Seth MacFarlane’s ‘hellscape of adolescence’ made for comedy in the TV version of hit movie Ted

Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane has revealed the painful source of comedy behind the new TV version of his hit movie Ted.

Seth Macfarlane says it was easy to reconnect with the “hellscape of adolescence” while writing the new television prequel to his hit movie Ted.

Family Guy creator Macfarlane wrote, directed and produced the 2012 comedy film and also provided the voice and motion capture for the title character, a teddy bear who shoots to global fame after being wished to life by his eight-year-old owner.

But once the novelty of a sentient toy wears off, Ted settles into life as a cynical, foul-mouthed, pot-smoking has-been, still the faithful companion of the now grown-up slacker John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) but an impediment to his love life and emotional growth.

Seth Macfarlane says it was easy to reconnect with the “hellscape of adolescence” while writing the new television prequel to his hit movie Ted. Photo: Momodu Mansaray/Getty Images

Thanks to Macfarlane’s edgy writing and the easy bromance between the unlikely lead pairing, Ted became the highest grossing comedy of the year, raking in $800 million at the box office and spawning a less popular, but still successful, sequel.

But when the approach came to revisit the character for the small screen, Macfarlane knew that a new approach was needed. So rather than try to pin down A-lister Wahlberg for another sequel, he and co-showrunners Brad Walsh and Paul Corrigan (of Modern Family fame) opted to explore the period between Ted’s initial fame and the movies’ adult era, setting the show in 1993.

“There’s a whole part of Ted’s life that we haven’t explored,” says Macfarlane. “Even though it’s the same character that you know from the movies, we’re playing in an earlier part of his life, and by its very nature, makes it a completely new environment. So hopefully it will evoke the tone and the personality of the bear that you remember from the movies, but it’ll feel like something very new.”

Macfarlane has brought back his much loved talking teddy bear Ted for a TV prequel.

The eight-part Binge series will also find John and Ted – and the extended Bennett family of father Matty, mother Susan, and cousin Blaire – negotiating a world without the internet and mobile phones and the creators saw a rich vein of humour in exploring the fraught high-school years, even if it meant bringing back some of their own teenage trauma.

“Most comedy writers are beta males, so it was pretty easy for us to put ourselves into the shoes of John Bennett,” says Macfarlane. “We had already established that he was kind of a loser and that Ted was his only friend in the first movie. So digging into that on a deeper level was pretty easy for all of us in the room.

“It was nice to be able to write about some of those experiences. All the writers on the show, including myself, Brad Walsh, or Paul Corrigan, had different versions of awfulness that they experienced growing up, punching their way through the hellscape of adolescence. So it was nice to get some laughs out of it.”

Sending the action back a few decades also meant finding an actor to play the teenage John. Thankfully Macfarlane didn’t have to search too far for Max Burkholder to step into Wahlberg’s shoes, having already worked with him on his long-running animated comedy Family Guy. Indeed, by a strange twist of fate, a young Burkholder was at the very first table read for Ted, reading lines that he now admits he was “way, way too young for”.

Macfarlane says that Burkholder’s audition was the clear standout because he already had “a real handle on the character” and “we all bought him as a young Wahlberg”.

Max Burkholder as John, Seth Macfarlane as voice of Ted in the new Binge TV series Ted.

“We all know that he grows up to become Mark Wahlberg, who is the farthest thing from a beta male, you have to believe that he was this person at one point in time; and Max walks that line nicely,” he says. “There’s just a little bit of the hint of confidence that is to come. But right now, he’s still somebody who’s finding himself.”

Burkholder says that while he took some guidance from the Ted movies, he was very careful not just to do a Mark Wahlberg impression.

“In my studying of that, I was not so much studying him as I was the character John Bennett,” Burkholder says. “I definitely wanted to bring my own sensibilities to it, especially because he’s 16. He’s not the guy that he is in the movies.”

Macfarlane says that his younger co-star also proved to be adept at improvisation, despite his lack of experience, and that after shooting a few takes that stuck to the script, often opted to do another “where we just kind of drift and say whatever came to mind”.

“He was so great at just letting go and letting the comedy flow,” says Macfarlane. “And his sense of humour is very similar to mine, so it wasn’t really that hard to improvise with him. It was such a pleasant surprise that Max was so good at [improv] because Wahlberg was too, and it’s nice to have that comedy tool to work with.”

Burkholder, once he got used to acting out often over-the-top scenes with a character who wasn’t actually there, was left in awe of the multi-talented Macfarlane, not just for his comedic abilities but also for his generous and supportive presence on set.

“He is down to play,” says Burkholder. “He’s down to have fun. He’s down to find options and alternative stuff within a scene and honestly, just as a director and as a guy and as a writer as an actor, he’s just eminently talented. Like, you cannot believe how many different things he is so skilled at and can do at the same time.”

Much of the comedy of the original films came from the outrageous and equal-opportunity-offender observations that spouted from the mouth of a CGI creation as cute as Ted. The new show continues the barrage of boundary-pushing gags but whether audience sensibilities have changed in the past decade remains to be seen.

“You can’t go into something like this, especially a raunchy comedy, expecting or worrying about failure and backlash,” says Burkholder, when asked if he’s worried about being cancelled. “If you do that then your focus isn’t going to be on the right thing, which is making people laugh.”

Seth McFarlane as Ted, Max Burkholder as John, Scott Grimes as Matty, Alanna Ubach as Susan, Giorgia Whigham as Blaire. Photo: PEACOCK

Co-writers Walsh and Corrigan agree that the TV version of Ted couldn’t have worked until now for two reasons. Firstly, the technology didn’t really exist until recently to enable Macfarlane to perform and direct at the same time, while also creating a CGI bear that could be visualised in real time and would also meet audience expectations on a TV budget. And secondly, the advent of streaming services had meant that content can now have a much harder edge than network television standards they both worked with on Modern Family.

“I think something about that animated bear and his ability to say things that other people can’t say – somehow he gets away with some humour that maybe otherwise wouldn’t fly,” says Corrigan. “And that’s an exciting thing and somehow a relief for viewers. It was certainly relief for me to see that tone captured in the pilot episode of this series.”

Ted will stream on Binge from January 11.

Originally published as Seth MacFarlane’s ‘hellscape of adolescence’ made for comedy in the TV version of hit movie Ted