Seth MacFarlane‘s Ted series has emerged from hibernation for season two.
MacFarlane voices the hedonistic, anthropomorphic teddy bear in the series that serves as a prequel to Universal’s 2012 comedy film of the same name and its 2015 sequel. Now streaming on Peacock, this season is set in 1994 and features John (Max Burkholder), the 17-year-old version of the character Mark Wahlberg plays in the movies, teaming up with his beloved stuffed animal to tackle senior year. Rounding out the show’s cast are Scott Grimes (Matty), Alanna Ubach (Susan) and Giorgia Whigham (Blaire).
During a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter below, MacFarlane explains why the team opted for AI to transform him into former President Bill Clinton, his focus when approaching the episode about abortion access and what the eight-episode season’s final episode suggests about the likelihood of continuing the series.
When we last spoke, you mentioned that Ted is not a cheap show. How did the budget impact the new season?
It was like, “Look, the show did really well, but it’s super expensive. We want more, but it’s really expensive.” (Laughs.) That’s the message that trickled down to me through the ranks. There has yet to be a method that we have discovered to make the creation of Ted, as a character, any cheaper than it is. It’s still the same way we did the CGI when the first and second movies came out. Nothing has really changed.
It’s the most deceptive thing about the series. You have this half-hour format that feels like a traditional single-camera setup, and the amount of work that goes into it is like doing an Avengers movie every 30 minutes, which people don’t think about. To be honest, we don’t want them to think about it. We want them to focus on the jokes and characters and just enjoy the show. But it is something that is a real challenge.
What was involved in turning you into Bill Clinton for one episode?
Way back, I had done a Clinton impression on Family Guy a number of times. It was a bit of a challenge to figure out, “Oh, God, how do we do this in live action?” It’s a great example of AI being used as a tool and purely as a tool. We tried makeup. We tried prosthetics. We tried traditional CGI. Everything just looked terrifying. It looked like Sloth from The Goonies. We finally figured that we don’t want people focused on the visual effect. We don’t want them going, “What’s happening there with this guy’s face?” We want them focused on the writing and the jokes, and the tool that allowed us to do that was AI, in this case.
We have a very, very talented team of visual effects artists — the same crew that did all of our Ted animation, which is all done so meticulously by this wonderful team of artists here and in Melbourne, Australia, with Framestore. And yet, in this one instance, this was the only way there was to pull it off. We probably couldn’t have done this to this degree, even when we were filming the first season of the series.
There’s an episode that explores abortion access. What made this the right way to tackle the topic?
It’s no surprise, I always try to use All in the Family as a North Star. Norman Lear was one of my heroes and became a friend before he passed away. That’s always the creative inspiration that’s in my head when we’re writing these things. We figured, this is a topical story. We have Matty and we have Blaire, who were on opposite sides of the political spectrum and are coming at this thing from two totally different viewpoints. We want this to be something that is going to be funny now, and it will be funny 10, 20 years from now. We don’t want to be a disposable show. That was the brilliance to me of All in the Family, was that it was 1971 to 1979. You can watch those shows now, and so much of it is still so relevant. It’s still the same issues that we’re arguing about, and yet it doesn’t feel dated. That’s really the challenge with that particular episode.
Not yet. I’ve heard nothing about season three, which is good because Ian McKellen has that little speech at the end of the last episode. It has Max walking into a gym, presumably walking out as Mark Wahlberg in the first movie. The book is sort of closed by the end of that episode, so we will see. There’s always things that can happen and ways you find your way back in. But as of now, I’ve heard nothing.
Anything you can tease about the Ted animated series?
The animated series is run by Brad Walsh and Paul Corrigan, who ran the live-action series with me. They come off of Modern Family with their pile of Emmys, so we’re in good hands. They’ve done a phenomenal job of picking up where the last movie left off and continuing the story and making it feel like something that is completely new and completely fresh, and yet at the same time, very faithful to the Ted universe. It’s been fun for me because the way I work, with a show that I’m not directly running, is I’ll help get it off the ground, and then I step away and let it take its own course. If the people running it are the right people — which, in this case, they are — you get to read these scripts and laugh out loud as a viewer and come at it from an objective standpoint. What they have cooked up is really funny, and I think people are going to love it.
Have we seen the last of The Orville?
I will be honest with you: Season four is written. It’s just a question of when we have the time to produce it. The 10 scripts are done. I’m the problem. It’s [a matter of] when I can make that my year, with all the other stuff we have in the works. But we can hit the ground running when it happens.
Any chances for a sequel to last year’s Naked Gun reboot, which you produced?
I know everyone would love to, including Liam [Neeson]. We have not heard anything yet. I think it’s all up to Paramount.
Ted is now streaming all of season two on Peacock.
