This clip of super vulgar outtakes from the short-lived ABC comedy Better Off Ted popped up on Reddit yesterday. It is five years old and has more than 500,000 views, but I’m just gonna go ahead and share it with you for two reasons:
- It is filled with delightfully imaginative insults, and I think you will like it
- I want to talk about Better Off Ted
Did you watch Better Off Ted when it was on television? Probably not, if the ratings are any indication. The show lasted just 26 episodes before getting canceled in 2010. But my God, what a fun little television program. Set inside the kind of DuPont/Koch-type conglomerate that produces everything from frozen dinners to pesticides to lawn furniture, it managed to combine biting satire with screwball yucks in a way not many comedies can. It had a lot in common with Arrested Development, both in tone and in co-starring-Portia-De-Rossi-ness (CONTROVERSIAL OPINION: Portia in Better Off Ted > Portia in Arrested Development), and like Arrested Development it went down too soon.
That last thing is probably the biggest shame of all, not just because I’ve seen all the episodes and have no new ones left to watch, but also because it got canceled before the gold rush of streaming alternatives. It was canceled too soon both ways. If it had been a new show in the 2014 season and had the type of poor ratings and very vocal diehard fans it had in 2010, maybe it could have ended up on Netflix for another couple seasons. Or Yahoo! Or Hulu. Or Amazon Prime. There are so many options now. I would settle for any of them.
That’s not to say it definitely would have gotten saved. Happy Endings was a fast-paced single-camera comedy with a small, rabid fanbase, too, and nobody stepped up to save that show. (Still bitter about this.) But it would have had a much better chance, at least. Who knows, maybe it would have bypassed the network and ended up online in the first place, like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Other Space. A lot has changed in five years.
All of which brings me back to this: Better Off Ted was a good show, and if you haven’t seen it you should go on Netflix and remedy that, since all 26 episodes are right there for the taking. You finger-banging chicken diddlers.
