TV Review: Better Off Ted

Better Off Ted is marketed as being at the cutting edge of workplace satire.

If campaigner Michael Moore, scourge of Big Business and its cronies, were to make a sitcom, it might look pretty much like C4's new offering Better Off Ted.

As Moore has pointed out, humour and ridicule are powerful weapons to wield in David and Goliath battles. But the problem with fictionalising corporate culture in a spoof is that so much of how it operates in the real world is beyond satire.

However, it's good to see someone having a go at the bewildering reality many find themselves in when they go to work: that although an employee might think she lives in a free country, when she steps over the threshold on a Monday morning it is to enter a world every bit as feudal, hierarchical and expecting of obeisance as any imperial court.

Naive company man Ted (played by Jay Harrington) believes he has the best job in the world as head of research and development at Veridian Technologies, a conglomerate with its fingers in many pies and, according to its publicity, making the world better in many ways, every day.

"Power - we make that. Technology - we make that, too. Cows - no, we don't make those but we have made a sheep," runs its wonderfully megalomaniacal advertising. Its zealous can-do attitude is matched by its equally ardent suppression of all objectors as insufferably negative, a lesson Ted has learned only too well. "I need a metal that is hard as steel but bounces - and is edible," demands his superhuman boss Veronica. "We can do that," is Ted's mantra. "We want to weaponise a pumpkin," says Veronica. "So do I," says Ted.

But, as in 1984, doubts are beginning to creep in. Small rebellions are occurring, such as Ted's colleague's OCD pinching of the company-supplied coffee creamer. When the company wants to freeze an employee, to test its new cryogenic chemicals, and then fire the unfortunate when he accidentally thaws out and exhibits post-traumatic stress disorder, Ted says no. "Strange career choice," says Veronica.

Ted may be the title character but the show obviously belongs to Portia de Rossi (Ally McBeal, Arrested Development), to yet again smoulder and scold in a figure-hugging business dominatrix suit.

Completing the cast are Ted's team of Phil and Len, the smartest guys in the world who are also terrifically cliched geeks. Then there's the requisite neurotic and supposedly endearing female sidekick Linda, with whom single dad Ted would like to have a romantic liaison if only he hadn't already used up his self-imposed limit of "only one office affair" with his boss.

Unfortunately, this sitcom can't resist including that bane of the genre, the precocious 7-year-old daughter who tells dad what's right from wrong.

However, you have to admire the show's determination to get away from the mockumentary comedy style made so popular by The Office and return to the good old art of pure lampoon. But, as one US critic has pointed out, it all might prove just a bit too close to the bone. Corporate culture has already proved itself so often to be one of those strange Bermuda Triangles humanity is so good at inventing for itself, a place where reason vanishes without trace.