I’m not sure who at ABC thought “Mad Men meets The Jetsons” was a viable pitch for a sitcom, but I’m so very, very glad they did. Better Off Ted is easily the funniest thing to air on ABC since, well, they poached Scrubs from NBC. Victor Fresco, who created the similarly gentle and delightful Andy Richter Controls the Universe for Fox a few years back, returns with the tale of a genuinely nice guy working for a thoroughly, hilariously horrible company.

The fictional Veridian Dynamics is exactly the sort of Big Evil Company that TV just can’t get enough of. (I wouldn’t be surprised if its main competitor was Fringe’s sinister Massive Dynamics.) It makes everything from weapons systems to high-tech fabrics to breakfast meats — sometimes, all in the same product. And then it makes hilariously sappy ads to promote them, using amusingly vague taglines such as “Veridian Dynamics: Family. Yay.” But one of the many delights of Better Off Ted is that, while its setting may be familiar, its protagonist is decidedly not.

Most workplace shows have a schlubby, put-upon hero who hates his or her job, and has to contend with a parade of idiots. Jay Harrington’s Ted, in contrast, is cheery, supercompetent, and really likes both his job and the people he works with. He’s a great dad, a terrific boss, and only has the mildest and most practical stirrings of conscience about being asked to create, say, a weaponized pumpkin. The show’s wild inventions and insane corporate logic are even funnier because Ted and the other characters barely notice or react to them. A lab-grown blob of meat that, as one hapless tester describes it, “tastes like despair,” is just another everyday problem for them to overcome.

His coworkers include Phil and Lem, a pair of brilliant, deeply codependent scientists, and Linda, the quietly rebellious head of testing, who steals creamer from the office in bulk, writes bizarre children’s books, and has a not-entirely-unrequited yen for Ted. (Kudos to the show for casting this role with the lovely and immensely funny Andrea Anders, who looks like a real actual person who has probably eaten a cheeseburger at some point in her life.)

If the show has a secret weapon, it’s probably Portia DiRossi as Veronica, Ted’s boss, who’s incapable of processing life through any filter but the corporate world. She plays the role as if Veronica were some sort of sophisticated robot programmed with a limited knowledge of how fleshy hu-mans interact, and smugly confident that she’s much better at imitating them than she actually is. Veronica gets the bulk of the show’s funniest and most horrible lines, and DiRossi delivers them with unperturbed, irony-free sincerity. (“You’re a very useful little girl,” she marvels to Ted’s precocious daughter, upon learning of the child’s innate talent for firing employees. “Do you have a card or something?”)

Better Off Ted manages to combine razor-sharp satire with real sweetness and whimsy, a tricky balancing act well worth applauding. (I could do with a bit less of the stereotypical ’50s-style space-age elevator music on its soundtrack, but that’s a minor quibble.) With a first-rate cast and dialogue precision-tuned for maximum laughs, it hits the comedy sweet spot right between the viciousness of Arrested Development and the lunacy of 30 Rock. The three episodes I’ve seen have seemed to just fly by, and when they’re over, I’ve always been left wanting more.

I can’t quite say the same for Party Down, the deeply uncomfortable and very funny new sitcom on Starz. Co-creator and showrunner Rob Thomas’s Veronica Mars showed off the ease with which he could juggle subversive wit and stark, unflinching darkness, and this pitch-black comedy about frustrated caterers in L.A. has both in equal measure.

Adam Scott is a would-be actor slinking back to his old catering outfit after an abortive career drenched in failure. Ken Marino (Mars’ delightfully sleazy P.I. Vinnie Van Lowe) is his former pal, now a stressed-out tool of a manager dreaming of opening a soup-and-salad-bar franchise. Lizzy Caplan, the only non-Anna-Paquin individual on God’s green earth who could ever make me want to watch True Blood, is a frustrated comedian stuck in a marriage going sour, and pondering whether to throw in the towel and follow her husband to Vermont. In short, these are painfully sad people, and the laughs they elicit in the course of their humiliating catering gigs are the dark, heavy sort you claw with your fingernails out of the rock-bottom pits of despair.

Like a particularly amusing sort of plague, they seem to spread their unhappiness at every event they cater — which actually proves to be one of the show’s saving graces. If Party Down were just a half-hour of the world dumping on these broken but likeable people, it might be intolerable. But everyone in Party Down’s world is miserable in their own way, from the suffocated estate lawyer suffering through his wife’s chintzy neighborhood awards party to the dumpy, Karl-Rove-ish secretary of the College Republicans, grimly convinced that hard work, networking, and Cuban cigars will secure him the respect he so desperately craves. The series has a weird sort of sympathy for everyone in range of its roving, documentary-style camera, which makes the horrible things it does to these people somehow even funnier.

This is an evil, evil show, and wonderfully so, full of the sort of rapidly escalating calamities that the BBC version of The Office did so well. By the time Marino’s character finds himself in a college parking lot, stomping on a burning American flag in full view of a flotilla of young conservatives, you know that there’s no depth to which the writers aren’t willing to plunge. My only complaint would be that the entirely able supporting cast is mostly playing to their strengths: Freaks and Geeks’ Martin Starr as the disaffected, nerdy author of unsold screenplays with names like Terror Bird; Ryan Hansen essentially reprising his Veronica Mars role as the biggest surfer-dude d-bag on the face of the planet; and Jane Lynch as the loopy, overly friendly former actress. But hey, they’re all really good at those well-worn roles, so I can hardly begrudge them for continuing to entertain me.

Party Down is a great little comedy, the sort that makes you want to laugh and claw your eyes out all at once. But that’s OK — if you do end up feeling that way, Veridian Dynamics probably has a pill that will help.

Better Off Ted airs Wednesdays at 8:30 on ABC. Party Down airs Friday nights at 10:30 on Starz; you can catch new episodes every week via Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature.