A quick review of tonight's "Better Off Ted" - at the moment, the last episode of this hysterical comedy currently scheduled to air - coming up just as soon as I say goodbye to common sense... God, I'm going to miss this very weird, very funny show, and if "Mess of a Salesman" wasn't this season's strongest entry, it still offered us an appropriately silly note for the show to end on(*).
(*) For now, at least. Steve McPherson didn't sound like he wanted to try the show on Wednesdays, and based on the ratings neither "Ted" nor "Scrubs" deserve any additional chances - but whoever would have thought we'd get a second season based on how the first one did? I don't want to instill false hope - and anyone thinking of petitioning another network to pick it up shouldn't waste their time (again, the ratings were beyond awful) - but more surprising things have happened.
We got to see the recklessness of Lem (in leather pants!) and Phil breaking rules, buying corpses (with "new dead guy smell"), and subjecting a family of robots (albeit not the whole extended family) to a wind tunnel. We got Veronica and Linda playing an unconventional but effective few rounds of Good Cop/Bad Cop. We got Eddie McClintock (from "Warehouse 13") as Ted's brother, suggesting an alternate universe version of the show in which McClintock (more innately funny than Jay Harrington, but still workable as a straight man) had been cast as Ted. And we got another Veridian ad, even though this season has been unfortunately scarce with those.
In a fairer, more hopeful world, "Ted" might have had a better chance to succeed. (If nothing else, ABC could have plugged it in on Wednesdays for a week or two once "Hank" was mercifully killed.) But if I try to look at this situation like Linda and not Veronica, I see that we got 24 episodes (with two still to go) of hilarity, got reassurance that Portia de Rossi's work on "Arrested Development" wasn't a fluke, discovered that Andrea Anders could be funny when given better material than she received on either "Joey" or "The Class," got the wonderful comedy duo of Malcolm Barrett and Jonathan Slavin, and got time capsule episodes like "Racial Sensitivity" and "Beating a Dead Workforce."
And, again, as I linked to a couple of weeks ago (and which I remind you is very NSFW), we got this.
Sigh... what did everybody else think?