Victor Fresco writes comedies about large organisations that would sell you for parts and hang a poster about teamwork while they did it. He has been cancelled more often than he deserves, and Better Off Ted is the one to start with.
Fi1m perspective
A Veridian Dynamics commercial interrupts Better Off Ted (2009) most weeks, and it is where Victor Fresco lives. A calm voice explains that the company values its people, while elsewhere in the episode the company is working out how to freeze one of them to save on pension costs. Nothing in the frame admits a joke is being made. The joke is that the voice believes every word.
That is Fresco's subject: the big institution that talks about family and behaves like a machine. He has said so himself. Companies, he told an interviewer, "would talk about ‘team members’ and how ‘we’re all family,’ but they would slit your throat and leave you by the side of the road without health care if they could save 20 bucks." Better Off Ted turns that grievance into 26 episodes, and Portia de Rossi's Veronica, a boss who does not care whether she is loved, is the sharpest thing in it. We laughed at the commercials first, and then, around the fourth or fifth, we stopped laughing for a moment and realised we had sat in meetings that sounded exactly like them.
He began as a writer on ALF in 1989, spent the 1990s on Mad About You and other series, and then started making his own shows, each built on an idea rather than a household. Andy Richter Controls the Universe (2002) was the first, and like Better Off Ted seven years later it was gone after two seasons. Santa Clarita Diet (2017), a suburban family comedy with a zombie in it, ran until 2019. Unstable (2023), a father and son comedy made with Rob Lowe and John Owen Lowe, is the latest. The pattern holds: single camera, a premise a network can describe in one sentence, a run shorter than the reviews wanted.
His weakness is his heroes. Fresco is happiest with the monsters, and Veronica and the Veridian voiceover are the best writing he has done. Ted Crisp, the decent man at the centre of Better Off Ted, is our guide and the show's soft spot: whenever it remembers he has a conscience the temperature rises and the jokes thin out. Two seasons was about right. A fifth would have needed Ted to grow, and growth is not what this writer is for.
We have not reviewed the later shows and will not judge them here, except to note that Santa Clarita Diet proves he can hold a tone across a family sitcom and a horror film at once, which is harder than it looks. Start with Better Off Ted. Do not be surprised if the office you return to on Monday has adopted one of its slogans without noticing.
Biography
Victor Fresco is an American television writer and producer. He created the ABC sitcom Better Off Ted (2009–2010), on which he also served as writer and executive producer. His other credits include writing for ALF (1986) and Dinosaurs (1991), and creating, writing and executive producing Santa Clarita Diet (2017) and Unstable (2023).
Born in Los Angeles on 9 January 1958, Fresco studied film and political science at Hampshire College. He began his career in television commercials as a production assistant and prop master before moving into writing. He has received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for outstanding comedy series work on Mad About You and for writing on Andy Richter Controls the Universe.
