This
isn’t a comparison I would’ve ever thought I’d make, but in a way, Better Off Ted is a tiny bit like Kings.
Back when it premiered, I watched it offhandedly, in large part because
I had nothing else to do at the time. I
thought it was fine, nothing extraordinary.
However, it didn’t take long before I was completely in love with this
oddball comedy, and when it was canceled after its second season, I mourned it
hard.
Essential
to Better Off Ted’s comic success is
the complete sincerity with which the mostly outrageous characters react to the
absurdity around them. Life and business
at Veridian Dynamics is a high-octane dose of surreal madness, and although the
characters are similarly larger than life, they somehow ground all the insanity
and make it feel wonderfully, hilariously true.
I could write about any one of them, but it’s fitting, I think, that my
first post about Better Off Ted is
about the captain of its ridiculous ship.
Though
Veronica isn’t the top dog at Veridian – she has a boss who appears on
occasion, and she has to frequently troubleshoot ways to get ideas approved
“upstairs” – she’s in charge of Ted and all the other regulars. In many ways, she’s a model executive; her
sights are usually set on the bottom line, she doesn’t have any particular
investment in whether or not something is actually feasible, and any efforts
she makes to mask her indifference toward the underlings are halfhearted, to
say the least.
These
traits are funny enough on their own.
Veronica’s always good for a drive-by insult, and I love the eternally-ludicrous
tasks she gives her workers. It’s great
when, upon learning that the employees would appreciate being treated as
individuals, she has their cubicles decorated according to one of four
corporate-approved themes. But
Veronica’s character has plenty of other comic wrinkles, and though they
complement these main tropes, they bring their own added humor to the mix.
There’s
of course her tightly-wound coldness (“The company feels that if we ease up
because someone dies, it will only encourage other people to die,”) and her
almost alien disregard for the concerns of the plebs (“Ugh! There are employees everywhere. It’s like I’m walking through spider
webs.”) There’s her frightening intensity
(“Ted, you’d a guest. I can’t have you
flinching every time I shoot a gun in here,”) coupled with her blasé pragmatism
(“Yes, Ted, I know. I shouldn’t hit
people on the staff. I’ve been hearing
that since grade school.”) There’s her
calm superiority (“I’m different than other women, Ted, and by different, I
mean better,”) and one mustn’t forget her deep, abiding, utterly random prejudice
(“I think it’s Dutch. It sounds like
their stupid handiwork, with their cheese and their giant propeller buildings.”)
And,
perhaps most surprising of all, every once in a while, she really comes
through. It’s often related to her
business-savvy, naturally – not many people could, given shockingly little prep
time, pull off a successful presentation for a product they haven’t actually
come up with. However, on occasion she
also shows a glimmer of regard for others beneath her robot-like detachment. More than once, she actually bends the
rules(!) for Ted’s sake! Oh, and she can
sit calmly discussing the web-dwelling octo-chicken created in the lab. How much does Veronica rule?
No comments:
Post a Comment