Ted (2024)

The carpet-bombed gags don’t always hit, but when they do their cleverness resonates, especially for those of us who were alive and consuming culture in the series’ early-Nineties timeframe.

"Ted” hews toward a ‘90s comedic sensibility that’s not merely nostalgic but seeks to tap into the inner teenager that some of us never entirely outgrow. That might not qualify as high art, but in its unpretentious silliness, this Peacock comedy is still more than bear-able.

Earns quite a few more chuckles than its big-screen counterparts.

Sadly, the sheer coarseness of the humour knocks the stuffing out of Ted and makes it a missed opportunity.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring much new to the table, and at just seven episodes, Ted falls short of mustering up the longevity of the kind of ‘90s sitcoms it’s clearly lampooning.

Even with only seven episodes, the Ted series does start to wear out its welcome, with the storytelling becoming repetitive and predictable. While it is never boring by any means, one season may have been enough. There's only so much you can do with a franchise about a cursing, pot-smoking teddy bear who lives in Boston before it becomes tired.

Ted” offers intermittent but not consistent laughs, and, at those one-hour drama episode lengths, it’s not worth viewers’ time.

Its crass humor isn’t a far cry from the films’ fratty outlandishness, but there’s a caution in Peacock’s Ted that is unmistakable. Also, in retrofitting this Naughty Bear franchise with red-state/blue-state warmongering, its revamped politics scrapes abrasively against the show’s more plainly comedic subplots. .... It must be said that Ted has its moments, which has much to do with its cast.

The seven-episode Peacock miniseries is the ultimate "Now That's What I Call MacFarlane" mixtape cassette of all his familiar sitcom-styled bits recycled in another '90s nostalgia fest package of wavering quality.

The cast does what it can with the dusty material, with Giorgia Whigham a standout as Blaire, and there are some moderately entertaining moments and even a heartwarming scene or two, but with each episode extending past the half-hour mark (the pilot is nearly 50 minutes), there’s a lot of unnecessary material as the characters get involved in trite and predictable circumstances that are usually resolved just in time for the credits. Turns out “Ted” was a bear of its time, and that time was 2012.

Every so often, one of MacFarlane’s extended runners will click, or Ted’s sheer enthusiasm for a stupid idea proves infectious. But any chuckles brought out by the series feel like the kind of comedy you come up with out of sheer boredom.

Painfully, obnoxiously unfunny. This is one bear we didn’t need to bring back to life.

Along with the underbaked writing, it just adds to the suspicion that fear of criticism is at last occasionally getting the better of him – so we go round in puerile circles, with ever-diminishing satisfaction. A great disappointment.

Ted had the potential to be a heartwarming show with good coming-of-age stories — at least as heartwarming as a show about a pot-smoking, cursing, bigoted teddy bear could muster — but the episodes are drawn out by Seth MacFarlane-style gags to the point where we got bored.

If you can push past the initial tedium, the good (or at least less bad) news about Ted is that the episodes that follow represent a marked improvement. Sometimes, as when it leans on absurdity over abrasiveness or goofiness over saltiness, it’s possible to make out a decent comedy buried in there somewhere. If only creator and star Seth MacFarlane could get out of his own way.

Just imagine “flame retardant,” “toga party” and “Jafar” pronounced with a New England honk and you’ve got the comedic gist. Any potential world-building is half-hearted, inconsistent or both.