Office Comedy Week Part I: Better Off Ted

Let’s start with one of the more “traditional” office comedies on my watch-it-or-suffer-my-wrath-because-these-shows-are-all-that-keeps-what-little-faith-I-have-in-television-alive inspired wrath. So I guess the most “normal” of them is Better off Ted.

Better off Ted is a good show. And like many good shows, it struggled to get a second season and was canceled after that despite solid ratings. Apparently five million viewers and critical acclaim when the show got no promotion just isn’t acceptable for a second rate Network like ABC. And you know, when they put Castle on the air I thought they were genuinely trying to rise above their pitiful past. Apparently I was wrong. The good news is that the show is available in its entirety through numerous digital means including but not limited to Netflix. Uh. As are all the shows I’m going to talk about actually. Turns out that I can bypass my usual hatred of television by using Netflix instead. If nothing else, it means it’s all there and I don’t have to watch the show piecemeal. Also gives the world time to separate out the chaffe. And let’s be honest. Most TV is chaffe.

So, BOT is about the titular Ted, a director of Research and Development for a Large, soulless, and generally evil corporation. His underlings like him because he’s merely amoral rather than outright immoral. Also because his underlings are batshit insane. His product tester/ love interest, Linda, vacillates wildly between sugar and spice and a rebel without a cause. Maybe if she had a cause she’d be better at it and stop stealing creamer or playing Linda Bagel- a game she invented which involves bouncing bagels off of one wall into a vent in the adjacent wall. His two best researchers are Phil and Lem, archetypal nerds who are without a doubt, the funniest things in an already hilarious show. Who else can make bullet proof dinner plates, lab-grown beef that tastes like despair, or invent an insult formula that will leave you saying “Dag, yo. I done been Philabusted and/or Lembasted.” Finally, there’s Veronica, his nearly sociopathic supervisor. Or as she would say “I’m different from other women, Ted. And by different, I mean better.” She’s played by the very funny Portia de Rossi (AKA Lindsay Bluth from Arrested Development). And on the off chance the show somehow bores you, bear in mind Portia’s married to Ellen Degeneres. So you can always picture her and Linda having a good time. I’m just saying is all. I was usually laughing too hard to think about it. Usually. But it was worth mentioning. And where most people would let tact get in the way of making such an observation public…I don’t. Because I’m different from other people. And by different, I mean better.

You too can be a better human being than the average. Watching this show’s a good start. In fact, I think the only problem with my strategy of avoiding actual TV and sorting it out once everything is already said and done is that I was unable to contribute myself as a statistic its producers could’ve used as they bleeted desperately to their corporate overlords as they begged for a third season. Which is pretty fitting since the show skewers corporate workings pretty well, with a hefty dose of absurd exaggeration to help the medicine go down. For instance, there’s the episode where the company installs cheaper light sensors that can’t see black people, forcing them to hire white people to follow around the black ones. And who can forget the episode that starts with a Spiderman (movie) spoof? “This story is about a girl. This girl. And like most stories about a girl, this one starts with gunplay.” The episode saw Ted halt his unbreakable dinner ware project, secretly funnel money to his product tester so she could actually deliver on the promises the company makes it its commercials to green their buildings, and has to cover his tracks by attributing the shifting funds to a “top secret” project called Jabberwocky. No one catches him only because no one- not even the highest executives are willing to admit that they’re too out of the loop to know what the imaginary project IS. Doesn’t that sound delightful? Well, get watching. Or you’re dead to me.