Seth MacFarlane says there is “no plan” to make a third season of his Ted prequel series because production costs are too high.
Ted follows an obnoxious teddy bear, voiced by MacFarlane, who was gifted sentience by a child’s wish. The film partners the sleazy bear with a slacker played by Mark Wahlberg; Ted the series reimagines Wahlberg’s foil as a misfit teenager in the 1990s, played by The Purge’s Max Burkholder.
It returned for its second season on Peacock on March 5 to broadly positive reviews; however, it might be the last audiences see of this particular Ted iteration.
“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 explained.
“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.”
TheWrap reports that Peacock has not decided on whether Ted will receive a third season. Universal did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.
While the live-action Ted series may be ending, Peacock announced an animated spin-off in May last year, with Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried and Jessica Barth set to reprise their roles from the original film.
Elsewhere in the interview with The Wrap, MacFarlane praised his production team for pulling off the first two seasons of the show.
He compared the amount of CGI required to “doing an Avengers movie every 22 minutes.”
“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,” MacFarlane said.
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“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.”
Ted season two is out now on Peacock.
