• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 22, 2023

Ted, the Seth MacFarlane teddy bear, is poised to talk again in a TV spin-off of the two “Ted” movies.

All seven episodes of the new “Ted” series drop January 11 on Peacock. It is one of three upcoming scripted shows on the way in December and January that the TV Blog is looking forward to.

They could be the first signs that TV’s content pipeline is starting to fill up following the settling of the writers’ and actors’ strikes that halted production for months.

Even if the writing and filming of these three shows were completed before the strike, having three new, high-profile shows to watch and write on is a welcome prospect. And more are on the way all over the TV universe in the winter season.

Mark Wahlberg starred in the “Ted” movies -- “Ted” (2012) and “Ted 2” (2015) -- as a 37-year-old man whose best friend was a teddy bear that had been his companion since childhood. 

MacFarlane supplied the voice of the profane Ted in the movies, and he does so again in the upcoming “Ted” series. Wahlberg is not back for the series, however. 

The show takes place in a whole different time frame than the movies. In the show, the year is 1993, and the Wahlberg character, John Bennett, is 16 (played by Max Burkholder). 

Of the three shows, the one that is most anticipated around here is the start of Season Two of “Reacher” on Amazon Prime December 15.

The first season of this series, dating back to February 2022, was the TV Blog’s favorite show of 2022.

Alan Ritchson is back as the title character, Jack Reacher, an action hero from a series of books by Lee Childs.

Reacher is a wanderer and former military police investigator who finds himself “wandering” into situations in which his peculiar skill sets represent the only resolution to the problems he encounters.

In the new season, members of Reacher’s old unit are getting murdered one by one, and Reacher leads an effort to find the killer, with help from three former colleagues.

The TV Blog cannot wait to see Reacher’s imaginative tactics and fists of fury back in action once again.

The TV Blog is also looking forward to seeing how the character of Sam Spade will fare in the upcoming AMC/AMC+/Acorn TV “Monsieur Spade,” premiering January 14.

Sam Spade was the famed detective from “The Maltese Falcon” novel by Dashiell Hammett published in 1930.

It was then turned into two movies, one in 1931 and the more-famous second one in 1941.

Directed by John Huston, Humphrey Bogart played Spade in the 1941 movie, and in the process, became forever linked with the character. His Sam Spade is a hard act to follow.

In “Monsieur Spade,” Clive Owen takes up the role of an older Sam Spade in 1963, retired and living in the south of France.

This is not a destination I would have expected for Sam Spade’s golden years after a lifetime plying his trade in San Francisco, but let’s go with it.

According to a description from AMC, the case that brings Spade out of retirement is the murder of six nuns in a nearby convent. 

The 1941 “Maltese Falcon” movie was a faithful re-creation of the novel, in which a group of eccentric, international conmen, and one woman, were circling the globe in pursuit of a falcon statuette encrusted with priceless jewels.

Taking on the murder of six nuns is not the kind of case one customarily associates with Sam Spade. 

Perhaps the show explains why Spade gets involved. And maybe there is a very logical reason why he chose to retire in France.

On that subject, let the record show that there is no evidence in any of the versions of “The Maltese Falcon” that Sam Spade spoke French.