'Outsourced' (8:30PM ET Thursday, NBC) has a somewhat original premise, which centers on an American guy who goes to India to manage a call center.

The show treats this central culture clash with a great deal of tentativeness, a quality that never makes for good comedy, yet despite its scaredy-cat caution, 'Outsourced' still manages to be vaguely insulting and condescending.

Many, many shows have mined quality humor from fish-out-of-water scenarios. 'Outsourced' is not one of them.

Maybe there's truth to the assumption the show makes -- that the Indian call-center workers are eager to learn about America and its culture. But there's no indication that Todd Dempsy (Ben Rappaport) has any desire to to learn about Indian culture, which, in the pilot, is the source of poop jokes (Oh, the cuisine! It's spicy! And hard on the digestion, hyuck hyuck! Hey, that guy has a name that sounds vaguely rude! Heh heh, foreigners have funny names. Sigh.).

Of course it will theoretically take time for 'Outsourced' to give individual personalities to the various call-center workers, who are given little complexity in the pilot. But Todd is clearly the main character here, and he's so bland that the idea of watching him learn about anything -- including how to manage people -- doesn't seem promising.

And if Todd isn't quite clueless enough, there's Charlie (Diedrich Bader), who is clearly disgusted with his assignment in India and imports all his favorite foods from home. I'm not sure what the point of Charlie is, though I guess his belligerent ignorance makes Todd theoretically look better by comparison.

The funniest moments of the pilot usually come from Rizwan Manji, who deploys a dry and effective line delivery in his role as Todd's assistant manager, Rajiv. A sitcom told from the perspective of Rajiv, who wouldn't mind terribly if Todd fails, might actually be funny in a subversive way, but 'Outsourced' seems desperate to avoid being subversive, which pretty much neutralizes a lot of the potential for culture-clash comedy.

And the humor that has nothing to do with that aspect of the show is merely lame. There's one worker at the call center who is so shy that she speaks in a whisper. That idea is simply unfunny, and dead moments like that make the half-hour show drag.

I could go on, but why? There are many other good comedies that air on Thursday; any of them would be a better bet than this misfire. And with any luck, 'Outsourced' will be canceled soon and 'Parks and Recreation,' a terrific comedy that knows exactly how to be subversive, silly and very funny, will be back soon than mid-season, which is a long time to wait for Ron Swanson.

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