It's The End Of An Era For Seth MacFarlane's Ted
Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
Sign in to your ScreenRant account
Seth MacFarlane’s Ted prequel series has proven to be the saving grace of Peacock. NBCUniversal has struggled to fill out its streaming library with hit original shows, but Ted quickly became one of the most beloved TV comedies on the air. The first season was a promising start — the humor felt like classic Family Guy, and the emotions felt a lot richer and deeper than the original movies — but it really found its feet in season 2.
Between a hallucinatory trip on-stage at a school play and an A.I.-assisted Bill Clinton outburst in a donut shop, Ted season 2 was an even wilder ride. It felt like the show was really hitting its stride, and Ted season 3 could be the funniest yet. But Peacock has no plans to bring back the live-action Ted show for a third season; instead, the streamer is pivoting to an animated series set after the movies.
The animated series is a number-crunching compromise. Ted has been a huge hit for Peacock, but the CG lead character makes the production of the live-action show prohibitively expensive, so the streamer is swapping it out for a cheaper 2D animated series. But the live-action cast is too good not to stick around.
Ted Season 3 Might Be Expensive, But The Show Is Too Good To End So Soon
Ted’s upcoming animated series looks fun — the teaser trailer teased Mark Wahlberg’s return as grownup John Bennett, and also hinted that, as a cartoon, this new show will have even looser constraints on the laws of physics — but the live-action show is too good to end so soon, after so few episodes. Family Guy has been on the air for hundreds and hundreds of episodes, and it’s not slowing down any time soon, and the Bennetts have a much more engaging and relatable and consistent family dynamic than the Griffins.
There’s still plenty of comedic mileage left in Ted and John coming of age, Matty and Susan struggling to keep their marriage afloat, and Blaire screaming into the void as the voice of reason. The animated show will undoubtedly be funny, but it’s jumping forward a few decades, so that endearing family unit will be years in the rearview mirror. The animated show is building out a whole new ensemble with Ted and John’s respective families, but they’ve already got a perfectly good ensemble going to waste, and the new one might not land as well.
Game of Thrones was very expensive to produce, but HBO kept producing it because it was their biggest hit. Peacock needs to take the same attitude with Ted. The show might cost a lot to produce, but it’s also the only Peacock original that’s worth keeping a subscription for.
Ted: The Animated Series Will Feel Like Vintage Family Guy
Ted: The Animated Series is set to premiere on December 17, and if the brief but tantalizing teaser is anything to go by, it’ll feel like classic Family Guy. The live-action Ted series had that vintage Family Guy feel, with a lot of cutaway gags and meandering non-sequiturs and shock gags, but it was restricted by its live-action format.
MacFarlane is back voicing Ted in the animated series, but he’s also back in the role of showrunner, alongside writers Paul Corrigan and Brad Walsh. Family Guy has morphed into a different show in the decade-and-a-bit since MacFarlane stepped down from the writers’ room to focus on other projects like The Orville and A Million Ways to Die in the West and, of course, Ted itself.
When Ted returns in animated form, it’ll finally feel like the early seasons of Family Guy are back. It’ll have that unmistakable MacFarlane sense of humor from the live-action show, but with the anything-goes cartoon calamity of his career-defining animated shows.
Ted: The Animated Series
- Network
- Peacock
Cast
-
John (voice)
-
Seth MacFarlane
Ted (voice)
-
Sam (voice)
-
Liz Richman
Ruth (voice)
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.