There’s no denying that Seth MacFarlane has a particular way of doing things. Whether its Family Guy, The Orville, The Naked Gun, anything that the comedy star seems to touch turns out in a very specific manner. It’s a style that is clearly driven by a love of sitcoms of yore and it’s a platform that can deliver quality comedy, even if it is a tad predictable. This is without question the case with the second season of Ted as well.
Following on from the strong first season that matched up savage comedic moments with complex family dynamics, this next round of episodes is back to what Ted, and MacFarlane for that matter, does best. We get to follow the iconic sentient teddy bear and his owner-brother John Bennett, all as the two continue to survive through high school and deal with the challenges of being young adults. Naturally, this involves plenty of sexually-themed narrative threads and other adult themes that every teenager explores or avoids during their maturing at this age. So you could say that it’s familiar and a little nostalgic, even if the weight of many of these topics is softened to a pulp by the very comedic tone of the Ted series.
But again, regardless of the topic of each episode – and each episode does tend to have a theme – we find an episode structure that is almost a direct representation of Family Guy. It starts in a completely inconspicuous way, usually at the Bennett household, and then soon spirals off into different directions before the key premise of the episode takes shape. One such example could be how an inquisitive call to a sex operator hotline soon sees Ted and John having to invent a fictional and rebellious student to avoid repercussions for costing their school thousands of dollars. If you’ve seen your fair share of Family Guy, this leap from one idea to something almost entirely random is not at all uncommon, and it’s because of this that if you still enjoy the animated series, you’ll find yourself instantly settling back in with Ted and the gang once more.
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Building on this, we also find a major use of cutaways and montages, another key element that coins a MacFarlane-creation, with many being nods to pop-culture in the same way that these are used in his animated projects as well. You could go as far as saying that Ted is a live-action version of Family Guy and it truly wouldn’t be too wide of the mark.
But otherwise the dialogue and the comedy that is used in this show is often more than enough to carry it through its somewhat predictable nature. Ted knows what it is and doesn’t try to trick you once that it’s anything more than a simple and fun sitcom-like series, the kind that we don’t tend to see all too often these days. There are truly funny jokes and puns in this series, ruthless and almost jaw-dropping insults that’ll have you wheezing, and all in a package that doesn’t eat up much of your time. We’re talking 30-minute episodes that aren’t particularly tied together, meaning there’s no requirement of following a wider and overarching narrative. This is entertainment at perhaps its rawest and most accessible and it’s hard to find that anything but admirable.
So, Ted’s return in this second round of episodes won’t blow you away or surprise you with how it’s re-writing the script for television comedy, but that’s fine, as it’s fun, easy to watch, and gut-wrenchingly hilarious at times too.
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