Veridian Dynamics. Friendship. It’s so important. But it’s different at work. Time spent with friends at work robs your employer of opportunity. And robbing people is wrong. Veridian Dynamics. Friendship. It’s the same as stealing.
Has there ever been a better time for a TV satire that savages the moustache-twirling evils of corporate culture?
The Great Recession has seen mega-conglomerates wallowing in bailout money while sloughing off employees in the name of “rightsizing,” the latest in layoff newspeak. Yet the brilliant corporate-skewing satire Better Off Ted itself seems headed for the chopping block.
It’s easy — and ironic — to blame the show’s death on obscene mismanagement by its corporate parent, the Disney-owned ABC. Instead of airing it on Wednesdays with comedy hits Modern Family and Cougar Town — or bothering to market it — ABC launched the second season of Better Off Ted quietly in December. Paired with the terrible Scrubs revamp, ABC burned off a couple eps weekly, including over the holidays and even New Year’s Day. Though two episodes remain unaired, starting next week a Lost rerun takes Ted’s timeslot for the foreseeable future.
Ted’s ratings failure is certainly not related to its comedy metrics — the show is arguably the funniest and most tonally original series on TV right now. Created by Victor Fresco, it revamps his brilliant-but-cancelled Andy Richter Controls the Universe, which also spent two seasons taking an absurdist approach to life on a cubicle farm, only this time with handsome middle manager Ted (solid straight-man Jay Harrington) as the lead instead of schlubby technical manual writer Andy. (Adorably odd character actor Jonathan Slavin appears in both).
Veridian Dynamics. Our team. Over 100,000 strong. And we love all of them. Unless they cross us. Then we’ll hunt them down and hurt them. Because that’s love, too. Veridian Dynamics. Don’t cross us. Ever. Seriously. Just don’t.
Universe’s corporate setting, the massive Pickering Industries, has been revised as Ted’s Veridian Dynamics. But the quirky ABC comedy hits many of the same pressure points — the pitfalls of office politics, head-banging bureaucracy, corporate evil-doing — while keeping a whimsical, if less fantastical, tone and firing off gags at an Arrested Development–style, machine-gun rate, along with faux commercials.
Take the episode titled “The Impertence of Communicationizing,” when a memo typo changed “not” to “now,” seemingly requiring the use of foul language in the office. Human resources refused to acknowledge the mistake and vulgar hilarity ensued. (Even more so online, where a majestically NSFW outtakes video went viral.)
Ted’s great first season got much of its bounce from Portia de Rossi’s eye-twinkling performance as ferocious boss Veronica, an ice-queen exec prone to such potent quotables as “God, you people are paranoid. No wonder the company has to secretly manipulate you,” and “The company loves money. If they could, they’d go to strip clubs and throw naked women at money.”
Now the rest of the cast has gelled — Ted’s children’s book–writing, bagel-tossing pseudo–love interest Linda (Andrea Anders); inseparable, unintentionally evil scientists Phil (Slavin) and Lem (Malcolm Barrett) — sending the series into some creative high water.
Veridian Dynamics. Doing the right thing. It’s important. What does it mean in business? We have no idea. We know what wrong is. Actually, no, we don’t. Because we’re a successful company, not some boring ethics professor. Veridian Dynamics. Right and Wrong. It means something. We just don’t know what.
The matter-of-fact malevolence of Veridian Dynamics, a company which specializes in such disparate inventions as cow-less beef, long-range people-skinning lasers, weaponized pumpkins and scented light bulbs, provides the show’s edge. When an employee dies during an overtime crunch in the episode “Beating a Dead Workforce,” Veronica uses her eulogy for a Mussolini-esque call to work even harder, even as the company lawyers argue his death was a pre-existing condition.
Better Off Ted bounces from bizarre back-stair spider infestations and demonic cleaner robots to such quotidian concerns as overly talkative co-workers, misinterpreted sexual harassment and office romances (albeit genetically matched ones set up by the company to decrease health insurance costs by creating better children).
Ted is whip-smart and cartoonish, multi-layered in its humour and always assured in its voice. It’s just too bad an evil corporation had to bury it — as German businesswoman Greta told Ted through her Phil-voiced translator device, I’d like to tell ABC: “You were much promising but not true.”