Ted TV Review

Last Updated on January 12, 2024

PLOT: In this comedic prequel event series to the Ted films, it’s 1993, and Ted the bear’s moment of fame has passed. He’s now living back home in Framingham, Massachusetts with his best friend, 16-year-old John Bennett, along with John’s parents, Matty and Susan and cousin Blaire. Ted may be a lousy influence on John, but at the end of the day, he’s a loyal pal who’s always willing to go out on a limb for friendship.

REVIEW: Seth MacFarlane is an acquired taste. Family Guy is the type of series that you either love or hate. When MacFarlane jumped to the big screen with A Million Ways To Die In The West, he showed an aptitude for crude humor in live action. With the Ted films, MacFarlane dove deeper into the heartfelt and feel-good humor underneath all the crass jokes and bodily fluids. I gained a new respect for him when he created The Orville, a far more serious science fiction project than I thought him capable of. Now, Seth MacFarlane returns to his bawdy sense of comedy with the Peacock series Ted, a prequel to his two feature films starring Mark Wahlberg. The small screen version of Ted still features a living stuffed animal, voiced again by Seth MacFarlane, but takes the tale back to the early 1990s as young John Bennett, now played by Max Burkholder, navigates high school alongside his best friend. Ted is far better than I expected and had me laughing harder than any other series in recent memory.

Ted opens with narration provided by Sir Ian McKellen, replacing Sir Patrick Stewart from the feature films. Returning to 1993, we meet high school-aged John after Ted (Seth MacFarlane) returns to Boston from his brief celebrity in Hollywood. Living in the Bennett household are John’s father, Matty (Scott Grimes, replacing Ralph Garman) and mother, Susan (Alanna Ubach, replacing Alex Borstein), and John’s cousin, Blaire (Giorgia Whigham). The dynamic in the home is instantly recognizable to fans of MacFarlane’s animated families as they are as loving as they are dysfunctional. Susan refuses to swear and is aghast at anything out of the ordinary. She is also immune to Matty’s gruff demeanor, including casual racism and bizarre habits, as well as Vietnam flashbacks. Blaire, much like the sibling characters from American Dad and Family Guy, is the odd one out as she is a liberal and progressive presence that butts up against Matty’s more conservative morals. The series draws quite a bit on the All in the Family formula with the added bonus of storylines about drugs, sex, bullying, and more.

Having seen seven of the eight episodes of Ted, I can honestly say I have not laughed as hard in a long time. While Seth MacFarlane’s animated series rely far too heavily on cutaway non sequitur jokes, Ted is predominantly structured with the traditional sitcom format of a main plot and a subplot. Each episode clocks in at a full hour, a rarity for sitcoms, but the plot never feels like it overstays its welcome. Within the first episodes, there are stories about how John and Ted smoke pot for the first time and one where the duo watch porn together. The subplots vary from Matty getting a colonoscopy to Susan thinking her husband has stopped finding her attractive. The stories also use the cliche of mistaken identity and overly complex plans to try and fix a problem, which results in all sorts of hijinks. Presented in a single-camera format without a laugh track, Ted avoids feeling out of touch like many sitcoms filmed in front of a live studio audience. But, like any number of great sitcoms from the 80s and 90s, the performances in this series make it work.

Like his animated roles, Seth MacFarlane transforms completely into the diminutive Ted. With the same caliber of special effects as in the movies, Ted looks tangible, and the actors around him interact convincingly with him. Most of Ted’s screen time is shared with Max Burkholder and Giorgia Whigham, who have a chemistry with the bear that elevates some of the more ridiculous situations they get into. Giorgia, daughter of the great Shea Whigham, is great as she plays Blaire’s befuddled reactions to her weird family. Max never tries to imitate Mark Wahlberg but instead embraces the thick New England accent of the character. Scott Grimes, who recently starred in MacFarlane’s The Orville, is hilarious as Matty, and Alanna Ubach transforms into one of the best sitcom moms ever. There is an Archie Bunker and Edith vibe out of Grimes and Ubach, both a tribute to those iconic characters and a refreshingly retro take. The 1990s setting of Ted comes alive thanks to great but subtle pop culture references that I caught immediately but are never too in your face.

Seth MacFarlane wrote three of the eight episodes along with Paul Corrigan, Brad Walsh, Dana Gould, Jon Pollack, and Julius Sharpe on the rest. MacFarlane directed the opening episodes and reunited with many of the crew he has worked with in animated and live-action projects. The writing is great here, tighter than anything we have seen on Family Guy, and that may be due to the hour-long episodes affording more room to develop jokes and characters. There are many moments where it feels like MacFarlane went on a tangent, and they kept the camera rolling, catching a hilarious and off-the-cuff joke. Because it is almost impossible to tell where the script ends and the improv begins, each episode of Ted never feels like it will go where you think it will. Because it is a sitcom, the episode eventually reaches the expected conclusion, but the journey to get there is riddled with some of the weirdest and most random jokes ever put to screen.

Taking a cue from recent retro series like The Goldbergs, Ted embraces a bygone era only a couple of decades ago. My fellow elder Millennials will love the comedy in this series, and fans of the Ted movies will get a kick at the origins of Ted and John’s obsession with Flash Gordon and many other big-screen connections. Because of the great cast and the wholesome nature of these stories, I enjoyed Ted the series much more than I did the feature films. Seth MacFarlane’s animated shows have always been hit or miss with me, but Ted is his best project. Be warned that just because Ted is not on the big screen, this series is in no way watered down. This is a hilariously profane and sometimes gross comedy that balances out with well-written plots that harken back to a different time. I loved Ted, and I hope Seth MacFarlane keeps developing live-action comedies like this.

Ted premieres on January 11th on Peacock.

Ted

GREAT

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