Interview by Sydney Breedlove • Story by Isha Pati

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 17— Sydney Breedlove on her experience talking to comedian Seth MacFarlane, creator of “Family Guy” and writer, director, and star of the “TED” franchise. TED (2024) is streaming now exclusively on Peacock. 

This piece is prefaced by a content warning for suicide and mild spoiler warnings for the Ted reboot.

BitRake contributor Sydney Breedlove had the opportunity to speak to several members of the production team behind Peacock’s “TED” prequel series, including SETH MACFARLANE, the creative force behind “FAMILY GUY” and creator of the “Ted” franchise. MacFarlane is a producer, writer, and showrunner for the 2024 series along with BRAD WALSH and PAUL CORRIGAN (Producers: “MODERN FAMILY,” “KING OF THE HILL,”).

The prequel series to 2012’s “TED” and 2015’s “TED 2” is set in 1993 and centers around the youth and hijinks of best friends (Max Burkholder playing a younger version of John Bennett, Mark Wahlberg’s “TED”/”TED 2” character), as he attends which school with Ted, the washed-up phenom vulgar teddy bear voiced by MacFarlane. 

Sydney was able to speak with MacFarlane in advance of the release of “TED” (2024) at a student round table via Zoom, preceded by a Q&A with Corrigan and Walsh. Here’s what she heard there:

Mary Randolph, a student reporter at the panel from the Daily Northwestern asked Corrigan and Walsh about their personal highlights of the production process. Walsh recalled his initial reaction to the pilot script when he received it from MacFarlane. 

WALSH: “I mean a couple highlights come to mind for me. One is just getting the pilot script from Seth and realizing how funny it is off the bat in a way that was tonally consistent with the [movie. It was] a little bit of a shock, but at the same time a relief.” He noted that the experience of writing, shooting, and editing was distinct for him because much of it occurred before the character of Ted was fully formed, physically, before the eyes of actors, directors, and producers. 

Beyond the “Family Guy” and “Ted” multimedia universes, MacFarlane also voices the anthropomorphic alien Roger in “American Dad!” which he created in collaboration with Family Guy co-creator Matt Weitzman. MacFarlane also voices spinoff “The Cleveland Show”’s deeply religious Tim the Bear. Dogs and babies and teddy bears speak in full sentences that are not only coherent but dark, sharp, and crass. His shows are hinged on the central comedic driver of juxtaposing cuddly appearance with crude personality, and doing it in a silly way.

Both “FAMILY GUY” and “TED” are about everyday characters in everyday settings navigating everyday problems while entangled in dysfunctional and heartfelt relationships but twist: the laws of this universe are wacky.

For fans of MacFarlane’s style, “TED (2024)” makes good on the promise of the highly-anticipated reboot.

The 2024 “TED” series is, like the film, completely live action save an animated Ted, but we still see Seth MacFarlane’s penchant for cartoon antics on display. In a moment, for example, where Ted and John are stacked on top of each other in a trench coat, (Ted on top, of course, receiving muffled directions from a blinded John for maximum slapstick), attempting to shoplift a gift for the kid they traumatized to attempted suicide, getting caught (Ted trying to pull the old quick, “I’m actually your boss,” over on a security guard, of course), all for Ted to say when asked where his parents are, “I don’t have parents. I’m actually a teddy bear that came to life.” MacFarlane’s nonchalant delivery sharply undercuts the absurdity of this cartoonish fiasco playing out in this otherwise realistic 1990s Boston.

TED (2024)’S BURKHOLDER AS JOHN BENNETT ON THE RACIAL MAKEUP OF THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM C. 1993:  “We used to have an Indian kid last year but they got him”

And like but the thing is I’m Indian and I laughed hard at that. And the line’s surprising and irreverent, sure, but I feel like it punches up. Mimics the blasé attitude many brown Americans have adopted regarding the sometimes life-shatteringly dire consequences of racial profiling— accepting it as a fact of life when inevitably they get held longer at airport security— and does it with such silliness that the laughs he earns are impactful.

“[TED (2024)] is just going to be jokes. Hard jokes in a way that I haven’t been seeing on TV and [that] are fun to write.”

BRAD WALSH TO STUDENT ROUNDTABLE

MacFarlane blends observational comedy and farce, using grounded details to heighten these elements with writing and production choices in service of absurdism.

Walsh commented to Daisy at the Boston University Daily Free Press on the entirely team based writing process inherent to episodic comedy. “One of the things when you are writing a movie is [that] it’s a fairly lonely process. One or two people, usually a small group. You do punch it up with other people later,” Walsh added, “but it’s a small core group. With [the series] we were able to assemble a team of writers […] and hash out the stories.” This writing process mirrors those that are often found in sketch comedy writers’ rooms.

Anna at the Duke Chronicle brought up the “comedy first” approach the “TED” team uses in their work, and asked why that was a priority for them in the production process.

At its core, comedy is all about manipulating emotions, and MacFarlane’s work does this masterfully through dialogue and action carefully crafted to elicit laughs.

WALSH: “Part of the episodic nature of [TED (2024)] is also just what comes natural to me and Paul, so it’s what we feel most comfortable in. Usually, we— and Seth as well— find ourselves telling episodic [stories]. It also frees you up to switch around the order and [not] make changes that have ripple effects throughout other episodes. So in some ways it’s liberating as far as that’s concerned.”

Comedy writing is characterized by the establishment of specifically recognizable situations and then a misdirect. Setup, punchline. For something to generate comedic stories over and over again the setup has to be as recognizable and true as possible. Typical American family: dad, wife, kids, companions, but something’s different.

CORRIGAN: “Comedy, and there are exceptions of course, but comedy lends itself to episodic TV much more so than drama. It’s easier to think of those stories and know you’re going to drop the characters back off where they started. Episodic comedy is about characters who learn nothing.”

The Harvard Crimson’s Millie May asked the pair, given their experience producing family sitcoms for networks like ABC, to talk about their experience developing the family dynamics in ‘TED.’”

WALSH: Yes. That was part of what made [Corrigan and I] think we could possibly tackle this project. We were lucky enough to be [at Modern Family] for, like, eleven years. We wrote a lot of episodes, and it was really almost like a grad school for us for learning how to craft story. So we tried to bring that to ‘TED’ [2024], and a lot of that involves […] bringing stories from real life to the episodes.”

“You often have to take a lot of liberties there,” he added, “And you know, build up structure around those stories that didn’t exist, but if you start with, sort of, a kernel of truth, it makes for a lot of relatable comedy.”

Contributing writer Sydney Breedlove asked Walsh, Corrigan, and MacFarlane about their experiences transitioning “Ted” from film to series. 

Q: Does TV or feature structure serve comedy better? How was the transition from feature to TV?

Walsh replied, “When you’re making a film you’re changing a character. You’re sort of dropping them off in a different spot than where you started, whereas in episodic television it’s a little bit more [of] ‘they come full circle’.” Corrigan added that “Ted” (2024) has enabled further exploration of the characters Ted and John, as it follows them throughout their junior year of high school.

MACFARLANE: ” Look, there’s advantages to both. With film, as a director you can get everything just the way you want it and with television you kind of, on the production side, have to live with stuff that maybe you’d want to go back and fix but you can’t because […] you’ve got a lot more to do and in a shorter time. “

“From a writing standpoint I’ve always found television more pleasurable to write than film, the reason being that you can screw up a little bit more. You can experiment more, you can be a little more daring, and it’s okay because it’s only one episode of a series, and if one is kind of a little weak and you try something kind of risky that didn’t work, its okay. “

The “Ted” series gets to explore the funny, sad, and often sweet moments that comprise the backstory of a duo that have been best friends their whole lives, such as all the coming-of-age milestones that come with high school: first cars, first girlfriends,

“You do that with a movie, you’re sunk because that’s all you have,” MacFarlane added, on the series allowing writers to take more creative risks, “It’s all riding on this one script. And there’s this pressure, too, to be a little bigger, to have a climax that’s more filmic and cinematic. There’s a lot more riding on the specific story beats, and it has to kind of follow a more specific shape. With television the stories are smaller, and I think that’s one of the things I like about this series. “

MacFarlane spoke on what the experience of revisiting a character after a long time through the perspective of a prequel. “Did that change your characterization/perception of [Ted]?” Lauren from UC Santa Barbara’s Daily Nexus asked.

“It didn’t, the same way the characters on Family Guy don’t change from year to year,” he replied, “I had toyed with the idea of doing something different with Ted and with his voice. There was a point at which I thought maybe I should just cast somebody else, you know, Pete Davidson’s name was kicked around,” the comedian chuckled, “Like, should I just hire somebody else to do the voice of this bear at this particular point in his life?” MacFarlane went on:

“I arrived at the feeling that people just want to see the Ted they saw in the movies. I shouldn’t mess around with it. He’s not a character that is a biological life form, you know? He’s a stuffed animal, so it’s not like he’s gonna grow and evolve. He’s always kind of going to be what he is, and the feeling was that people probably just wanted to see Ted.”

S.M. to BitRake

Intense commitment to his signature absurdist style is precisely what enables MacFarlane and co. to pull at your heartstrings by giving you moments like the one, for example, in episode 2 when we meet Clive, a high school bully who, having mustered up the courage to sit in a crowded diner clad in complete sailor garb filled with genuine eager hope to see his long lost navy father after having received instruction from Ted, posing as Clive’s dad, to greet each customer that enters by saying “ahoy” until he finds him, before pulling the rug out when that kid attempts suicide via Flintstone gummy overdose because Ted sent a note with the waitress that Clive’s father wasn’t going to show up because he was “disappointed with him.” Ted in about five minutes is dealt the emotional consequences of that, calls Clive posing as the dad to say he’s proud of his boy and that they’d meet one day when he’s ready, and Ted finally declares in moral absolution “if he kills himself now it’s from other stuff.” The two later feel responsible for Clive’s emotions and argue like parents who don’t know their son very well while shopping for a gift for “Clive’s dad” to send him. Not only does this bear swear, he also commits heinous acts of emotional manipulation against the people around him, seemingly for no other reason than entertainment.

“And, you know, we’ll find out,” he added, “After all this time, you’re rolling the dice a little bit. Is there still an appetite for Ted? Or has it been so long that people have kind of moved on and [Ted’s] not as big a deal as it was back when the movie came out? We will find out soon enough. But we poured our guts into this show and we did the absolute best we could, so if there’s still an appetite for this character, it will be well-satiated by this series.”

S.M. TO UCSB DAILY NEXUS

A HOLLYWOOD REPORTER review by television critic Angie Han called “TED” (2024) “indulgent,” and in many ways, it is.

Everything the series does it leans into intensely, in a way that can feel like writing and production choices were driven exclusively on the most base comedic instinct of the people who made the show. What struck me so deeply, I think, is that MacFarlane’s work is so clearly the result of heart— writers and comedians searching for the most gut-punchingly funny and emotional beats and dialogue they can muster, then packaging and delivering it to you in a constant stream for over 40 minutes. That’s no small feat. They teeter your heart over a cliff and springboard it back up again alternating within seconds for the same reason we’re all listening to that indie hyperpop unnecessary-five-minutes-of-jarring-noise bullshit: because it’s fun to feel intensely.

What’s most fun, to me, at least, about writing and performing comedy, is the heightened emotions and silliness, and the commitment to it all for the sake of loving those things.  The commitment of an artist to create art, and the acknowledgement that the best way to do that is to trust your instincts and do what makes you happy. The delightful thing about watching about live comedy is that it’s all created with the ultimate goal of the pursuit of joy.

MacFarlane’s characters are yes, bears that say fuck. They also speak in a kind of pointed way to the absurd folly and intense struggle of the silent observer, i.e. what it is to sit, unheard, looking pleasant to passersby while in your world you are thinking and feeling all sorts of things you can’t say out loud. What is a more effective way to personify something than to just explicitly show it is so simply overwhelmed with emotion that it sees no other choice than to act out or use slurs or spontaneously burst into song?

That’s what makes us laugh with the large force of emotional release that only the feeling of “that’s so stupid” can make us feel. The stakes for this bear that says fuck are such that a young adult’s fragile life and psyche is at stake, and here we are laughing at it because we live in a world where fathers can leave and psyches can break and teddy bears can come to life and say fuck and the world can love it for a second and just move on.

Yes, the comedic driver is the funny specifics of simply, what if Ted happened in the ‘90s when Mark Wahlberg was a boy, but the series also delivers genuine situational comedy over an intense 40 minutes (50 for the pilot, which while not unheard of is certainly uncommon for a sitcom) and the expanse of situational comedy available from these characters is, in a way, representative of the simplicity of the relationship between these characters— John and the titular Ted— and yes, there’s shock humor from the bear that says fuck, but what MacFarlane does well is capturing relationships that are so deeply representative of human life and allowing his characters to feel deeply that real life is shocking, because they live in a world, just like we all do, that is. He does this with his ability to utilize the human laugh triggers of incongruity, surprise, shock, emotional release.

MacFarlane and his team use shock humor in animation to examine the reasons people do shocking things. In other words, to break through the barrier of verbal communication and express pure, raw, emotion upon an audience, which is ultimately the most effective way to elicit a laugh.

This editor’s opinion is that MacFarlane’s consistent usage of cartoonish fantasy and realities whose laws are otherwise different from our own exemplifies his demonstrated ability to use absurdism and surrealism in both combination and juxtaposition with grounded reality in his comedy.

“I think it’s probably pretty obvious why somebody would want to work with Seth MacFarlane. He’s pretty good at what he does. I think if there’s something that would make Seth want to work with us it’s our experience writing those family comedies […] Grounding things in a little bit of reality and bringing a little emotion and being sure that at their heart the relationships make sense.”

CORRRIGAN TO STUDENT REP. FROM HARVARD CRIMSON

Part of what’s so enjoyable about watching television (and consuming written stories in general, as a medium) is the way the form allows for detailed visual and verbal showcase of a writer’s inner world. In Peacock’s 2024 “TED” series, MacFarlane ground his signature comedic style characterized by slapstick, shock, and rapid switching between heightened emotions (influenced by live performance) in recognizable relationships to elicit effective emotional release in his audience, and has finally, on streaming, been given the production model to properly delve into the question how funny would it be if a teddy bear said fuck?

“’Ted,’ at the end of the day, is just about relationships. And these stories are all pretty small, you know? This isn’t anything that’s life-changing. This is just like day-to-day life in the ‘90s for this family with this talking teddy bear. And in many ways it’s structurally probably the most representative of any incarnation of this franchise that we’ve worked on.”

S.M. TO BITRAKE

Sydney Breedlove thanks the NBCUniversal CampusU Program for this opportunity. Sydney is a writer, comedian, and producer, in the Chicagoland area. You can find her work on Instagram @sydneybreedlove.

Isha Pati is the Editor-in-Chief of BitRake Humor, and thanks Audrey Gold and Sydney Breedlove for watching several episodes of Ted (2024) on her couch with her, as well as the writers of the reference sources below.

Works Referenced:

TODAY. “Seth MacFarlane on how he brought the ‘Ted’ prequel to life. Jan. 5, 2014. https://www.today.com/video/seth-macfarlane-on-why-he-decided-to-make-ted-prequel-201410117628.

WIRED. “Seth MacFarlane Answers the Web’s Most Searched Questions.” May 24, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVl4hq9DyHs.

Angie Han. The Hollywood Reporter. “‘Ted’ Review: Seth MacFarlane’s Foul-Mouthed Teddy Bear Returns in Indulgent Peacock Prequel Series” Jan. 11, 2024. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/ted-review-seth-macfarlane-1235783086/.