It sounds like bad news bears for Ted fans, as Seth MacFarlane comments on the future of the Peacock series beyond its sophomore season, now available to stream.
The creator and voice of the eponymous foul-mouth teddy bear admitted he has “no plan” for a Season 3 of the show, citing “really expensive” production cost of the prequel series of Ted (2012) and Ted 2 (2015).
“What I kept hearing [from Peacock and Universal] was, ‘Listen, the show is really expensive to produce and there’s no way to do it at a lower cost,’” he told TheWrap. “So I said, ‘All right, I hear you loud and clear.’ So I wrote the last scene with Max [Burkholder] walking into a gym, presumably coming out as Mark Wahlberg in the first Ted film.”
MacFarlane added, “So [showrunners] Brad Walsh and Paul Corrigan and I kind of painted ourselves into a corner. Is there a way to do it? There’s always a way to do anything. But at the moment, it might take some narrative acrobatics. There’s no plan that I’ve heard of at the moment to do Season 3.”
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A source close to production says no decision has been made regarding a Season 3 renewal. However, an animated spinoff is coming to Peacock later this year.
In the 2012 comedy feature film Ted and its 2015 sequel, Wahlberg starred as the adult version of John, who wished his stuffed bear to life as a child, embarking on some debaucherous adventures together. In the Ted series, Burkholder plays young John as he and Ted navigate high school and life with his family in Framingham, Massachusetts.
“It’s very good that we had two Ted films under our belt, because the workload is something that, on a weekly basis, is just insurmountable,” explained MacFarlane. “And it’s a testament to our production team, to our DP Jeff Mygatt, to our camera crew, to our visual effects crew and [visual effects supervisor] Blair Clark and our wonderful crew in Melbourne, Australia, at Framestore that this was able to be achieved on a weekly basis. It’s like you’re doing an Avengers movie every 22 minutes with the amount of CGI that it takes, not only to animate the bear, but to act the bear. It’s something we couldn’t have done if we had not had the education of doing two films 10 years earlier.”