Instant Watching: Better Off Ted

In her weekly column, Instant Watching, Christie Dean talks about recently produced obscure and independent films that are made available through Netflix’s Instant Watch feature.

I’m changing up my post a little bit this week to talk about one of my favorite things about Netflix–the ability to revisit favorite TV shows or discover new ones and be able to watch a lot of them in their series entirety. There is a treasure trove of well-produced and well-written television shows available on the Instant Watch feature, many of which only had a one to three season run despite their quality of storytelling. One show that I completely missed during its run on ABC was Better Off Ted, which aired for two seasons (2009-2010).

Better Off Ted is a comedy about Ted Crisp, who is second in command of Research and Development at Veridian Dynamics, a huge corporation that invents new, bizarre products. Ted is extremely good at his job but he constantly tries to find the balance between his work, his role as a single father to his little daughter Rose, and his romantic feelings toward Linda, a product tester in his department. Veronica, Ted’s boss, is a confident and driven leader who seemingly harbors no emotions. Ted often challenges Veronica to keep the employees safe and treated with respect, but Veronica and those over her merely do what they can to turn a profit and bribe employees to avoid lawsuits.

Veridian Dynamics is a greedy, lawsuit-paranoid corporation with unwise solutions to problems and an endless amount of red tape. A highlight of the show that appears in almost every episode is the Veridian Dynamics commercial spots, which use all stock footage and narration to talk about the greatness of the company and are tailored to the overall theme of that particular episode. Ted constantly breaks the fourth wall to narrate throughout the episodes, and the show as a whole has a very similar feel in its sense of humor and character structure to Arrested Development. As Ted struggles with self-gratification versus staying a responsible supervisor and father, he and his employees have to try to remain morally upright in a corporation with very questionable ethical standards. Both hilarious seasons of Better Off Ted are currently available on the Netflix Instant Watch feature.