid, you know, throughout the day, we’re doing it during the work hours versus making them stay after work to do it. But the English-speaking management employees, they do their day jobs, and then they stay later because it’s sort of optional for them.
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