You could hear that the new Apple TV + sitcom “Ted Lasso” is based on a few one-joke promotions, made for NBC Sports, and has a “What the World Comes?” moment. But that would simply mean that you forgot “Cavemen” (2007), based on a series of Geico commercials, or “Hey Vern, It’s Ernest” (1988), an outgrowth of local spots featuring the very annoying Ernest P. Worrell.
I do not have that, and I can say with confidence that “Ted Lasso” is not the worst television show based on commercials. And with the recent debuts of “Intelligence” on Peacock and “Wild Bill” on BritBox, it’s not even the worst comedy this year about an American coming to Britain for work and struggling to fit in.
These are really low beams to cross, like not the least pumpkin-spiced latte. And “Ted Lasso,” who debuted Friday with three of his 10 half-hour episodes, doesn’t leave her with much room to spare. You will not forget the line prominently in the credits, between writer and director, which reads, “Based on pre-existing format / characters of NBC Sports.”
The pre-existing main character is Ted Lasso, a short-time American football coach hired to manage a British football team and starred in both the commercials and the series by Jason Sudeikis. The ads, made in 2013 and 2014 to promote NBC’s coverage of English Premier League football, mocked Lasso’s extreme suitability for the job and gave no indication as to why he was given it.
Now that Sudeikis and sitcom veteran Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs,” “Spin City”) have built a series around Lasso, among others, they’ve filled in some of those gaps. There’s a screw peace for the rental of Lasso: Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), the owner of the fictional AFC Richmond club, wants the team to fail despite the former co-owner, her football-free ex-husband. And there’s a sentimental reason: Lasso gives his own wife (Andrea Anders) some space by moving to London while she’s staying in Kansas.
You can predict most of the sports-comedy heartbreak and upheaval that flows from these buildings – the big games, the box office speeches, the drunken hook-ups for road trip, the selfish players that come around there. What you would not guess, and that you can constantly wonder, is how particular cornball the performance is. It is as Sudeikis et al. predicted the chaos and terror of the summer of 2020 and wanted to prove that America could do something right.
In his unbridled positivity and dedication to entertaining his audience while maintaining a glimmer of pop cult knowledge, “Ted Lasso” is the pants of sitcoms. It contains some of the foul language and sobbing sexual humor that allows streaming, but they are an excuse for Sudeikis to glaze his eyes and purr his lips in a way that says Lasso is healthy enough to notice , but cool enough to do nothing outside.
While it plays the clichés of both the inspiring sports story and the fish-out-of-water comedy – Lasso struggles to understand the offsides rule, Lasso did not know how hot Indian food gets – the show bathes us in folksy, by Marcus Mumford’s twangy music to Lasso’s endless supply of aphorisms and down-home-ish observations.
“That fella looked like a kitten when he was spooked by a cucumber.” A player is “more open than the pot of peanut butter on my kitchen counter.” ‘You save yourself as Woody Allen playing the clarinet. I do not want to hear it. These take the place of jokes, but they are so easily presented that even if you want to laugh, you are not sure if you should.
Sudeikis, a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus, has a pretentious ability to deal with the slightest whimsy of a character, and he’s believable and even fun like Lasso, a character who makes no sense except as an avatar of a mythical Midwestern good heartbeat. (With his strong sense of self and his tendency to start in stories no one wants to hear, Lasso is played as a bizarre world version of the cynical drunk by Hank Azaria in a much better sports sitcom, “Brockmire.”)
And while it’s hard to really worry about whether Lasso will win over the hot, angry mouths Brits and Richmond will not like relegation, the store story is filmed and composed with style and professionalism. Half of the episodes were directed by Tom Marshall, the primary director of the great Michaela Coel series “Chewing Gum”, or by Declan Lowney, who directed the first season of the great Chris O’Dowd series “Moone Boy.”
The show works overtime to present Lasso as a non-ugly American (except for his aversion to tea), a winning package with old-fashioned Kansas values and awakened most sensitivity. He is also, if you look closely, just a nice guy whose life is complicated by a familiar, charming woman (the club owner) and a wishful, unappreciative woman (his wife), and who finds comfort with other men. To borrow a sentence, that’s kind of like Woody Allen playing the clarinet.
