Better Off Ted (2009)

I am very glad I finally made time to watch the eminently quirky Better Off Ted. This show is a joy and a hoot (intelligently so)! Ted (Jay Harrington) is the smart, moral, friendly, likable, tongue-in-cheek R&D manager at Veridian Dynamics, a mega corporation so large and diversified that it can chide GE even as it develops its own weaponized or genetically modified vegetables, tests cryonically freezing employees, uses children from its corporate daycare center as unpaid custodians, and commits a panoply of other human rights violations for profit (because, according to Ted’s boss, “the company never parts with [money] unless forced to by a government stronger than they are -- and there's only three of those left”). Portia de Rossi is excellent as Veronica, the blithely immoral and punctilious R&D director. (“It's gonna be a fantastic new tool, if we can get it to tell the difference between soldiers and children.”) Jonathan Slavin and Malcolm Barrett are superb as the firm’s two top R&D scientists (so nerdy). Andrea Anders is perfect as an R&D tester who is Ted’s unrequited love interest. (She wants him, but he’s too moral to go there – for work reasons, but he is also a single dad: “I don’t have the energy for a onesome.”) The ensemble cast has exceptional chemistry. Particularly entertaining are the company commercials, included in nearly every episode, promoting questionable stances on ethics or morality. ("Veridian Dynamics. Making your world better. Whether you want us to or not." Or, “Our robot servants are programmed to not be dangerous. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t. Please don’t taunt our robot servants.”) Better Off Ted is eminently quotable for fans of over-the-top irony and sarcasm. The writing is well above average. Enjoy! 5 stars. (4-27-2016)