TV: Outsourced (NBC, Thu 9:30)

Outsourced returns us to the "laughing at vs. laughing with" problem that Mike & Molly raised earlier in the week. This time, the focus of the awkward laughter is India.

Our hero is Todd Dempsey (Ben Rappaport), who's been sent to India to manage the call center for a novelty company. He has a motley crew on the phones, who are utterly ignorant of American culture, and thus not very good at selling "add-ons," the related products that callers didn't know they wanted. Todd is sadly unaware of Indian culture himself -- even the idea that cows are sacred seems to be new to him -- so we've got a classic culture-clash comedy in the making.

At its best, Outsourced is a reasonably entertaining comedy. There's an interesting relationship between Todd and his assistant manager, Rajiv (Rizwan Manji), who figures that it doesn't much matter whether Todd succeeds or fails; either way, he's headed back to America, leaving Rajiv to take over his job. Diedrich Bader is amusing as Charlie, manager of another call center, who's clearly meant to be such an Ugly American that we forgive Todd his relatively mild lapses and insensitivities.

But there's a lot of crude ethnic humor here, too. Indians have funny names! (A character named Manmeet is the butt of most of those jokes.) The cities are crowded! ("It's like Frogger, but with real people," says Todd of the local traffic.) The food gives you diarrhea!

And it's a bit annoying that the show also has one more call center manager in the form of Tonya (Pippa Black), a sexy Australian; she's obviously meant to be Todd's romantic interest, and the clear implication is that it wouldn't do for him to be attracted to an Indian woman.

So, even more than Mike & Molly, the show is a very uneven mess, with enough offputting stuff that you feel a little bit queasy about enjoying even the stuff that actually is funny. But there are hints of something more interesting and complicated here, especially in the notion that Todd needs to learn about India just as much as his staff needs to learn about America. If the writers can get past the obvious ethnic humor, Outsourced could turn into something worth watching.