zwolanerd

Season one is over and done, thirteen great episodes with very few weak spots.  This is one of the best first seasons of a show that I’ve ever seen (compare it to Seinfeld, which was fine in its first two seasons, but didn’t hit its stride until season three). This is my fifth watch-through of this show and I still can’t figure out why it didn’t get more attention.  I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of network programming and marketing, but I can’t help but think somebody messed up on this one, big time. People like workplace comedies, people like wackiness, people like love subplots, (I presume) people like crazy inventions, and people like laughing – so what’s the deal? Maybe people still don’t like sitcoms without a laugh track. We’re in the 21st century here, people! Try to catch up!  Honestly, this is the next show I wish Netflix would revive, now that they’ve done Arrested Development. Yes, yes, Firefly and all that, but I’d vote for Better Off Ted first.

I think I got off in my counting a little bit, but here are a couple of first season numbers for you:

• Twelve of the thirteen episodes had Veridian commercials
• There were 47 inventions/ideas mentioned or seen
• There were 42 coworkers seen or mentioned (actually, some crowd scenes would raise the “seen” number quite a bit, but we’re sticking with coworkers that were more (or slightly more) than set pieces
• Bhamba is the coworker seen most, appearing in five of the thirteen episodes (again, I think my counting on some of the other coworkers might be off, but the Bhamba numbers seem solid)
• Rick is second most, at three.
• Number of episodes where Veronica is awesome: 13

These entries on the show are some of the least-read on the site, but I’m going to go ahead and start season two next week for two reasons:

1. Those who are watching and reading along are as big of fans of the show as I am and have a lot of great insight to it. 
2. I really enjoy seeing the show this way. I’d kind of like to do it for all of my favorite shows, but there are hundreds of episodes of some of those and I can’t even imagine trying to keep the spreadsheets on those.

I keep hoping these articles will get someone new interested in the show. The second season hasn’t been released on DVD yet, and I don’t know how to make that happen.  A bigger fanbase seems the only option, though the farther out we get from when the show aired, the less likely it seems that it will happen.

Thanks for joining me through season one! Come on back for season two starting next week!

Tags: Better Off Ted, LWST

Written by: Mark