‘Ted’ Interview Roundtable: Reboot and Reimagining

On Dec. 12, 2023, Seth MacFarlane, Brad Walsh and Paul Corrigan, showrunners of the new Peacock series “Ted,” completed a roundtable discussion with college reporters from across the country.

A prequel to the 2012 hit raunchy comedy of the same name, starring Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis, the new series is set in the ’90s and follows a high school-aged John (Max Burkholder) through coming-of-age experiences alongside his animate teddy bear and dysfunctional but loving family.

MacFarlane, who also serves as an executive producer, director, and writer for the series, talked about how “Ted” would necessarily differ from the original films, allowing for new and exciting stories.

“The fact that it is a television series, just by nature of the format, injects some fresh life into it. We don’t have to tell these big, grand, life-changing stories. We can tell smaller stories, which really is better for comedy to begin with,” he said.

Though John as a teenager is a very different person from his 35-year-old self, much of his personality and dynamic have been preserved on the small screen. MacFarlane explained how despite John and Ted being in a different phase of life, the characters largely haven’t changed.

“It didn’t [change] in the same way that the characters on ‘Family Guy’ don’t change from year to year. 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. Should I just hire somebody else to do the voice of this bear at this earlier point in his life? And I arrived at the feeling that people just want to see the Ted they saw in the movies.”

In the limited series, for the first time in television history, Ted was animated in real time on screen. Visual effects supervisor Brandon Faye and software developer Gene Reddick developed a suite of tools to allow the crew to see Ted live onscreen while filming.

“We have a great cast of four immensely talented actors who really saw him in the room. And it goes back to the original movie — if you look at the footage of Wahlberg sitting on the couch talking to empty air, he’s really doing his part, he’s doing a lot of heavy lifting as far as really believing that that bear is there,” MacFarlane said.

With this new technology, McFarlane was able to perform as Ted, and the cast could immediately watch a take back and see the titular bear next to them.

“The fact that we do it all live too makes a big difference. We’re not going in and adding the voice later,” MacFarlane added.

“Ted” co-showrunners Walsh and Corrigan, who also executive produce and write with MacFarlane, are most famous for their stint as showrunners on “Modern Family,” the ABC comedy that ran for 11 seasons about a complicated extended family, explained how they brought that experience to the household featured in “Ted.”

“[‘Modern Family’] was really almost like a grad school for us, for learning how to craft story. So we tried to bring that to ‘Ted,’” Walsh said.

Part of the challenge of the series was finding the cast who could make this property sparkle, while also doing justice to the beloved films.

“I think we all breathed a sigh of relief when we thought, ‘we have someone who is talented enough, funny enough, and could plausibly grow up to be Mark Wahlberg,’” Corrigan said when speaking of series lead, Burkholder.

Given the series’ characteristic bold comedy, Walsh and Corrigan found it especially gratifying to return to John’s junior year of high school.

“The thing I noticed in the shift immediately was the innocence that is in the characters when you’re dealing with them as teenagers,” Walsh said.

As a limited series, the new “Ted” had to be different to the original films, but it was a formal change Walsh and Corrigan, giants in television, much preferred.

“When you’re making a film, you’re changing a character, you drop them off in a different spot than you started. Whereas with episodic television, it’s a bit more of they come full circle,” Walsh said.

— Staff writer Millie Mae Healy can be reached at milliemae.healy@thecrimson.com.