TED: THE ANIMATED SERIES Trailer Brings Ted and Mark Wahlberg Back for More Insanity
Ted is back, and animation may be the perfect place to unleash the foul-mouthed bear. Peacock has released the first look trailer for Ted: The Animated Series, the new animated continuation of the Ted movies from Seth MacFarlane.
The series will premiere Thursday, December 17th, with eight episodes, reuniting Ted with Mark Wahlberg’s John for another round of ridiculous adventures.
Unlike Peacock’s live-action Ted series, which serves as a prequel to the movies, Ted: The Animated Series moves the film story forward. It takes place 12 years after Ted 2, with Ted and John now neighbors who have families of their own, along with dead-end jobs that apparently haven’t made them any more responsible.
Mark Wahlberg returns as John, with Amanda Seyfried reprising her role as Sam and Jessica Barth returning as Tami-Lynn. MacFarlane is, of course, back as the voice of Ted. The cast also adds Kyle Mooney as Apollo and Liz Richman as Ruth.
The animated format should give MacFarlane and company plenty of freedom to push Ted and John’s stupidity into territory that would be considerably harder and more expensive to pull off in live action. It also made it much easier to get Wahlberg and Seyfried back despite their busy schedules.
MacFarlane created the series alongside Paul Corrigan and Brad Walsh, who previously executive produced Peacock’s live-action Ted. Corrigan and Walsh will serve as showrunners, with animation handled by Rough Draft Studios, Inc.
While eight episodes will arrive in December, that isn’t all Peacock has planned. Additional episodes are expected sometime in 2027, although a release date for that batch hasn’t been announced.
For fans of the live-action Ted series, however, the future isn’t nearly as promising. After Season 2, MacFarlane explained that the cost of producing the show became a major obstacle to continuing it.
“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.”
That leaves TED: The Animated Series as the franchise’s current path forward, while also bringing the story back to the characters who kicked the whole thing off.
There’s still plenty of potential to connect the two sides of the franchise down the road. The Peacock prequel built up its own cast of characters and fans, so it would be cool to see MacFarlane find a way to work some of them into the animated series eventually.
For now, Ted and John are older, they have families, they have lousy jobs, and somehow adulthood still hasn’t managed to straighten them out.