Seth MacFarlane, the creator and voice of the potty-mouthed teddy bear on the show Ted, recently delivered some news that fans might find… unbearable.
Videos by Suggest
MacFarlane recently admitted he has “no plan” for a third season of the show, which just wrapped its second season on Peacock. He cited the “really expensive” production cost of the prequel series to the films Ted (2012) and Ted 2 (2015).
Warning: Spoilers for Season 2 of Ted ahead…
“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,’” the 52-year-old told TheWrap. “So I said, ‘All right, I hear you loud and clear.’ I wrote the last scene with Max [Burkholder] walking into a gym, presumably coming out as Mark Wahlberg in the first Ted film.”
“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,” MacFarlane added.
Peacock has not yet officially announced if the series will be renewed or canceled, and a spokesperson for the streamer declined to comment.
Seth MacFarlane Details the Huge CGI Needed for ‘Ted’: ‘Like You’re Doing an ‘Avengers’ Movie
Meanwhile, MacFarlane noted that working on the original Ted films helped with the workload of the TV series.
The original films, Ted (2012) and its 2015 sequel, featured Mark Wahlberg as the adult John, whose childhood wish brought his teddy bear to life for a series of debaucherous adventures. In the prequel series, Max Burkholder plays a young John navigating the wilds of high school with Ted and 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,” MacFarlane explained. “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,” the Family Guy mastermind added. “It’s something we couldn’t have done if we had not had the education of doing two films 10 years earlier.”
While the Ted prequel series may be over, something new is on the horizon for the character. MacFarlane and Peacock are expanding the film franchise’s universe with a new animated series that picks up where Ted 2 left off. In addition to MacFarlane, the series will feature the vocal talents of Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, and Jessica Barth.