‘Ted’ Review: Seth MacFarlane’s Foul-Mouthed Teddy Bear Returns in Indulgent Peacock Prequel Series

The bad news about Peacock‘s Ted prequel, also called Ted, is that all of its worst instincts are apparent from the jump. For one thing, its premiere clocks in at 50 minutes — not inherently an unreasonable run time, but a baffling one for a TV outing that otherwise unfolds like a half-hour sitcom. For another, that near-hour is front-loaded with the show’s most self-consciously “offensive” material: hoary jokes about derogatory terms and racist stereotypes, all delivered with a smirk that’s daring you, just daring you, to get outraged by any of it.

But if you can push past the initial tedium, the good (or at least less bad) news about Ted is that the episodes that follow represent a marked improvement. Sometimes, as when it leans on absurdity over abrasiveness or goofiness over saltiness, it’s possible to make out a decent comedy buried in there somewhere. If only creator and star Seth MacFarlane could get out of his own way.

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In fairness, Ted‘s oh-so-unwoke zingers aren’t too far removed from the source material. As in the 2012 film and its 2015 sequel, Ted (once again voiced by MacFarlane) is a teddy bear brought to life — on screen via impressively tactile-looking CG, and in-story via a wish upon a shooting star by a lonely little boy. And as in the films, the central gag is the contrast between Ted’s cute, cuddly appearance and his rude, crude personality. The biggest difference between the movies and the latest project is that the latter picks up two decades earlier, in 1993, and finds Ted’s human bestie John Bennett not as a middle-aged man-child played by Mark Wahlberg but as a 16-year-old boy played by Max Burkholder.

The shift comes with a corresponding change in subgenre. Where the features fit in with man-child bromances like Superbad and The Hangover, the prequel is an updated spin on sitcoms of the ’80s and ’90s. It’s none too coy about its influences, either: A Halloween chapter has the characters watching the likes of Roseanne, The Simpsons and Married… With Children. (The show also frequently references the squeaky-clean Full House — but mainly just as jerkoff material for Lori Loughlin fan John.) The main distinction is that while Roseanne and its ilk were constrained by the decency standards and strict time restrictions of broadcast television, Ted is a streaming title that has to worry about none of those things.

This proves to be a severely mixed blessing. On one hand, Ted‘s no-holds-barred crassness is its signature. There’s practically no conversational vacuum that someone, usually Ted, doesn’t try to fill with a dick joke, a sex joke or a masturbation joke, and it’s hard to imagine them hitting quite the same if the characters had to resort to coy euphemisms (though there are plenty of those, too). And the indulgent run times at least theoretically allow the series to push both its characters and its humor further. A storyline about John’s dad Matty (Scott Grimes) rethinking his homophobic ignorance after an encounter with a virulently bigoted sentient toy truck, for instance, feels too dated to seem as shocking or as heartwarming as it apparently means to be — but it’s essentially a very special “issues” episode delivered in a way that only Ted could.

With each of the season’s seven episodes stretching toward an average of 40 minutes, however, it grows increasingly apparent that the downside to Ted‘s freedom is its sloppiness. Whittling each installment down to a broadcast-standard 22 minutes wouldn’t have made this a masterpiece, but it might have compelled MacFarlane to trim some of the weaker punchlines, or to spend less time insisting on his own outrageousness. It certainly would have forced him to reconsider the repeat attempts at that Sideshow Bob rake thing where a bit goes on so long that it becomes unfunny and then becomes funny again. It’s a hard trick to pull off, and since Ted never does, all it accomplishes is adding bloat.

It is possible, amid all that shagginess, to imagine the tighter, brighter series that could have been. Burkholder has a sweet chemistry with MacFarlane (or at least the latter’s voice coming out of an animated creature). Giorgia Whigham imbues John’s college-liberal cousin Blaire with a slyness that keeps her from being reduced entirely to a self-righteous punching bag; likewise Alanna Ubach, who plays John’s mother Susan with such wide-eyed sincerity that she nearly transcends the put-upon wife type skewered in Kevin Can F**k Himself. And when the dumb jokes hit, they hit. Some of the stupidest ideas here are also the most memorable, like a subplot in which Ted decides he must be another Jesus Christ because he, too, was “born not from the seed of man, but from divine origin.”

The problem is that for every element that clicks, there are a half dozen more that don’t. In a sense, Ted‘s self-indulgence is right in line with its leading bear — after all, Ted never bites his tongue or second-guesses his impulses, and no one who enjoys his lightly edgy brand of humor would ever want him to. But what could be charming for a TV character is a drag for a TV show. Ted would’ve done better to leave the lack of restraint for Ted, and limit itself to the best of his material.