Ted Baxter - Character

Character

Baxter was the pompous nit-wit, narcissistic anchorman for fictitious station WJM-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Satirizing the affectations of news anchormen, the character spoke in a vocal fry register parody of the narrator of the old Movietone News film strips that played in movie houses before the television era. While his narcissism fueled Baxter's delusions of grandeur, his onscreen performance was buffoonish. A running joke of the show was Baxter's incompetence, featuring a steady stream of mispronunciations, malapropisms, pratfalls, and miscues. Constantly in fear of being fired, Ted Baxter was, ironically, the show's only character to survive the final episode's massive layoffs at WJM.

In the first few seasons of the show, Knight played the character broadly for comic effect, a simpleton that would mispronounce even the easiest words while on camera. Knight even grew so concerned that the show's writers were abusing the character that at one point he considered leaving "MTM". To round out Knight's character, the writers then paired him with a love-interest, Georgette, played by Georgia Engel, who brought out some of Baxter's more lovable characteristics and whom Baxter eventually marries.