Certain historical events stay with you forever.
The Berlin wall falling. The man standing up against a tank in Tiananmen Square. The first moon landing. These moments, whether you were alive for them or not, are embedded in the cultural milieu as extraordinary testaments to the indomitable human spirit.
Streaming now on Peacock, Ted has a new unforgettable visual that people will remember for generations: Ted, the foul-mouthed talking teddy bear, walks around wearing a giant purple appendage. It’s the perfect image for our troubled times, a balm to refuel your soul and inspire you to achieve a higher purpose.
OK, not really. It’s just a talking teddy bear with a strap-on. But it’s unbelievably funny, and part of a pitch-perfect episode of Ted. Sex is rarely this spectacularly goofy on screen.
Let’s take a step back to see how we got there. In Episode 2 of Season 2 of Ted, “Mrs. Robichek,” Ted (Seth MacFarlane) and John (Max Burkholder) accompany John’s dad, Matty (Scott Bennett), to assist on a plumbing job. There, they meet the titular Mrs. Robicheck (Micheala McManus), an extremely wealthy—and attractive—housewife. They all have the hots for her, but she only has eyes for one of the guys, and he’s the smallest, furriest one.
With heavy shades of The Graduate, Mrs. Robicheck (a name that intentionally evokes Mrs. Robinson) attempts to seduce Ted, specifically requesting that he come back the next day to check things over. Ted doesn’t know the first thing about plumbing, but Mrs. Robicheck is hoping he’ll know a few things about…well, you get the drift.
Ted arrives the next day to find Mrs. Robicheck wearing lingerie, and the show even mimics the legendary shot in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is shown through the legs of his older lover. And once you see the same shot with a Teddy bear, you’ll want to hang it in the Louvre.
Mrs. Robicheck holds nothing back in her seduction. She tells Ted that they’re so rich that they “even have outdoor pillows, and we don’t even bring them in at night,” to which Ted responds with a genuinely amazed “F--- me!”
She seduces Ted because her husband is always away, and she’s desperately lonely, but with Ted, she can fill the void of her loneliness. She asks Ted to come back the next day, and he more than willingly obliges. He can’t believe he’s about to get it on.
The next day, Mrs. Robicheck has prepared a sexy bubble bath for herself and Ted. All sudsed up, she asks, “Can I confide in you?” to which Ted giddily answers, “You can do anything you want in me.”
She reveals her desire for Ted is rooted in childhood: “I learned on a teddy bear. He was soft, and cuddly, but had this hard little nose,” she says suggestively. “I can tell you my nose is rock hard right now,” Ted beckons.
It works: she grabs Ted and brings him under the water.
Things are going great for Ted and Mrs. Robicheck. There’s just one problem: she wants to go all the way, but Ted is a literal teddy bear, and doesn’t have the required…appendage to make things happen. But Mrs. Robicheck is several steps ahead and has just the thing.
Cut to an image that is now burned on the retinas of anyone brave enough to watch: Ted, walking into the bedroom awkwardly, adjusting his purple strap-on.
“It does go on the front, right?” he asks. It’s a line as surprising as the item itself—despite Ted’s rampant horniness and sexual desire, he seems to have no idea whatsoever of how sex actually works. Thankfully, the show spares us the details of them actually having sex (I can assure you nobody on Earth wants to see that, and I’m glad the show didn’t subject any performers to doing so).
The two lie together in post-coital bliss—“I particularly liked the part where you spun me around like a steering wheel,” Ted says, giving us all we need to know about their night.
But there’s a problem: Mr. Robicheck comes home a day early. This leads to the episode’s pièce de résistance: Ted running around in a panic with the faux-member still attached.
He cannot, for the life of him, get it off. He thrusts, trying to detach it to no avail. He tries to crawl under the bed, but the attachment gets stuck, so Mrs. Robicheck has to help him. After her husband leaves the room, he falls down the stairs, purple genitalia bouncing as he falls. He escapes intact.
This is what we call peak television.
Ted has no intentions of making a hot sex scene. Its only purpose is to make you laugh as much as possible, while delivering some scandalously giggly imagery along the way. And it delivers it perfectly, giving us one of the year’s first truly unforgettable TV moments.
