Skip to main content

Better Off Ted: The High Road Leads To Pansytown


Based on a review I read the other day, I decided to check out Better Off Ted. If you want the quick and dirty review, it's this: Why hasn't anyone I know told me about this show? It's funny, nerdy, well acted and has a ridiculous amount of just out there mad science moments. You'd think that everyone I know would be raving about this show, but they aren't.
So, Ted is the manager of the R&D department for an evil corporation called Veridian Dynamic. Ted's good at his job, and just about everyone likes him, he's a single dad, and he always tries to do the right thing. You'd think that Ted would be an unbearbly perfect character, and he is a little disgusting at times, but he has just enough flaws to make him interesting, he's overly competitive, a stickler for rules, and has somehow created a rule to keep him from hooking up with the hot product tester that he knows is a perfect match for him. He also has a nasty habit of breaking the fourth wall and talking to the camera, which is a fun way for you to hear what he's thinking, without the cliched looking up while deep in thought during a voiceover.
In our opening episode, Ted's team is put in charge of weaponizing pumpkins for a country that has a surplus of pumpkins, and a deficit of armaments, "We can do that". In the same episode, Ted's given a piece of frabic that the company can manufacture for cheap, and told to find a use for it. He immediately decides to create an office chair, which turns out to be terribly uncomfortable, but manages to boost the productivity of employees sitting in it. Mad science is never really the point of the show, however, it's always about social situations, as well as the evil corporate overlords' schemes to make the workplace more productive. One episode had the company posting a list of suggested oprions for dating within the company, based upon genetic compatibility. Another had a typo in a memo cause foul language to be used in all conversations during work hours.
The bottom line is that Better Off Ted does a decent job of filling the whole in my life that was left by Pushing Daisies being cancelled. It doesn't have the vibrant colors, or whimsical fairy tale elements, but it does have wicked sense of humor with some snappy dialogue.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Jason PalmerFebruary 8, 2010 at 8:31 PM

    I'm 4 eps into the show and I'm really digging it. All thanks to this review!

    Operation White Shadow lives on!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but...
Post a Comment
Read more

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...
2 comments
Read more

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...
2 comments
Read more