Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 9, 2026
Like the original Ted movie, the first season of Ted, the Peacock television series, benefited greatly from lowered expectations. It succeeded largely because it wildly overshot those expectations and delivered an immensely funny and surprisingly heartfelt season of television. The second Ted movie was a dud — cheekily acknowledged in this second season — and while this new run doesn’t quite live up to the first, it remains one of the most consistently funny comedies on television, even if it lacks some of the warmth that made season one such a pleasant surprise.
At its heart, Ted’s second season remains a buddy comedy between John Bennett (Max Burkholder) and Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) nestled inside a raunchy, almost All in the Family-esque domestic sitcom. John and Ted — high-school stoners navigating the ’90s — have great chemistry, but it’s the family dynamic that really makes it work. Ted’s father, Matty (Scott Grimes), is an old-school, emotionally detached, slightly racist Massachusettsan who nevertheless loves his family, even if he has absolutely no idea how to show it. Susan Bennett (Alanna Ubach), meanwhile, is the long-suffering housewife who will do anything for her family, serving as both emotional glue and, too often, doormat.
She’s also willing to let another man watch her and her husband have sex if that’s what it takes to keep the marriage humming. Her husband, for his part, is basically a walking digestive system — nary an episode goes by without reference to his stool size, his erectile dysfunction, his heart problems, or some other magnificently disgusting bodily malfunction. That Susan not only tolerates but genuinely loves this man is an often hilarious, occasionally melancholy artifact of ’90s-brand masculinity.
Then there’s Blaire (Giorgia Whigham), the politically liberal, bisexual cousin who lives with the Bennetts while attending Emerson College, having fled a family even more dysfunctional than the one she landed in — which is really saying something. She’s the motor of Ted’s second season, the character who jolts the others out of their comfortable stasis while quietly reminding everyone what they owe Susan.
And then there’s Ted who, beyond being a foul-mouthed, pot-smoking teddy bear, is really just another member of the Bennett family — one who occasionally sleeps with older women and hacks up wads of stuffing after a long night of drinking.
The season’s individual episodes offer plenty to recommend. A family game of Dungeons & Dragons works better than it has any right to. An episode finds the emotionally unavailable Matty getting completely wrecked by ’90s romantic comedies. John accidentally takes mushrooms before performing in the high school play to satisfy an extracurricular requirement. And best of all, there’s a brilliant episode in which the entire family scrambles to keep the O.J. verdict from Matty, whose weak heart, they fear, cannot survive a not-guilty outcome.
It’s good — genuinely, reliably good — even if it doesn’t hit the soaring highs of season one. Sadly, it’s also likely to be the last: Seth MacFarlane has said as much, citing the staggering expense of the series (each episode runs $8-$10 million, owing to the CGI required to bring Ted to life). There is, at least, a bridge in the season’s epilogue connecting events here to the eventual Mark Wahlberg films, which I won’t spoil. Another season might have pushed diminishing returns, but it’s hard not to feel the loss — spending eight half-hours with a comedy that tries just as hard to tug at your heartstrings as it does to make you laugh is a genuinely rare thing, and this show, at its best, made both feel effortless.
