Seth MacFarlane Says There’s ‘No Plan’ to Do ‘Ted’ Season 3, Citing Cost

Note: This story contains spoilers for “Ted” Season 2.

Ted and John Bennett’s wild teenage adventures may have reached its end, as creator Seth MacFarlane says there is “no plan” for a third season of the Peacock prequel series.

While “Ted” Season 1 became Peacock’s most-viewed title following its debut, MacFarlane emphasized that the show is expensive to produce. Some estimates have pegged the prequel series’ budget between $8 million and $10 million per episode.

“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. 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 told TheWrap. “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.”

Peacock has not yet made a decision on whether the series will be renewed for a third season or canceled. A spokesperson for the streamer declined to comment.

MacFarlane praised the show’s production and visual effects team for taking on the difficult task of bringing the titular foul-mouth teddy bear to life for two seasons with eight, half-hour episodes each.

“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. 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,” he said. “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.”

In addition to using CGI, “Ted” Season 2 also uses AI in Episode 5, in which MacFarlane makes a cameo appearance as former president Bill Clinton, who makes a stop at a local Dunkin Donuts where John’s father Matty (Scott Grimes) works. He said that the scene proved to be an “interesting study” in the use of AI as a production tool after the team was unable to nail down Clinton’s look using CGI.

“I had done my Bill Clinton impression on ‘Family Guy’ a number of times and there was some speculation in the writers’ room where they said ‘God, wouldn’t it be funny to have him come in and have Matty meet him and have the two of them actually go at it? And it was a challenge to figure out how to do it,” MacFarlane explained. “We tried makeup, we tried CGI, and eventually, it wound up being AI that saved us.”

“Had we gone the traditional CGI route, which we did try, it was just terrifying to look at. It was just this monstrous face that was contorted like Doug McKenzie in ‘Strange Brew.’ So we used the AI method,” MacFarlane continued. “The CGI was distracting from the jokes, you were focusing on the effect rather than the writing. We want people focused on the writing. So it was an interesting use and interesting glimpse into the future. It’s like, here’s AI used as a tool the same way that we use CGI or stop motion or any other tools to best bring our writing to life.”

While the “Ted” prequel series may or may not be coming to an end, MacFarlane and Peacock are continuing to expand the universe of the film franchise with a new animated series that picks up where “Ted 2” left off. In addition to MacFarlane, the series relies on the vocal talents of Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried and Jessica Barth.

“A lot of times, on-camera stars do not translate well to voiceover because they don’t have their fabulous faces to show off. But this group has really just thrilled all of us,” MacFarlane said. “[Mark Wahlberg] is great and he’s so funny. With just two words out of his mouth you know that it’s Mark and he knew how to elevate it just a little bit for the animation medium. He’s a very shrewd guy who just always winds up being the savant that’s two steps ahead of where you think he’s going to be.”

MacFarlane declined to share specific plot details, but praised Corrigan and Walsh for doing a “knockout job” executive producing the new installment.

“They’ve, of course, come off ‘Modern Family’ with their pile of Emmys. So they were a good choice to do this,” MacFarlane said. “They’ve really delivered something that feels new and fresh and yet also feels like it’s within the Ted universe.”

Though it’s unclear when the animated series will premiere, fans can hold themselves over by streaming both “Ted” films and Season 1 and 2 of the prequel series on Peacock now.

The post Seth MacFarlane Says There’s ‘No Plan’ to Do ‘Ted’ Season 3, Citing Cost appeared first on TheWrap.