LI-based floral giant on Sunday's 'Undercover Boss'

Did Sunday night's "Undercover Boss" on TV look just a little familiar? If so, then he could be your neighbor. This particular boss is from Long Island.

He's Chris McCann, 49, president of Carle Place-based 1-800-Flowers.com. The Nassau County resident and father of three appeared on what has become the highest-rated new show of 2010.

If you're thinking "ridiculously great promotion opportunity," then you are thinking along the right lines. An average of 13 million viewers have tuned in to the show to see benevolent bosses mix it up incognito with their hardworking minions.

McCann and 1-800-Flowers.com, one of the nation's leading flower-and-gift retail giants (annual revenue approaching $1 billion), get their close-up on the eve of the busiest flower/gift-buying stretches of the calender year, culminating with Mother's Day.

"I was very intrigued, nervous and cautious" when CBS approached the company, McCann said in a phone interview last week. "And then I saw the first [post-Super Bowl] episode." He and his brother, company founder Jim McCann, decided it would be "a great opportunity for our company and for me personally to learn more about our company from behind the curtain."

"We liked that the company is a highly recognized brand - and we loved that it's run by a pair of brothers with a unique work dynamic," Jennifer Bresnan, executive vice president of alternative programming for CBS, said in an e-mail. "Chris McCann, the company's president, goes undercover, but his older brother Jim, the chief executive and founder, appears in the episode in a few key, somewhat charged, moments together."

Chris was selected to go, in part, because he has assumed greater operational responsibilities at the company - and because Jim has been a frequent star of the company's commercials. Adds Chris McCann: "I was willing to grow a beard, and I don't think he was willing to shave his."

McCann says his cover was predicated on the "art of being vague. We told people that the company was looking to do some kind of film work about getting ready for spring and Mother's Day . . . I was an out-of-work house painter from New York" named Patrick.

He jokes that he "had to play dumb, which some people say I don't have to play at."

The boss went to stores in South Plainfield, N.J., and worked the factory line at 1-800-Flowers-owned Fannie May Chocolates in Canton, Ohio. The place turns out 10 million pounds of chocolate a year, and in an "I Love Lucy" moment, McCann struggled helplessly as the boxes flew by.

He's nearly identified - or afraid he will be - at a store in Boston, when the store manager, whom he had met before, decides to drop by.

Sunday night's episode, which airs at 9 on CBS, is the last original of the season, but "Undercover Boss" has been renewed for next season.