Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) is a man who knows he has fallen over and accepts the position anyway.
Photo: Apple TV +
There are a few metrics you can use to gauge success Ted Lasso, the new comedy Apple TV + about an American football coach who is hired to become a coach in the English football Premier League. There is at least one ridiculous metric that is also incredibly flattering Ted Lasso: TV shows based on advertising campaigns.
The character Ted Lasso emerged as a marketing gimmick for NBC Sports, who wanted to promote some American interest in their new coverage of the Premier League. In 2013 and 2014, Jason Sudeikis played Lasso in a four-minute commercial, which included some jokes that survived until the eventual Ted Lasso pilot. (His team will play hard through all four quarters, Lasso announces, before being informed that football games will take place in two halves.) If you judge Ted Lasso on its relative success as a TV adaptation of an advertisement, a category most infamous also including a short-lived TV version of the Geico Cavemen, then Ted Lasso slag wild.
The show also succeeds in another, but more valuable metric, a metric that will be especially important in 2020. It’s enjoyable! It’s a pleasant performance about a nice man, one who arrives in the middle of a somewhat dysfunctional and toxic work situation and slowly puts things right by being the nicest, most considerate, most optimistic possible version of himself. Sudeikis’ TV Lasso is a much nicer man than his commercial counterpart. And crucially, the show pulls the most important element of transition away from a simplistic TV commercial premise. A man who knows nothing about his job works four minutes but does not work for ten episodes, and Ted Lasso invests enough energy in developing side characters and small story arcs that can complement its originally narrow concept.
The first and most important task of customizing a Ted Lasso TV show is for some reason coming for the man to usually be seen as a Premier League coach, and the show does this with a simplistic but functional premise that makes it admirably the choice to most so to be forgotten as soon as possible. Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) is the new owner of Richmond FC, a team teetering on the verge of relegation. Rebecca has been in possession of this team for a very short time – it once belonged to her now-ex-husband, and although she apparently hires Ted Lasso so he can bring unconventional methods to turn things around for the football club, Rebecca has hired Ted instead. an obvious motive: Rebecca wants Ted Lasso to destroy the team because it’s the thing her ex-husband loves most.
This tension drives Ted Lasso through his first several episodes. Rebecca claims he wants to succeed, but really hopes he will fail; Ted cheerfully does his best in every situation, often by recognizing when someone else in the room is more talented than he is and quickly raising their voices. Rebecca is won over by him, and fortunately she gradually releases her harridan, bent-on-revenge motivation. The players are also slowly won. It’s like a building crashing with slow motion, but vice versa: You expect physics to fall apart, but to Ted Lasso things tend to magically move to all the right places.
There’s a nice running B-plot of tension between two key players on the team, a plot with a surprising amount of juice behind it, although the two players – Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent and Phil Dunster as Jamie Tartt – there so much out it seems to me that more than once I lost track of which man was crazy for what reason. There’s a very predictable, yet satisfying arc of redemption for the team’s much-maligned kitman Nathan (Nick Mohammed). Even Ted gets a few solid moments of emotional complexity, which just barely pass Sudeikis’ very key sweet southern accent, allowing the scenes to land somewhere next to poignancy.
The great disadvantage of Ted Lassohowever, is another kind of success metric, one that is less about adapting an ad and more about being a premise that is directly imported from 2013. Ted is a perfectly good-looking boy, absolutely. But if the central idea for a TV show, “unqualified white man lands a powerful performance and then muddles through with charm and cheer” hits differently in 2020. It’s hard not to think about Ted’s incompetence, especially when everyone is rooting for Ted, though he does not yet understand the basic rules of the game. Ted is a man who knows he has fallen over and accepts the position in any case. He has no idea what he’s doing, and assumes from the jump that it will be okay. He is right! For the purposes of the show, it’s totally fine. Even in the moments when he fails, Ted Lasso goes to great pain to trust us that he has still succeeded what is most important.
Since the show was probably purchased as an adaptation of this particular idea, it goes without saying that there was something about the show (writing, acting, the general fun male mood) that could address my deepest reservations about it. . Truly, Ted Lasso works hard to be the best version of Ted Lasso it would be possible. Is it Ted LassoIt’s the fault I do not think anyone is particularly concerned about Ted Lasso right now? Is it the show’s fault that I’ve lost some energy that I once had to root for unqualified male protagonists? Can I blame Ted Lasso for existing, even if I also think it’s as well made as any show with a hapless dude main character and a Mumford & Sons main theme could it have been? Probably not. But all the same, it’s bad to shake that impression.
It’s too bad to post my reaction Ted Lasso and my reaction to his platform. Since its release, Apple TV + has been producing a show that feels really lively and lively and fresh (except Dickinson, that is, a very weird comedy that still does not get the respect it deserves). Ted LassoThe general impression is that it’s a nice show coming at the wrong time, and that impression applies to most of Apple TV +’s programming. Overall, the platform, the shows, the ideology, the optimism, the hopeful pleasure for decency and goodness are more important than actual knowledge – it all feels like entering a time warp to the recent past.
