Better Off Ted: A very funny show about an evil corporation

[TMC]

https://mutantreviewersmovies.com/20...l-corporation/

Whenever lists of the great modern laugh track-free sitcoms are discussed, you’ll usually see a lot of the same contenders bandied about: Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation, The Office, Community, and Scrubs. And while all of the aforementioned are amazing TV, they do tend to overshadow some worthy contemporaries that deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. So to that list I’m going to add one of my absolute favorite sitcoms, Better Off Ted.

Maybe it was the “what do we do with this?” title or its somewhat hard-to-pitch premise that worked against it, but Better Off Ted doesn’t get nearly the amount of love that it really should. It’s consistently one of the funniest, quippiest, and most likable half-hours of television that I’ve watched. So consider this my campaign to have its ignominy blotted out.

Better Off Ted follows the day-to-day worklife of Ted Crisp (Jay Harrington), a senior vice-president of research at Veridian Dynamics — a very large and overtly evil company. But evil in a cheery way! It’s kind of “evil” with quote marks around it, because Veridian Dynamics swings back and forth from being a mad scientist’s power base to an exaggerated satire on the callous ways that companies tend to treat their office drones.

At the heart of the mad science (and of the show, to tell the truth) are Lem (Jonathan Slavin) and Phil (Malcolm Barrett), two completely brilliant nerds who are best friends and social pariahs. There’s nothing they can’t make, from the Octochicken to a sound ray that makes the hearer throw up, but their fragile emotional states and assumed submission to the world at large means that Ted needs to handle them like children.

Rounding out the cast is the fantastic Andrea Anders as Linda, a product tester who brings both sass and morality into this evil empire; Rose (Isabella Acres), Ted’s daughter; and Veronica (Portia de Rossi), Ted’s boss. As great as de Rossi was in Arrested Development, I’d argue that she’s way better here (and gets loads more screentime). Veronica may have mostly sold her soul to the company, but she’s got a sliver of humanity left. But her largely amoral attitude and scathing quips makes her presence always welcome.

Every time I come back to watch Better Off Ted, I go through the same cycle of being initially excited that I get two seasons to watch… and then let down to realize (because I had forgotten) that these are only two half-seasons, totaling 26 episodes in all. I mean, I love shows with a smaller count, but I could’ve gone for three or four more full-blown seasons of this show, easily. Twenty-six episodes — out of which there is nary a dud — is a mere appetizer.

Ostensibly a workplace comedy set in a nondescript office, this series makes the most out of its core cast and revolving bit players to carry the load. Usually every episode features a moral or ethical theme — interoffice flirtation, lying, power struggles, corporate sabotage, racism, sexual harassment, boundaries — and then bounces it off the characters’ different levels of inherent morality and status. Ted is right in the middle, pulled by the company to do the “evil” thing while Rose, Linda, and occasionally the others yank him in the direction of “good.”

Better Off Ted utilizes a couple of storytelling devices to make its runtime snappy and fun. First, Ted often narrates right to the camera as he’s going about his day, which allows him to quickly set up situations and let us know what he’s thinking. It feels very natural the way the show does it, usually just lines here and there like Ferris Bueller. Another device the show employs is creating fake commercials for Viridian Dynamics that use stock footage and a script (usually on the theme of the show) that tries to strike a wise and hopeful tone while being unable to cover up the sinister nature of the company. We see more of these commercials in season 1, while they become more sparse in the second run of episodes.

With snappy writing and largely upbeat and cringe-free episodes, Better Off Ted is a sitcom that goes down smoothly. A few of my favorite episodes are the one where Lem is frozen in a cryo state (for like a day or two), Linda accidentally gets dosed with an energy drug, the company mistakenly mandates that everyone start insulting each other, and — of course — Jabberwocky. You don’t need to know what that is.