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?
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