Hello and welcome back to this review of the show I thought I’d be least likely to write about once, let alone twice: Ted! This sardonic sitcom is back for a second season, full of all the same crass humor and the Bennett family’s wacky hijinks as last season, but we’re here to focus on the live-in cousin, Blaire. She is the foil to her aunt and uncle’s conservative Irish Catholic beliefs and is often the voice of reason in a house full of goofballs who seem to be living on their own planet.

Last season, we learned that Blaire is queer, fluid being her preferred terminology, and she even came out to her family. Her cousin and Ted didn’t care at all, but her aunt and uncle were less supportive at first, though eventually they came to terms with the fact that Blaire had a girlfriend named Sarah.

This season, we get a little more insight into Blaire and why she’s choosing to live above the garage in her aunt and uncle’s house instead of with her own parents when we meet her alcoholic bully of a father. He makes a homophobic joke within five minutes of being on screen, so it’s no surprise his queer daughter has cut herself off from him. He’s there to ask Blaire to move back in with him, not because he misses her or regrets how he treated her, but because his wife left him and he doesn’t know how to fend for himself or live alone. He also has it in his head that if Blaire comes back, her mom will too. But after just a few days of sharing a roof with him again, Blaire knows this isn’t the right choice for her and writes him off for good.

For the first few episodes I wasn’t sure if Sarah was going to make an appearance again, though we still got little reminders of Blaire’s queerness in moments like finding her alone in her room listening to the Indigo Girls, but in the fourth episode, Sarah comes to Blaire’s birthday party.

Alas, my joy is short-lived because they almost immediately get in a fight. All Blaire wanted from Sarah for her birthday was for her to tell her parents about them, but Sarah can’t do it. She says it’s complicated, but Blaire doesn’t want to hear it. The fight ends with Sarah storming out of the party. Blaire decides to drown her sorrows and by the end of the night is so wasted that she makes out with Ted. But, because of the nature of this show, and how nobody knows exactly what to make of Ted, this news is a bit too far for Sarah. She might have been able to forgive Blaire for making out with one of their friends, but her cousin’s magical stuffed animal is too much of a red flag for her so she breaks up with Blaire on the spot.

To rebound from this heartbreak, Blaire sleeps with a guy she knows at school and ends up pregnant. It’s a trite storyline, but it was just a vehicle for the show to explore how everyone in the family talks and thinks about abortion; Blaire’s uncle of course is hopping mad about it, and her aunt disagrees with her choice to get one but loves her niece anyway, and her cousins not only take her to the clinic but also scare away the anti-abortion protestors so she can get safely inside.

Overall, the show is stupid but enjoyable. It goes for cheap laughs while also covering heavier topics with an added layer of heart. Even though Blaire’s uncle makes some truly horrific statements sometimes, it’s obvious the show is portraying him as the buffoon and Blaire as the reasonable one. Blaire sometimes leans into the ridiculousness of what he says, like the time he decided eating eggs after noon is gay because gay people invented brunch since they were out too late partying and doing gay things, so Blaire just tries to mirror his absurdity back to him by saying “You know, the day I decided to be fluid, I had an egg after noon.” As someone who grew up in Boston and was often the Blaire of any given gathering, I do have a weird soft spot for the kind of Masshole humor this show deploys: from the blind faith in the Red Sox even when they were on a record losing streak, to the fact that Blaire’s aunt and uncle worked at Dunkin Donuts, where I myself worked over the summers in college. It sort of makes me…whatever the opposite of nostalgic is. It almost makes me nostalgic while still reinforcing I was right to move away when I did, for my own sanity.

One other random queer-adjacent update from this season is that at one point, Blaire’s aunt goes to jail for 10 days (in an episode hilariously called Susan is the New Black), and when she’s there she meets an inmate played by Julie Goldman called FedEx. She befriends a lot of the women in there, including ones named Bitch Killer and 69. Of course, she ends up befriending everyone in there, and it’s just a random hilarious side quest she goes on.

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As if rewarding me specifically for watching this show to write about it for you guys, this season also featured a Very Special D&D Episode in which Blaire and her cousins have to play D&D in order to get weed from their dealer, played by Brennan Lee Mulligan. Brennan’s character DMs a game for them, and we get to see them all decked out in fantasy garb, including Blaire as the hot rogue. (All rogues are hot, it’s the law.) It was probably my favorite episode of the season, but I’m biased.

All in all, if you’ve never seen the Ted movies, I can’t recommend this show. It’s a very specific type of humor and you have to have a high tolerance for bullshit to survive it. But overall, parts of it did appeal to my inner Masshole, and the teenage boy inside my brain that used to think Dane Cook and South Park were peak comedy. But the Johnny and Ted stuff was all harmless fun, and Giorgia Whigham really grounded Blaire and made her the only non-cartoonish character in a very cartoonish family, which was a great entry point for me as a queer viewer.

I would be very surprised if this show came back for a third season, partially because I know it’s extremely expensive to make because CGI Ted is in almost every scene (and they do truly do amazing work with fitting him seamlessly into the world), but also because at the end, the narrator seemed to imply that the next step in Ted and Johnny’s adventure is what we saw in the movies. And I can’t say I’m too sad about it. I don’t regret watching these shows, for the aforementioned Masshole nostalgia, but I don’t know if this is something the world needs more of at this particular point in time.