We asked the two men how they were handling the legal quagmire when it comes to revealing details of employees’ personal evaluations on national TV.  They got all coy on us, blushing prettily and declining to discuss sordid details. 

From Lisa de Moraes’s article “They Get Fired, You Get to Watch,” Washington Post, April 8, 2009

Oh my!  Fox is planning a new reality series that takes schadenfreude to a new level.  They are lining up small businesses, with 10-15 employees, who are struggling financially and agreeing to let the employees decide who gets the axe.  To help the employees “decide” they company will engage in full disclosure about their staff, or as the series’ creator, Mike Darnell says:

“We’ve . . . opened up the books to everybody’s salary, opened up their HR files and let them talk about each other and to each other – this one’s lazy, this one’s a hard worker, I hear this one’s having an affair.  And in the end they will decide who’s to go.”

Gee, do you think that all this water cooler talk and full disclosure might lead to comments about age, race, gender, religious affiliation, or ethnicity?  And maybe, just maybe such taboo comments could factor into the “Gotta Go” decision?  You bet your show ratings they can.  And if they do, this show may well get rerun as evidence.

Better yet, it could generate a spin-off series where the show’s producer’s and the previous company contestant win a date on a different reality show called: Hot Seat.  It could be similar to the runner up on The Bachelor becoming the new Bachelorette.  It could be a show about well meaning projects and their executives getting trounced in Court and the media for not anticipating the negative, liability inducing, consequences of their business decisions.  Oh wait; don’t we already have something like that already?  Would it be called Motor City Today?  Or Banking Now?

“Someone’s Gotta Go” could easily be a self fulfilling prophesy because blushing prettily and being coy is no substitute for legal literacy.

Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, The No Nonsense Lawyer

Tags: Fox, legal literacy, reality series, schadenfreude, Someone's Gotta Go

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Business Blind Spots, Costs, Decision Making, Quote of the Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.