It’s been nine years since we last saw Ted, the plush teddy bear who, courtesy of a wish upon a shooting star, was magically brought to life as the racist, sexist, and all-around profane best friend of Mark Wahlberg’s thirtysomething Massachusetts schlub John. That prolonged absence is rather surprising given that 2012’s Ted is the second most successful R-rated comedy in Hollywood history (and its 2015 sequel did pretty well in its own right). Nonetheless, it’s less shocking to discover that time has not altered the cute-and-crass animated toy, who’s once again voiced with impudent inappropriateness by creator Seth MacFarlane in Ted, a seven-episode Peacock prequel series that rewinds to Ted’s early days with best pal John (Max Burkholder) in the Boston suburb of Framingham—and, in doing so, earns quite a few more chuckles than its big-screen counterparts.
As with its predecessors, Ted, which premieres Jan. 11, is as scattershot as they come, with Ted and John dispensing all manner of politically incorrect—if not outright prejudiced—comments about Blacks, women, Jews, and anyone else who happens to stroll into their crosshairs. In this endeavor, they’re joined by John’s dad Matty Bennett (Scott Grimes), a working-class Vietnam vet Masshole who hates the Clintons, gays in the military, and every other liberal facet of the United States. He’s also a rampant chauvinist whose wife Susan (Alanna Ubach) is a vacant-eyed (and occasionally empty-headed) housewife who’s expected (and willingly accepts her duty) to serve. In this closed-minded enclave, they’re joined by John’s cousin Blaire (Giorgia Whigham), a college student who serves as the clan’s conscience, chiding her relatives for their backwards viewpoints and acting eye-rollingly exasperated when they choose to ignore her advice.
This happens often, since Ted and John are a duo who can’t help but behave horribly, as occurs at the outset of Ted when the furry stuffed animal goes on a winding rant about “midgets” and “Polacks” and is joined in this ugliness by Matty, who makes cracks about Asians being bad drivers and, for it, is dubbed by Blaire “a classic Boston racist.” Matty denies this since he loves Rocky—in which a Black man triumphs—and eventually turns the tables on Blaire for being a hypocrite for favoring her light-skinned Barbie over her dark-skinned one. This is par for the show’s course; it’s frequently a veritable free-for-all of intolerant wisecracks. However, to a greater extent than in either of his prior features, MacFarlane is modestly successful at straddling that South Park-ish line between reveling in insensitivity for cheap chortles and using it to mock those who are spewing it, so that Ted, John, Matty and the rest are also the butts of their own jokes.
Moreover, in a 2024 rife with hate speech, there’s something uneasily honest about Ted’s portrait of everyday folks trying to figure out the boundaries between their old-school values, opinions and upbringings and new-world ideas about equality, open-mindedness and compassion. Which is another way of saying—a bit of the discomfort generated by MacFarlane’s latest comes from the fact that people like Matty exist, and moreover, that they’re not just one-dimensional monsters. The same also goes for Ted and John. Two socially maladjusted weirdos grappling with angst, awkwardness and horniness like the tactless and uncouth teenagers that they are, the series’ protagonists are a match made in puerile heaven, and the show is most assured when it fixates on their bond, here solidified by their newfound love of marijuana (the focus of the premiere) and rooted in their shared love of sex and mischief.
Of course, excessively psychoanalyzing Ted, John and the rest of the Bennetts is to take Ted more seriously than it takes itself, and MacFarlane smartly keeps the focus throughout on a variety of hijinks-related stories, beginning with Ted enrolling in John’s high school (thus denying him the ability to watch his beloved daily Plinko games on The Price is Right) and including Halloween parties gone awry, drug-purchasing escapades, schemes to get even with a pesky bully, and quests to rent VHS porn. Amidst these larger narratives, MacFarlane and company rattle off non-stop one-liners, and if a lot of them miss their marks, those that hit their targets elicit genuine belly laughs—and are all the more cathartic for feeling more than a tad wrong. In particular, MacFarlane repeatedly has John extend his jokes with Ted by taking them into bizarro terrain, and it’s there—when logic flies totally out the window, leaving behind only stream-of-consciousness lunacy—that the material is most amusing.
As R-rated as any comedy on television, Ted is a show that Susan would likely think needs its mouth washed out with soap, and as with the movies, it integrates various pop culture artifacts (The A-Team, The Simpsons, Aladdin, Jurassic Park) into its plots. Still, those are less intrusively utilized than they were before, and in the case of a gag about “Monster Mash,” MacFarlane mines entertainment-world detritus for pitch-perfect stoner-brain absurdity. He does likewise with religion during a sixth episode in which Ted, forced to attend church, comes to believe that—because of the inexplicable nature of his creation, and the similarities between his story and the New Testament—he might be Jesus Christ himself. Blasphemy is merely another component of this juvenile and ribald stew, and though it seems determined to push buttons, its tone is too good-natured to really offend; the best it can do on that count is inspire exasperated groans before moving on to its next unseemly subject.
Ted’s adorable form is, as usual, juxtaposed with his expletive-spewing banter, and if Burkholder isn’t quite as charismatic as Wahlberg as the doll’s BFF, he shares a naturally vulgar rapport with the CGI bear. Ted doesn’t try to reinvent the franchise or waste time explicating the origins of these characters’ personalities, hang-ups and prejudices. It’s just a dumb, rude, ill-mannered comedy that cares solely about saying and doing what should not be said and done. What it lacks in ambition (or taste, or subtly, or class), it makes up for in disreputable humor of a surprisingly sturdy sort.
