Ted review: A profane, obvious lampoon of old sitcom tropes

For the generation that came up in the ’90s, before the internet could worm its cruel, pitiless tentacles around our minds and hearts, it was TV that shaped us. Game shows allowed people to dream of nicer stuff for the house. Talk shows gave everyone something to bicker about around the table. But it was sitcoms that gave audiences a moral True North—or, at least, they were designed to, which might help explain why television would soon metastasize into a cynical, postmodern wasteland and why most of us have grown into adults with the vagueness of ennui informing every day of our waking lives. Anyway, Seth MacFarlane’s Ted, the latest film series to be spun off into a show (out January 11 on Peacock), incorporates these aspects of TV’s yesteryear—with a strong focus on the family sitcom structure—into a prequel about a young boy and his talking teddy bear.

Of course, being from the creator of Family Guy, the earnestly delivered morality of family sitcoms like Family Ties and Full House are given a profane and metatextual spin in Ted. Throwaway jokes said for shock value become prolonged debates about how they make no sense, like an argumentative cul-de-sac early in the season where 16-year-old John Bennett (Max Burkholder) and his cuddly best friend, Ted (that unholy pairing of MacFarlane and digital plush) volley over who they’d eat first in an Alive-type survival scenario: Tom Hanks or Diane Keaton. Self-awareness simmers at the edges of its single-camera glossiness, like the haughty British narration from the Ted movies that comes and goes seemingly at random. A Bill Cosby joke, so obvious that it’s probably already forming in your mind at the mention of it, is also there to fracture the show’s vintage facade of Framingham, Massachusetts, circa 1993.

And, as befits a modern TV series set in previous decades (All In The Family feels like it should be a touchstone, but this looks and sounds more like The Goldbergs), Ted, which is set in the ’90s and never lets you forget it, is overstuffed with pop references. Some make sense (hey, Zima was everywhere in 1993!) and others are too anachronistically triggering for critical pedants to ignore (“Macarena” didn’t dominate American radio waves until 1996, but whatever). Also, spare a thought for Lori Laughlin, Full House’s Aunt Becky, who is frequently seen smiling from a poster that hangs near John’s bed. John might insist his weed-infused pubescent dreams of Laughlin are pure, but like much in Ted, nothing’s sacred.

Ted takes us back to the age of Sega Genesis, Married… With Children, the Jerky Boys (ask your uncle), and casual racism. But before you take to social media to itemize all of the series’ offensive malfeasances, don’t bother: The series has installed a failsafe for whenever John’s “Boston racist” father Matty (Scott Grimes) flies off the handle (which is often) or when John’s dear-hearted mother Susan (Alanna Ubach) gently dismisses his tirades, in the form of John’s live-in cousin Blaire (Giorgia Whigham), who’s here to set things politically correct.

Matty and Blaire’s arguments are a frequent source of tension in the show. It’s just as calibrated and cynical as the smugly provocative humor that’s so synonymous with MacFarlane’s work, which makes their scenes together about as funny to watch as X (formerly Twitter) is to read, a cake-and-eat-it approach that allows MacFarlane’s characters to say fucked-up things while clearly showing the viewer that he and the show’s writers are not, y’know, “like that.” Matty is the regressive sitcom dad that was being lampooned into the dirt back in the ’90s—he’s a borderline red-pilled fusion of Bill Burr and Al Bundy if Al came with post-Vietnam pathos as well as anti-feminist hostility. Blaire, in turn, is the hip, youthful type who speaks to (or mostly for) the current generation and, as such, is here to spotlight how awful and full of shit Matty is.

Their war of attrition peaks in “Loud Night,” Ted’s Very Special Christmas Episode, in which Blaire, a pot-dealing college student armed with the academic terms that have since worked into the more socially aware political discourse of the last 20-odd years, brings home her girlfriend for the holidays. In the episode, Matty, like his son, wishes upon a star for someone to back him up in his Budweiser-soaked takes on society and thus brings into the world Dennis, Matty’s childhood truck, who, like Ted, is also voiced by MacFarlane but is presented as the paranoid right-wing extremist version of him, which insinuates that Matty’s pent-up regression is but a few beers away from hatching into full-on Trumpism if he doesn’t wise up pronto.

Through Dennis, Matty comes to realize how out of line his screaming invectives are and how they alienate his niece, who has already suffered alienation from her immediate family due to her queer identity. And Blaire, after an awkward heart-to-heart with Susan, realizes that couching her romantic relationship in terms like “good friends” might be unacceptable for her and her partner, but it does keep the holidays on an even keel. In so doing, Ted saps its yuks to find a social middle-ground where warring generations come to some sort of accord before the credits roll, and we await the next episode’s kerfuffle. This stuff’s above the series’ purview; Matty is no Archie Bunker, and Ted sure as hell ain’t All In The Family.

In episodes like this, Ted squirms for relevance, almost like MacFarlane realizes in real time that pitting his acerbic non sequiturs against flesh-and-blood people instead of cartoon characters packs a different kind of punch. Its crass humor isn’t a far cry from the films’ fratty outlandishness, but there’s a caution in Peacock’s Ted that is unmistakable. Also, in retrofitting this Naughty Bear franchise with red-state/blue-state warmongering, its revamped politics scrapes abrasively against the show’s more plainly comedic subplots, as in “Loud Night,” where John and Ted aim to prove that Ted’s miraculous animation means he’s the Second Coming. Maybe the big point of Ted is how everyone around them is losing their minds about changing social mores, yet there’s John and his bear, separated from the tumult, unaffected and unchanged, clearing bongs and watching Flash Gordon. Maybe we are John. Perhaps we are the bear.

It must be said that Ted has its moments, which has much to do with its cast. Burkholder has an aw-shucks appeal as the foul-mouthed proto-Wahlberg, and Alanna Ubach does fascinating things with the kept housewife trope as Susan, a mom who obscures her deep wells of longing with pert suburban cheeriness. Susan differs terrifically from other MacFarlane TV moms; her sexuality isn’t the primal scream of Lois Griffin, but it’s there. And Ubach wields a freakazoid sense of dementedness (a wild evolution from her Beakman’s World days) to convey her character’s arrested sexual development. Her performance says more about the chaste dimensions of family sitcom sexuality and the submissiveness of archaic family roles in general than any speech or poke-in-the-eye reference can about politics. This weirdo subtlety is something Ted could learn to hone if there’s to be a second season.

Ted premieres January 11 on Peacock