Seth MacFarlane’s Ted returns in a new series 12 years after leaving cinemas.
Seth MacFarlane’s Ted returns in a new series 12 years after leaving cinemas.
Review by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
12 years after leaving cinemas Seth MacFarlane’s Ted returns in a new series, 2024′s first TV surprise.
I’m not sure what surprised me more. That a prequel series to 2012′s raunchy comedy Ted has just come out, or that it’s pretty funny.
The first Ted movie was a huge success back in the day. It became the second-highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, got nominated for an Oscar — Best Original Song, admittedly, but it still counts — and spawned a middling sequel.
Written and directed by Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane, the two movies starred action-man Mark Wahlberg in a comedic role acting alongside a foul-mouthed animated teddy bear. And that, pretty much, was the joke.
Now, all these years on, that’s still pretty much the joke. The show’s even called Ted. There are only two things that have changed. The passing of time since MacFarlane’s joyously juvenile humour was en vogue and the rewinding of time in Ted to an era more forgiving of his equal-opportunity offending.
Ted, the series, is a prequel to the movies and takes us back to the early 1990s.
The series, which is streaming on TVNZ+, is a prequel to the movies and takes us back to the early 1990s. Wahlberg’s character John Bennet is now a high school student and Ted is still, well, Ted. Stuffed animals, even alive ones, don’t change. The character remains voiced by MacFarlane who also wrote and directed many of the episodes in this first season.
Right from its traditional sitcom intro theme tune Ted lets you know it will be playing by the sitcom rules while also subverting them. Not in the typical ironic winking way but rather in its aggressive adherence to them. There’s an uptight dad, a meek mother, a worldly live-in cousin and the picked-on main character. It’s impressive how cartoonish MacFarlane has made each of these tropes look and feel.
The jokes are the standard sort of MacFarlane fare, happily shocking and in grinning bad taste. Offensive? Most certainly. That’s the whole joke. However, MacFarlane’s clever enough to frame his gags in such a way that acknowledges how objectionable they are.
Like in the early era of Family Guy, MacFarlane’s pulling no punches. In Ted’s first couple of episodes, you get jokes about Anne Frank, little people, racists, infidelity, bulimia, at least three masturbation jokes, a couple of groin punch gags and an elongated debate on whether it would be better to eat Tom Hanks or Diane Keaton in a survival situation.
Some of these are very clever. Some of these are very dumb. Mostly, they are very funny. Of course, your mileage may vary on that. If the idea of a talking teddy bear dropping f-bombs and getting stoned doesn’t sound very funny, then it’s probably best to keep scrolling right past Ted on the TVNZ+ app.
But, if you enjoy laughing at things you maybe shouldn’t then there’s a lot to like.
There’s an abundance of 90s references to hit those nostalgia buttons and MacFarlane’s wrapped serviceable, sitcom-style stories around his willfully puerile and irreverent humour. It’s important to note there’s a complete absence of Family Guy-style cutaway gags. A trademark, and now a source of ridicule, of that series.
While his animated shows may have worn out their welcome, Ted breathes new life into MacFarlane’s humour. His enthusiasm is obvious from his scripts which often see characters seguing into bizarre non-sequiturs — Ted’s attempt to shame a teacher backfires when the teacher goes into the nitty-gritty of his marriage breakdown ending his tale of woe with a triumphant ‘who’s laughing now?!’ — or silly jokes like John and Ted’s mutual dismay that the hottest girl in school is named Sheila.
These don’t always land, a banker’s “random fact” about adult diapers goes exactly where you predict it will, and the adherence to sitcom schmalz is perhaps a little unnecessary.
Ted is crass, rude, politically incorrect, and also frequently laugh-out-loud funny. It’s the first genuine surprise of 2024.
