Better Off Ted episode 112
I’m almost at the end of the first season of Better Off Ted, and it seems to be getting uniformly better.
I mentioned in my initial review that when it started, each character was essentially a single personality trait that was magnified to absurd proportions. That’s still true to some extent (especially of Phil and Lem) but they’ve also started to flesh out the characters a bit. They’re letting Veronica display a bit of a human side, and they’re letting Ted and Linda act a little insane.
I’m writing about this episode specifically because it was a significant step above the rest in terms of awesomeness (with the exception of episode 4, the one about racial sensitivity). Also, there was some actual honest-to-God Japanese spoken at the end. Those were real Japanese people, speaking real Japanese, and they said what the subtitles said. Nothing more to say about that.
This episode featured some great Phil-and-Lem moments, as well as two fantastic lines from Veronica: “I can’t hear you, I’m going through a tunnel!” and “I wish I had the power to make everyone go away. Oh wait! I do! *leave*” I think I’m going to start using the latter one.
Random note: you know what’s weird? The resemblance between Portia de Rossi (Veronica) and Yvonne Strahovski (of “Chuck” fame). There’ve been a few moments where the physical resemblance has been almost creepy. Plus they’re both Australian imports on American TV shows who do American accents with just the tiniest flaws.
This is a bloody difficult show to write about. It’s not particularly deep (yet) and there’s nothing particularly wrong with it, so all I can do is watch, laugh and enjoy. There’s little room for criticism or analysis. It’s probably good for me to have a TV show that I can just watch without thinking about it too much.
I just have the season finale of Better Off Ted left to watch, but I’m saving that till tomorrow. Also tomorrow I will be giving The OC a chance to redeem itself after the heinous Chrismukkah episode of the fourth season. The whole time I was thinking “oh man we are airborne over the shark right now” and I’d hate for The OC to have punked out in its last season after a good run.
