Better Off Ted's Brilliant Corporate Satire Was Ahead of Its Time

In The Late Great, Primetimer staffers and contributors revisit shows that were cut short, but still cast a long shadow over the TV landscape.

Being creatively ahead of your time may not be quite as satisfying for an artist as being able to harness widespread audience attention in the moment. But some of the best TV shows only grow over time because of how forward-thinking they were upon their initial release. It’s hard not to consider the two-season ABC sitcom Better Off Ted as a peak example of a show that was ahead of its time, even as it owed a creative debt to Arrested Development, another incredibly funny sitcom that was also ahead of its time. The difference is that Arrested Development has had a much longer shelf life and legacy due to its prominence on Netflix, whereas the sweet but often very savvy Better Off Ted is still out there, waiting to be rediscovered.

Better Off Ted starred Jay Harrington as Ted Crisp, a single dad whose life is split between being a kind and tender father to his daughter Rose (Isabella Acres), and serving as the head of research and development at Veridian Dynamics, a massive corporate conglomerate that seems to be involved in all aspects of human life without officially having any products of its own. A brave YouTuber has compiled the first season’s faux-commercials for Veridian Dynamics, which were included within the episodes themselves, highlighting the show’s droll, deadpan sense of humor and its depiction of the monolithic company at which the main characters worked. “Every day, something we make makes your life better,” intones the narrator in one of the ads, though the show itself would often prove that to be untrue.

Better Off Ted did have some unavoidable thematic similarities with Arrested Development. First, the lead character is also a straight-man single dad whose love of his child would often trump his own personal romantic preferences. (Early on in the series, Ted has romantic feelings for his new co-worker Linda, but is hesitant to act upon them lest he bother Rose.) Second, both shows had a heaping helping of voiceover narration, though in the case of Better Off Ted, Ted himself served as narrator and would often break the fourth wall on camera in doing so. Most notably, both shows shared a regular cast member, Portia de Rossi. Whereas de Rossi played the beautiful but clueless Lindsay Bluth in Arrested Development, she has a more Lucille-like role in Better Off Ted, as Ted’s boss Veronica, who’s not the CEO of Veridian Dynamics but often seems to be its most confident power broker and is able to control and manipulate so many other characters within her realm.

Even beyond Harrington and de Rossi, Better Off Ted had a masterful ensemble including Malcolm Barrett and Jonathan Slavin as a pair of best-friend nerdy scientists, Lem and Phil, whose various experiments often landed them in some kind of mess. In the series pilot, Phil is forcefully volunteered to be cryogenically frozen for a brief period of time to see its effects; most specifically, after exiting the cryogenic chamber, Phil is unable to stop screeching loudly at random times.

In many ways, though, the series’s high point came in its fourth episode, “Racial Sensitivity.” In that episode, Lem is shocked to realize that a new set of motion sensors in the office do not detect him or any other Black employees due to their skin color. One of the more acidic and scabrously satirical episodes the show delivered, “Racial Sensitivity” has a remarkable ear for the way corporations talk about racial differences, and how much they attempt to avoid dealing with problems head-on to maintain a perceived status quo.

Series creator Victor Fresco has an honestly remarkable knack for creating comedy series that are both extremely funny and sadly unable to linger long enough to get as massive an audience or cultural footprint as they deserve. Before Better Off Ted, Fresco created the very funny but slightly goofier Fox sitcom Andy Richter Controls the Universe; afterwards, he moved onto Netflix and delivered the more garish but no less enjoyable Santa Clarita Diet, which melded two disparate genres: a family sitcom and a zombie drama, with co-leads Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant more than up to the task of balancing the show’s creative aims. (Fans of Andy Richter Controls the Universe will remember that the gawky and very funny Slavin was a regular on that series too.)

What is perhaps most amazing about Better Off Ted is the one key aspect of creative DNA it inexplicably wound up sharing with Arrested Development. In the latter show’s case, while it was easy to spot the parallels between the Bluth family in the early 2000s with George W. Bush and his extended brood (especially when the show leaned into Iraq War references during the onset of the purported War on Terror), it’s just as easy to watch the show now and see disturbing and darkly funny parallels with the Trump family, with their lavish lifestyles, scam-like businesses, and a terrifying lack of self-awareness that trickles down as the family gets more and more involved in American society.

Better Off Ted doesn’t have such specific aims in mind; when the show was made in 2009 and 2010, corporate-speak didn’t feel quite so prevalent in the entire fabric of Western culture. If anything, it’s awe-inspiring that Fresco and his writing staff were as adept at capturing the learned soullessness of how so many major corporations talk both to their employees and their customers, over a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, after which it became all too painfully evident how much humans are treated like cogs in vast and impenetrable systems.

Arguably, it’s a miracle that Better Off Ted even got a second season. (At least with Netflix, there’s a similarly vast and impenetrable sense to how it tracks viewers of a given show or an episode of a given show, so we can’t really know how popular Santa Clarita Diet ever was.) When the series premiered in the spring of 2009, it netted the lowest sitcom debut ratings for any ABC show in four years, and before the first season wrapped, its live ratings were garnering fewer than 2 million viewers a week. (The TV-ratings landscape is much different in 2024, but even those ratings aren’t too impressive today.) For his own part, Fresco was fairly circumspect in May of 2010, when the show’s cancellation was made official, stating that “I think not enough people knew about it. It wasn’t like we had a lot of people watch it, and they didn’t come back to it.”

Savvy, sly corporate satires have become much more en vogue in the last decade. The recently concluded and wildly beloved HBO series Succession was as much a commentary on the real-life Murdoch family as it was a glimpse into how wealth and power corrupt media empires. And the Apple TV+ drama series Severance — with a second season on the way — is a bleak representation of how corporations ruin the very concept of a work/life balance when your brain has to essentially turn you into a different person to navigate each half of your life.

Better Off Ted was not so nihilistic as Succession as to depict Veridian Dynamics having a dramatically horrifying effect on American elections, nor as grim as Severance in treating corporate employees as puppets to be manipulated by their masters. But it paved the way for these shows and others, and with a weirdly effective and cheerful air to each episode. For a long time, Better Off Ted was on Hulu; now, episodes are available on demand and the entire series is on DVD. This brilliant satire is just waiting for you to discover it, and wonder why you didn’t catch up with it when it originally aired.

Josh Spiegel is a writer and critic who lives in Phoenix with his wife, two sons, and far too many cats. Follow him on Bluesky at @mousterpiece.