Great Minds Think Different

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.

I’ve started watching a new show: “Better Off Ted”. It’s just completed airing its first season of 13 episodes, and it’ll supposedly be back in January for an 18-episode second season. Also, it’s fantastic.

The show revolves around main character Ted, who is a mid-level manager at a generic megacorporation called Veridian Dynamics. The other primary characters are Ted’s emotionless, unscrupulous boss Veronica; a duo of perpetually squabbling scientists, Phil and Lem; and Linda, an underling of Ted’s. You might already be thinking that this premise offers few paths that have not already been taken. But “Better Off Ted” manages to find one.

Unlike “The Office” (both British and American), “Better Off Ted” does not aim for realism in its portrayal of generic megacorporation office life, but instead engages in wildly over-the-top parody. It takes all of the setting’s little absurdities, magnifies them to epic proportions, and shows Ted (who is a relatively normal guy) dealing with them. For example, the scientists Phil and Lem are constantly getting into the kind of little kerfuffles that long-married couples stereotypically have, culminating in shamelessly bizarre situations like the two of them squeezing themselves into one hazmat suit.

On the other end, there is Veronica, whose main function is to relay the whims of the nebulous upper ranks of the corporation to Ted, who, as head of R&D, must get his underlings to fulfill such duties as creating beef without the use of a cow, and weaponizing a pumpkin. Though she is emotionless and unscrupulous, she avoids all the tired “evil boss” archetypes. Again, it’s the show’s total abandonment of realism that accomplishes this. The things she says and does are so absurd that her coldheartedness doesn’t come across as an unusually strong bad trait like it does in, say, Bill Lumbergh, but just as a normal trait that is exaggerated like everything else in the show. It doesn’t make her evil; it’s just how she is.

Stylistically, the show bears a striking resemblance to “Malcolm in the Middle”. It’s extremely fast-paced, full of random and abrupt segues, and has a main character who habitually breaks the fourth wall. While fourth-wall-breaking normally bothers me, it seems natural enough in “Better Off Ted” that I’m OK with it. The only thing wrong with it is that it feels like a vestige of “The Office”’s mockumentary format.

Of course, since it resembles “Malcolm in the Middle” so much, by transitivity it resembles “Scrubs” quite a bit too. But it doesn’t resemble Scrubs in tone at all. Like “Malcolm”, and unlike Scrubs, “Better Off Ted” plunges itself headfirst into comedy with nary a dramatic moment. It’s all about the silliness. However, three of the thirteen episodes were directed by former Scrubs directors, Gail Mancuso and Michael Spiller (who, incidentally, has directed some “Sex and the City” too).

Through the absurdity, the show often musters some absolutely vicious social commentary, especially episode 4, the latest one I’ve watched. The plot of the episode revolves around some new motion detectors the company installed to save money by, for example, turning off lights when there is no motion in a room. Trouble is, the motion detectors operate by detecting light reflected off skin, and as a result, cannot see black people (like Lem). Hilarity (really good hilarity) ensues.

There’s one area of the show that’s not quite like the others: the relationship between Ted and Linda, which is, predictably enough, fraught with sexual tension and emotional confusion. It doesn’t involve the same unabashedly ridiculous situations as the other plotlines, but it’s great nonetheless. Early on, after they end up holding hands during a tense moment, Ted claims that he didn’t hold her hand; he held onto her hand after she held his hand. Linda, first coyly: “Oh, that’s how we’re playing it?” Then disgustedly: “We’re gonna play it STUPID?”

In contrast to this obviously meant-to-be relationship that just causes a lot of awkwardness, there’s the relationship between Ted and Veronica, where they occasionally hook up, think nothing of it, and experience no awkwardness as a result. It’s all very quirky, funny, and in the strangest of ways, believable. It’s the only believable part of the whole show.

Granted, I’ve only watched four episodes, but I have high hopes for this show. For its potential to entertain me, that is. Naturally, since it is a very funny, offbeat comedy with a devoted following, it has terrible ratings and probably won’t survive beyond two or three seasons. Such is the cruelty of television: a great show like “Better Off Ted” gets shitty ratings and has its first season cut short, while stupid bullshit like “Hell’s Kitchen” rolls along for infinite numbers of seasons and has viewerships in the zillions. Such disappointment is the price of having good taste in TV shows.