WE'RE WORKING ON IT: It's time to recognize that for the last month, while some of our favorite shows conserve energy for the big season-ending sprint and others trot along unevenly, Better Off Ted has quietly been the best show on television.
When Ted premiered a month ago, the critical consensus seemed, accurately, to be "unspectacular, but promising." As Matt pointed out (and I agreed) in a post on Parks & Recreation, though, it's tough to judge a show by its pilot. The writers have to do a lot of exposition, and the actors need time to settle into their characters. While some pilots (Sports Night, Arrested Development) get it right from the opening bell, others take two (The Office) or three (30 Rock) or more (Seinfeld) episodes to hit full stride. So if Portia de Rossi's Veronica started a bit too broad, or Jay Harrington's Ted was unexpectedly more Ted Moseby than Don Draper, they could be forgiven.
A month later, I hope the critics come back to drive viewers to this show, because it has fulfilled its promise. Everybody pointed out the creative debt Ted's pilot owed to Andy Richter Controls the Universe and to a lesser extent Arrested Development -- as sure a recipe for disheartening cancellation as one could concoct -- but now I think that the show's closest comp is 30 Rock. Superficially, they are very similar: workplace comedies whose main characters are a success-obsessed executive and a do-right middle manager who are both excellent at their jobs and who must coddle and prod their talented but self-obsessed employees. The real similarity, though, is the way both shows create generate crisp humor out of outlandish situations that are nonetheless true to the characters and their world (as opposed to shows like Andy Richter and Scrubs, whose more slapstick moments arise from characters' fantasies). At the same time, Ted, like 30 Rock, has, since the overly ridiculous pilot, relegated its most absurd inventions (a solar-powered oven that leaches toxins when in contact with the sun; a military drone that cannot be taught to distinguish terrorists from children) to props and one-liners, where it's easy to laugh at them without thinking too much.
The show really hit its stride in the third episode, when the show fully embraced its sunny amorality and the writers and actors all seemed to figure out how to make their characters work (especially de Rossi, whose Veronica lost her sadism and became just singularly goal-oriented, and Andrea Anders, who seems to give her fish-out-of-water Linda more substance than is on the page). And then it did a great episode about corporate racial insensitivity (harkening back to, without repeating, The Office's "Diversity Day" and 30 Rock's "Rosemary's Baby") when the office installs energy-saving motion detectors that only detect the movements of whites, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Jews, leaving the office's Black employees and white executives alike frustrated in their efforts to find a solution. That is both high-quality absurdist humor and, probably, impenetrable to the executives and TV viewers who keep shows on the air. It's depressing to recall that if NBC hadn't hired Ben Silverman, The Office -- exec-produced by Ben Silverman -- might not have survived its low-rated second season.
Also, the Veridian Dynamics commercials are awesome. "Diversity. Just the thought of it makes these white people smile." If you get a chance, try to find "Through Rose Colored HAZMAT Suits" and "Racial Insensitivity," and give ABC a reason to keep the show.
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