And first the bad news. The ABC network in the States has already declared Better Off Ted dead, after a paltry two seasons. Which is a pity, since acerbic, mildly surreal satires about the workings of corporate America don’t come along very often.
One of Better Off Ted’s trademarks is its opening sequence, which takes the form of a commercial (new every episode) for Veridian Dynamics, the gargantuan conglomerate where the title character, Ted Crisp (Jay Harrington), heads the Research and Development department. Veridian’s ads are triumphs of PR gloss and technological triumphalism, with just a smidgen of screaming nightmare – an optimistic female voice tells us that Veridian is developing “the next generation of food and food-like products”, including “lemon-flavoured fish” and radishes which are too spicy to eat. Moreover, “We have made a sheep.” The full scope and scale of Veridian is left unspecified, but it seems to be an all-purpose mix of pharmaceutical giant, futuristic arms manufacturer and neo-imperialist think tank.
We see Veridian’s deranged ambitions through a compact group of characters, notably Ted’s boss, the glamorous but merciless Veronica Palmer (Portia De Rossi, alias Ellen DeGeneres’ other half). Then there are his top scientists Phil (Jonathan Slavin) and Lem (Malcolm Barrett), a pair of bickering geeks (pictured below) who are always doing stuff like growing lumps of beef in a laboratory tank, without cows. And there’s Linda (Andrea Anders), who despite being “head of Testing” is clearly not fully indoctrinated into the Veridian Dynamics way of doing things. She expresses her rebellion against the overpowering corporate will by stealing all the little pots of creamer from the kitchen. She’s also dead keen on single-dad Ted, who’s played by Harrington like an enthusiastic Ivy Leaguer, but Ted’s reciprocal attraction is inhibited by the fact that he’s already had a brief fling with Veronica.
“I can’t have you sleeping with Linda,” Veronica informs him, sweeping up alongside him as she advances through the office. “It could embarrass me. Plus I may not be done with you yet.”The central idea of series creator Victor Fresco is that Veridian is a place where social norms and conventional moral gravity cease to exist, so that timid and harmless characters find themselves whirling through interludes of wildly escalating madness. It’s left to Veronica to present Veridian’s latest crackpot schemes, though we assume there are countless layers of secretive decision-making above her.
“We want to weaponise a pumpkin,” she instructs Ted. Good idea, says Ted. And again: “We want to make a metal that is hard as steel but can bounce like rubber. And is edible.” Ted says he’ll get on it. However, Ted surprises himself by discovering that there are limits to his blind subservience. When Veronica announces that “we want to cryonically freeze Phil, just for a year, to see if it’s possible”, it eventually dawns on him that he ought to make a chirrup of protest, though only after getting a prod in the right direction from his young daughter Rose, the show’s precocious moral conscience.
Despite its frontiers-of-technology themes, there's something reassuringly old fashioned about Better Off Ted. Jay Harrington is reminiscent of classic droll Americans like Bob Newhart, or Don Adams from Mel Brooks's Sixties spy farce Get Smart, while in some ways Veridian Dynamics functions as a gigantic mutation of the advertising agency that employs put-upon husband Darrin in Bewitched. It's just that it might suddenly bring about the end of the world, that's all.
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