‘Ted’ Season 2 review: Ending the series on a high note

Seth MacFarlane’s Peacock prequel, Ted, has always been about one thing. And Ted Season 2 finally admits it by ending the season (and the series) with a feeling instead of a joke.

There’s a scene near the end of Ted Season 2 where John Bennett (Max Burkholder) sits in a basement making a fake newspaper. Why? Well, John is now 18 years old and still the perpetual loser he was at the beginning of Season 1. Still living in Framingham, Massachusetts. Only now, his father has had a heart attack. And if he gets too worked up, he’ll probably die.

The trouble is that the O.J. Simpson verdict has just come down. Not guilty, of course, to the horror and incomprehension of most white conservatives in 1994 America. That would obviously include Matty Bennett (Scott Grimes). So the family has decided, collectively, that they must shield Matty from this information to keep him alive.

That leads to John, who has spent two seasons establishing himself as a person of nearly limitless inertia, suddenly producing daily fabricated news reports, fake broadcasts, and even an invented comic strip. He becomes, almost by accident, an artist.

Ted Season 2 was always about the “first” family guy.

Seth MacFarlane started out drawing comic strips for his local newspaper before becoming one of the most successful television creators in American history. The comic strip John draws in the finale is called “The Galumphs.” It’s about a family and their wacky antics. The connection is not subtle, nor is it meant to be.

See, what Ted Season 2 understands, and what the show spent much of its first season circling without quite landing on, is that this was always an autobiography. MacFarlane grew up in Kent, Connecticut. He was the son of a self-described “all-American guy” father. And his creative imagination was forged by the specific crucible of New England working-class Irish Catholic life in the 1980s and ’90s.

The Bennett household — Matty’s volcanic resentments, Susan’s (Alanna Ubach) borderline-saintly patience, Blaire’s (Giorgia Whigham) exhausting progressive certainty, and Ted himself as a kind of id-made stuffed animal — is the cultural environment that produced MacFarlane’s entire comedic sensibility. The surprise of Ted Season 2 is how willingly the show leans into that acknowledgment. And how touching it becomes when it does.

The sitcom Ted finally decides to be.

The eight-episode sophomore run is structured more episodically than Season 1. It’s a shift that turns out to suit the material, though. Individual installments follow John and Ted calling a phone-sex hotline from the school basement. Ted’s affair with a lonely married neighbor, which gives Seth MacFarlane the rare opportunity to play his signature id as something approximating heartbroken. A full Dungeons & Dragons sequence, guest-starring Dimension 20‘s Brennan Lee Mulligan, and is easily one of the funniest single pieces of television MacFarlane has made since early Family Guy.

Also, Blaire’s unexpected pregnancy and the ensuing family fallout. My personal favorite episode, where Susan goes to prison. And the finale’s extraordinary fake-news ruse that lampoons modern right-wing cable news. Ted was always pretty much a sitcom, despite its wonky 35-40 minute episode structure. But now it really feels like one.

MacFarlane has said in interviews that All in the Family is his north star for Ted Season 2. Norman Lear was his hero. The Ted series is his attempt at something that will be funny now and funny in twenty years. That will use the unique register of comedy to say something about America that straight drama can’t reach.

This is an ambitious statement of purpose for a show that also has a joke about Ted running out of a house while wearing a purple sex toy. Both things are true simultaneously, of course. The miracle of the show at its best is that neither cancels the other out.

MacFarlane’s Norman Lear ambitions.

The Lear comparison hasn’t always been a good thing. Season 1’s Matty/Blaire arguments sometimes felt like a Twitter debate in sitcom drag. Each side represented a position rather than a person. Season 2 mostly corrects for this. The abortion episode — titled with characteristic MacFarlane shamelessness, “Roe v. Weed” — earns its political content through the particular way the Bennett family processes Blaire’s pregnancy.

Matty doesn’t oppose Blaire’s choice with policy arguments. He brings home the wrong man to marry her and genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing. Susan’s opposition comes from Catholic faith, not calculation. And John and Ted, who accompany Blaire to the clinic and take a beating from protesters in the parking lot so she can get inside safely, do so not out of ideology but out of the simple loyalty of people who love someone.

The episode is doing something that the best Norman Lear episodes did. It’s letting a political argument reveal itself through the texture of family, rather than the other way around.

When the politics actually work.

Alanna Ubach is the season’s most cherished gift. Susan Bennett is a character built on a familiar joke; She’s the infinitely patient, slightly dim wife of the overbearing reactionary patriarch. A direct descendant of Edith Bunker in many ways. And Ubach has been playing her beautifully since Season 1.

But “Susan Is the New Black,” in which Susan takes the fall for John’s drug possession and goes to prison for ten days, gives her something the season’s other characters only get glimpses of: True-blue interiority. Watching the Bennett household collapse without the woman who has been doing everything to hold it together is funny, sure, funny in the way that only truly observed comedy can be funny. Where the laugh comes out of pained reality. Ubach, who has spent her career being brilliant in roles that don’t quite deserve her, is extraordinary in it.

The controversy that almost distracts from everything else.

The Bill Clinton controversy will follow this season into its cultural legacy in ways that probably exceed its actual importance. MacFarlane used AI to render himself as Clinton for a cameo in the Dunkin’ Donuts episode. And the choice sparked the necessary (and predictable) debate about AI’s place in creative production.

MacFarlane’s defense — that prosthetics looked terrifying, that CGI looked terrifying, that the AI rendered a result nothing else could achieve — is coherent as far as it goes. What it elides is the possibility that a joke requiring photorealistic Clinton rendering at any cost is a joke worth reconsidering. The scene is funny. It’s also the moment the season most clearly shows the seams.

Because honestly, the comedy itself works on its own. The ethical implications of using AI to shortcut the believability adds basically nothing and only takes away from the writing. They would’ve been much better off hiring someone who looks close enough to Bill Clinton and letting it rip. Or pull a South Park and just use deepfake technology!

Max Burkholder’s quiet center of gravity in Ted Season 2.

What Ted Season 2 gets completely right, all the way through, is Max Burkholder’s performance as John. It’s easy to overlook because it operates entirely in negative space. John is a character defined by what he fails to do. By what he fails to become. What he fails to understand about himself, even.

But Burkholder has been doing something remarkable across fifteen episodes now. His connection with a CGI bear he can’t actually see feels more natural than ever. More physically intuitive than Mark Wahlberg’s connection with the same character in two films. He’s playing someone we already know will never fully grow up. And he plays that not as tragedy but as a kind of cheerful, oblivious grace.

The gym scene that ends the finale — John announcing he wants to get “super-jacked,” Ted following him through the doors, Ian McKellen narrating the bridge to the films in a voice that sounds like God having a good time — lands because Burkholder has done the work to make us genuinely fond of this sweet, hopeless kid.

The show’s perfect closing trick.

McKellen’s narration, incidentally, has been one of the show’s secret weapons from the beginning: Patrick Stewart voiced the Ted films, McKellen replaced him for the series, and the choice is quietly perfect. They’re the same voice, the same grandeur and mischief, the two sides of the same coin the X-Men franchise ran on for a decade.

So when McKellen signs off in the finale by telling the audience there are two movies about what happens next and to just go watch them, there’s something lovely about it. A show that began as a prequel to a franchise nobody asked to be expanded ends by earning its place within that franchise.

Then it gracefully steps aside because, well, the show is just too expensive to make. And they might as well end it on a high enough note. No weed pun intended.

The bottom line.

Ted Season 2 isn’t a great television season. The episode runtimes remain too long for their premises. Some jokes land in the same place the show has already been. And the central conceit — that a show built around a foul-mouthed CGI stuffed animal is actually a meditation on family, creativity, and the cultural formation of its creator — asks a lot of your patience, and that’s not even getting into the AI nonsense.

What the show delivers in return is something rarer than great television, though. It’s a season that knows exactly what it is and makes peace with the cost of that knowledge. It uses its final episode to softly suggest that all the profanity and the pot jokes and the Stallone references were, the whole time, someone trying to figure out how they became who they are.

The fake newspaper John makes in the basement to protect his dying father from the truth about O.J. Simpson also keeps a record of the world as it actually is. Comedy that tells the truth while appearing to tell a lie? Well, that’s the whole MacFarlane project, in the end.

Ted Season 2 doesn’t always achieve it, but it knows what it’s reaching for. And that’s more than most shows ever get to figure out.

Ted Season 2 is available to stream now on Peacock.

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Images courtesy of Peacock. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.