Better Off Ted

If ever there was an industry tailor made for people of the mindset: “If at first you don’t succeed…” then it is network television. With that in mind writer/producer Victor Fresco takes another roll of the dice with this midseason sitcom Better Off Ted. We say another roll because for all intents and purposes Fresco has brought us this exact same idea back in 2002 with the short lived Andy Richter Controls the Universe, then on Fox.

Premiering right around the time Scrubs was making its debut bow, Andy Richter married the so-sad-but-so-true nature of office politics with the now infinitely imitated fantasy sequences that saw Sacred Heart’s residents soar while Andy faded away into obscurity after a mere fifteen episodes. Given Fox’s notorious intolerance for anything even remotely out of the ordinary, it’s amazing it lasted that long.

Now seven years on, Fresco is back with much the same idea kicked into high-concept mode and now minus the flamboyant fantasy that – let’s face it – these days is a little passé. Imagine Don Draper, having kicked the scotch, stalking the halls of Edward Neumeier’s dystopic conglomerate Omni Consumer Products and you’d have something approaching affable head of R&D Ted Crisp (Jay Harrington). Here the sign on the wall reads Veridian Dynamics, but the influence of Old Detroit (they’re having a little trouble with their cyborg killing everything that’s put in front of him) is undeniable.

Ted’s a shoulder to the wheel kind of guy, a facilitator whose job it is to provide that all-important link between collecting underpants and profit. When informed that the higher-ups want to “weaponize a pumpkin,” he simply responds: “well then so do I.” At the practical end of these increasingly bizarre requests are bickering research guys Lem and Phil, the latter of which sparks a crisis of conscience within Ted after the company decides to freeze him for a year (presumably there is a Walt Disney gag that got lost somewhere amidst the rewrites). Above Ted is the icy Veronica, a quite hysterical sociopath sporting a gigantic and false grin who exhibits and otherworldly serenity while displaying the people skills of Hannibal Lector.

Into this mix comes new employee Linda, an eccentric whose defiance for corporate conformity manifests itself in the pathological theft and hording of every single serving creamer in the building. Linda fancies Ted and Ted fancies her back but any courtship is held up by Ted’s policy of one and only one office affair (he used his with Veronica). At home is the token precocious child Rose, who while the subtext of the show is clearly beyond her, is thankfully quite un-irritating when she does join in.

So what exactly is Better Off Ted? Is it a sitcom? Is it a satire on consumerism? Is it a social commentary on corporate culture run amuck? Well, it’s all of those things and at the same time not really any of those things, which results in something decidedly unaffecting. Ted is essentially the straight guy and the other characters bounce off him, which is fine, but for the most part the result is a series of vaguely related sketches that lack any real cumulative punch and rarely build to anything. Some of them are very funny (a cost-cutting exercise means the janitorial staff is comprised entirely of kids from the daycare) and some of them aren’t (Phil’s siren screech, a side effect of the freezing process).

At its heart you get the feeling the show wants to be a black-as-coal comedy about rampant capitalism and the lack or accountability in the corporate world. Where do these bizarre orders come from? No one ever seems to know. Each episode opens with a Veridiean Dynamics promotional video informing us how they make out lives better – cloning dead relatives back to life accompanied by the flat, robotic declaration: “Family. Yay.” But that kind of humor only works if you commit to the idea 100% and Better Off Ted seems reluctant to tackle the truly sinister side of the subject matter.

In order for the satire to resonate the antics depicted have to have at least some consequence in the real world. Here the ideas are simply so outrageous they just seem disconnected from reality and at times are so unfathomable Ted has no choice but to carefully narrate to you what’s actually happening at any given time. Yes, they do genetically engineer food with God only knows what, and that’s really scary, but at the end of the episode Ted simply explains that the stuff is so expensive no one will ever end up eating it, which is really just a warm and fuzzy cop out.

Black comedy is based on a mood and a sustained air of unbalance. That’s simply something you can’t structure around commercial breaks. Chasing a terrified staffer down the hall to force feed him some chemically concocted “cowless beef” that may or may not kill him doesn’t work with big band music and certainly looses something when followed immediately by an Allstate ad.

Starring: Jay Harrington, Portia de Rossi, Andrea Anders, Malcolm Barrett, Jonathan Slavin, Isabella Acres

Created By: Victor Fresco

Network: ABC