No, ‘Ted’ isn’t as awful as the British reviews suggest

Seth MacFarlane’s TV prequel has been picked apart by critics. There’s a lot about this series that’s perfectly fine, writes Louis Chilton – it just can’t escape its creative quicksand of a premise

The obnoxious Ted (Seth MacFarlane) receives a bath in the new TV prequel (Peacock)

Did anyone ask for Ted? No, but on the spectrum of output from Family Guy creator-star Seth MacFarlane, this new series is at least more understandable than A Million Ways to Die in the West, his crude oater comedy, or even his bafflingly straight-faced Star Trek vanity parody The Orville. But even so, Ted, a prequel to the hit 2012 film of the same name (and its less successful 2015 sequel) is a bit of a head-scratcher.

Ted follows an obnoxious teddy bear, voiced by MacFarlane, who was gifted sentience by a child’s wish. The film partners this sleaze-caked anti-Paddington with a slacker played by Mark Wahlberg; Ted the series reimagines Wahlberg’s foil as a misfit teenager in the 1990s, played by The Purge’s Max Burkholder. In the US, where the series debuted last month, reviews have been perfectly fine, and word of mouth positive. In the UK, it has fared less well: Ted has been panned by The Guardian (“joke-free” – two stars), Empire (“horrendously slim pickings” – two stars) and The Telegraph (“It just isn’t entertaining” – one star). Others are similarly disdainful. Is the series really as bad as these reviews suggest? Not necessarily. Fundamentally, nearly all of Ted’s problems can be traced back to the flimsiness of its original premise.

“A bear who swears” is not a lot to base a series upon, or arguably even a two-hour movie, and it makes for pretty arid satirical soil. For anyone who saw the original Ted films, any possible shock value or joy that can be derived from watching a CGI teddy bear smoke weed and perv at human women has long dissipated. There is, it seems, something MacFarlane finds inherently compelling about things speaking that should not speak: Family Guy has a talking dog and a talking baby; American Dad has a talking fish and a talking alien; The Cleveland Show had a talking bear. I’m not saying that MacFarlane has literally been plucking random nouns from a hat, but would the results really be so different if he were?

The 1990s setting ought to, in theory, add another dimension to the premise, but the show only ever half-commits to its time period. When MacFarlane’s ursine alter-ego is chastised for political incorrectness over his use of the word “midget”, it seems like the sort of argument from a decade or two down the line – likewise the moment when Ted, now attending high school, gets the better of a homophobic bully. “Listen, man, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s the Nineties – times are changing. Anybody else here gay?” he asks, prompting the entire group of kids surrounding them to all raise their hands matter-of-factly. Everyone’s gay! It’s the sort of weak joke that would at least make sense in a sitcom set in a schoolyard today – but makes absolutely no sense in the 1990s, when homophobic banter was still rife among the young.

All of this is particularly dispiriting because Ted is by no means the unsavoury and laugh-free failure that some of the reviews suggest. Whatever you may think of MacFarlane’s comedy – from the solid, occasionally very inventive American Dad to the misogynistic nadir of his Oscars hosting gig – he’s got demonstrable prowess as a performer. In an industry where opportunities for specialised voice actors have drastically diminished, MacFarlane remains a bone fide old-style talent, with a real aptitude for vocal modulation and innate comic timing. Beyond MacFarlane, Ted is also just a perfectly functional show: the supporting cast – particularly Giorgia Whigham, playing a liberal counterweight to the fratboyish Ted – are roundly capable, and the integration of the CGI-rendered bear is consistently slick.

The problem for Ted is that it’s unable to escape its own pointlessness; whatever novelty drove the success of the original movie has given way to something stale and biteless. This all begs the question: is there any right way to make a “subversive teddy bear” series in 2014? I struggle to imagine how you could possibly make a version of this show that is meaningfully funnier, or timelier, or more purposeful without abandoning the entire premise. It’s a situation comedy after all, and all Ted can do is make the best of a bad situation.

‘Ted’ is streaming now on Sky and NOW