TV Rewind: It’s Better Off Ted‘s World, Severance Is Just Living In It
Photo Courtesy of ABC
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
In case you missed the memo, Severance, one of Apple TV+’s weirdest original series to date, is currently in the midst of its inaugural campaign to unsettle the American office worker’s just-off-the-clock Friday nights. Produced (most notably) by Ben Stiller and starring Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette and Britt Lower, among others, the bleakly eerie corporate “comedy” has, with the simple addition of a little unreal body horror, a lot too-real surveillance, and no fewer than half a dozen existential jump scares per hourlong episode, taken the dark office satire model Hollywood’s spent decades perfecting and turned it into something that feels wholly new.
Oh, and goats. They’ve also added goats.
Severance is an eerie, prestige-y update to what my basic cultural literacy understands to be a well-established dark office satire formula—that is, framing modern office work as a kind of imprisonment within a windowless, dehumanizing box in which blatantly meaningless tasks are performed for the merciless satisfaction of a blonde, power-hungry corporate ice queen. But it also owes something to one of its more ambitious (and equally bleak) forebears: ABC’s cult-favorite “horrible corporate” sitcom, Better Off Ted.
Created by Victor Fresco and starring Jay Harrington, Portia de Rossi, Andrea Anders, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Barrett, and Isabella Acres, Better Off Ted focused on the same question Severance has made so central to its identity (“who are we when we’re at work, and does that person even count as a person?”) but ran it through the quirky single camera sitcom lens. Full of bright colors, an irritatingly catchy jingle-adjacent soundtrack, and the kind of hammy performances you find more often in theatrical productions than on network comedies, Better Off Ted made the existential horror of losing yourself inside a soulless corporate behemoth, well, fun. Ranging from the development of weaponized pumpkins to the repurposing of miscalculated lab experiments to a psychological investigation of the hundreds of ways workers are expected to contort themselves to accommodate their managers’ mistakes—including, in “Beating a Dead Workforce,” literally working a man to death—Better Off Ted’s anti-corporate remit was so flexible that everyone, all the way from de Rossi as the department’s humorless boss bitch to Slavin and Barrett as its bumbling scientists to Anders and Harrington as its always-striving-to-be-moral leads, got to eat. Even Isabella Acres, popping in occasionally as Ted’s (Harrington) eight-year daughter to counterbalance Veridian Dynamics’ overwhelming corporate bleakness, got her share of killer dark-comedy bits.
Frustratingly, as delightful(ly grim) as it was from the pilot, Better Off Ted ended up as so many ambitious network comedies do: proving itself too good for this world. In fact, the series was so short-lived it didn’t even see all of its 26 episodes air. Premiering in early 2009 to broad critical acclaim and returning for a second season later that same year, ABC ended up mysteriously dropping it from the primetime calendar two episodes before what would turn out to be its official series finale, only to officially cancel the series later that May. (Apocryphally, ABC intended to air the final two episodes in June of 2010, but the NBA Finals dragged on long enough that year that that plan was scrapped.)