Warning: This article includes spoilers and details about Ted Season 2.
Ted is back on Peacock, and for Season 2 it's bringing a little bit of magic along for the ride. In Episode 3, "Dealers & Dragons", Ted and John are drawn into a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Prepare to see a very different setting for the show, a cameo from the world of tabletop gaming and a truly incredible scene involving Ted and a reference to the movie Philadelphia.
The Ted and fantasy universes might not make for the most obvious crossover, but as IGN discovered when it visited the set of the Dungeons & Dragons episode, a huge amount of work went into making sure this was a true tribute to the iconic tabletop game. (Look for our full video report from the set of "Dealers & Dragons" this Monday, March 9th.)
Don't worry, this isn't about to get Stranger Things traumatic; Ted is still very much the foul-mouthed fluffball we know and love, even when he's transported to a world of wizards and spells. The plotline behind this little jaunt into the magical realm is powered by a need for weed, rather than saving the world from the Abyss.
In order to win their prize, John and Ted have to complete a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Ted is the bard, John is a mage (or wizard, in modern Dungeons & Dragons speak), mom Susan is a fighter, dad Matty is a cleric and Blaire is a thief. As anyone who has ever LARPed will tell you, fantasy is nothing without some decent drip. Doing D&D right means dressing the part, and the cast explained their new looks for this very special episode.
Casting Spells
"Something I learned, wizard robes are fucking hot. Like, warm, like physically very warm," said Max Burkholder, who plays John. He's a legitimate Dungeons & Dragons fan and helped the rest of the cast understand the game's world and storytelling. Having gotten into it while watching games online during the quarantine, Burkholder even tried to set up a one-off Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the cast, creating characters for them.
He talked about the process of working with the costume department on his outfit. "My one note that I gave to Heather [Pain], our costume designer, about it was I want to have so many pockets. I want to have pockets in the sleeves. I want to have pockets here with little bullshit and little trinkets I've got on my belt. A leather pouch that in it has another leather pouch. I've got keys, a spell book.
"Everything about mine looks exactly like you would think a wizard should look. Except not as many stars and moons on the cape like Fantasia. And no giant conical hat. But I've got the hood, I've got the robes, I've got the staff. It's pretty incredible."
Meanwhile, dad Matty, played by Scott Grimes, had the cleric costume with a more unusual focal point, apparently entirely Ted mastermind Seth MacFarlane's idea. "I wear a Friar Tuck wig, which is just a bald spot in the middle with a rim of hair around it," said Grimes. "We did six tests because I didn't realize I'm a redhead, and my skin is very, very pink and lots of different colors. So the bald spot in the middle took 16 people to make it. They bring it to me and they put it up against my face and I'm like, 'that's not what I look like'. But it is. It's freckled and speck[s] and little skin cancer here and stuff like that. Oh, it's humbling."
Alanna Ubach, who plays mom Susan Bennett, got arguably the coolest makeover, with a full set of armor. "I wanted to translate Susan into what she would imagine she would wear," said costume designer Heather Pain. "She wears a lot of sweater vests and turtlenecks. What if we made her armor a little bit like her sweater vest? The line of it with a turtleneck, but then bring in, like, this weird kind of disco chainmail that feels more ’70s."
Of course, sometimes you have to make sacrifices for fashion. "Susan is happy to be Susan the destroyer. And she's in this sort of Joan of Arc-esque armor," said Ubach. "The armor is so heavy and so constricting that I need help going to the bathroom, and I'll leave it at that. Wardrobe had to follow me to the bathroom so that I can take off my skirt and my sword and my 700 belts and my tampon [a key prop from the episode] and hand it to them, and then I can go pee."
Down and Dirty
One of the biggest changes for viewers and the people working behind the scenes is that most of the action doesn't take place in a bedroom or a school hall – instead, it takes place in a fantasy land. One the set designers built. In fact, the creation of the classic fantasy landscape required 25,000 pounds of dirt to be flown in.
"They triple refined it. They like sieved through three things. They had like an environmental pathogen breakdown report for all the dirt," said Burkholder. Unfortunately that dirt did include a stowaway cricket, and a noisy one at that.
"We had to redo that scene about three or four times. I was like, where's the damn cricket?" said Ubach.
Expect forests, ominous chambers full of spikes, and of course a tavern, which I'm pretty sure has to be included in any fantasy story by law. One scene sees the band of adventurers solving a riddle while surrounded by four statues. If you think the statues look lifelike, it's because they're actually dancers brought in to play the parts. The dancers wore stiff, plastered costumes and couldn't move, hear or see what was going on around them.
"Everytime we walked into the room I just thought that there were four statues in there, and then they would start moving and I'd be like, 'oh, I guess they got moving statues.' And then I would remember that they were four dancers doing an incredible job for me," said Burkholder.
From School Days to Screen
The writers made the very smart choice not to spend the episode dealing with the D&D algebra that is creating a character sheet, or endless dice rolls. It skips the mechanics to get straight to the fantasy, without sacrificing authenticity. One of the people making that happen was writer Chelsea Davison, who played the game in high school and brought her full nerd powers to recreating the game for the show.
"As a high school student, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, and that was a huge part of my adolescence. That was something that Seth had never played, but he knew how passionate fans of D&D are," explained Davison. "He was like, 'okay, well, it doesn't make sense, in that Ted and John were a little too cool. They wouldn't just be playing this. They don't have a campaign going. They can't commit to anything. But what if there's a way to get them hooked into a game for one episode?'"
MacFarlane actually had Davison lead a game of Dungeons & Dragons for the writers room. "Which was crazy because I've only ever played with, like, five players, when I've been a DM, a dungeon master, and this was a room of 12 people," said Davison.
"It was just chaos. Mostly people who had never played before in their lives. And we created characters, played the whole game. I mean, it was dark by the time we finished, but so many of those things, like the riddle from the episode, is the riddle I used in the room with them that I wrote for that campaign."
"We want this to be really authentic to this fan base.If there's still lingering doubt, Dungeons & Dragons nerds will know they're in good hands the minute they see a familiar face - Brennan Lee Mulligan - playing the role of dungeon master. He's best known for his work on Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) and created the popular Dimension 20 series show, where he and a team play through different campaigns.
"Brennan and I are friends from UCB, in New York," said Davison. "And I'd watched his meteoric rise through Dimension 20 and, when we were writing this script and I was writing this character of the Dungeon Master, this was something that I said to Aimee [Carlson, executive producer] and others, that in a perfect world it would be Brennan. He would be so great. Luckily, the stars aligned and it worked out."
You'll be able to see the episode for yourself from today, but the set visit and an early preview of the episode shows that all the effort the cast and crew put into making this special episode happen was worth it.
"It is so big," said Davison. "It is a huge undertaking. And, you know, I think Seth was really passionate that if we're going to do it, let's do it 100 percent. We don't want to have them be playing some knockoff fairies and whatever. We want this to be really authentic to this fan base, so we ended up saving this episode for Season 2. I'm so glad Season 2 happened so that we got to bring this all to life."
All episodes of Ted Season 2, including "Dealers & Dragons," are available on Peacock now. Be sure to read our Ted Season 2 review.
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