Why you should watch ‘Ted Lasso’
Last December, I settled in at home prepared for a relatively uneventful holiday season — a 10 p.m. curfew had been extended through my home county in the North Carolina section of Appalachia and it had been significantly snowier than the last few years, making the cops even more vigilant and driving at night even more of a hazard than normal. Not to mention, you can’t really go into town incognito when you live in a small town — what I mean is I wasn’t interested in having to change out of my day pajamas (you know, the ones you change into so you don’t feel like a total slob when you inevitably have to change back into your night pajamas) on the off-chance (almost definite guarantee) that I would run into somebody I knew.
The holidays came and went in their usual greenish red flitter of ribbons and wrapping paper, and pretty soon it was about time for me to start packing up to head back to Utah. Most everybody in my family gets what I call (at least, in my head) the “travel grumps”: faced with the reality of having to return to the significantly less appealing “normal life,” especially after the holidays, we all get sad and cranky and tend to eat our feelings and/or take them out on each other (I know, I know, we’re the picture of healthy coping mechanisms, you don’t need to tell me twice).
In a total Bob-Ross-happy-accidental sort of way, my mom turned on the first episode of “Ted Lasso”: the fruits of creating an entire TV show inspired by eight-year-old commercials for NBC’s “An American Coach in London.” The comedy series is written by a stunning roundtable including Bill Lawrence (creator of “Scrubs” and featured writer of other treasures including “The Nanny,” “Boy Meets World,” “Friends,” and lots more I couldn’t fit here) and Saturday Night Live veteran Jason Sudeikis. It proved to be the perfect antidote my family needed for our “travel grumps” and general post-holiday crankiness.
“Ted Lasso” follows a newly successful American football coach, Ted Lasso, who is hired to help fictional soccer club AFC Richmond out of their flop era. Far from a genuine attempt at thinking outside the box, their ice queen club owner, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), hires Lasso in a last ditch effort to get back at her skeezy ex-husband Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head) counting on the fact that the inexperienced Lasso will run Mannion’s beloved soccer club right into the ground. But Coach Lasso himself (Jason Sudeikis) is the picture of charm and undeterred optimism, and is a lot smarter than he initially lets on. Lasso slowly but surely wins over nearly everybody in the series, and the series itself is packed with clever little quips that now live in my head rent free (among my favorites is “You know what the happiest animal in the world is? It’s a goldfish. It’s got a 10 second memory. Be a goldfish”).
I’ll be honest: the feel-good sitcom formula normally makes me want to be sick. I mean don’t get me wrong, I grew up loving the nostalgic Nick At Nite sitcoms like “Family Matters” and even “Full House,” but I have been hard pressed to find one in recent years that isn’t missing the mark in some way. I am under the impression most sitcoms now try to be clever and ironic and self-aware of their cheese factor, but the choice to lean into this kind of meta-style of writing only makes the show feel more cheesy and altogether insincere. Not very feel good, if you ask me.
So, really, to quote another critique featured on Bill Simmons’ website The Ringer titled ‘How on Earth Is ‘Ted Lasso’ Actually Good?’, “The series has no right to be as good, funny, and moving as it is. And yet I devoured all 10 episodes in a single day.”
Aside from being absolutely doubled-over-in-stomach-pain funny, “Ted Lasso” also doesn’t shy away from discussing the uglier sides of life, such as the discomfort from moving to an unfamiliar place, trying to do your job to the best of your ability even though (very publicly, in Coach Lasso’s case) others are rooting for your failure, the ugliness that can come from divorce and even what it means to experience panic attacks as an adult — among other themes of jealousy, loyalty, importance of communication, growth, forgiveness and how choosing to be kind can produce radical amounts of change.
When discussing the challenge of being honest and avoiding the cheese factor in creating “Ted Lasso” in an interview with collider.com, Sudeikis said, “This show I don’t think would exist without something like the British ‘Office,’ and I know the British ‘Office’ probably wouldn’t exist without something like ‘Larry Sanders.’ But between the influence of people who are just frustrating and maybe a little more biting and sarcastic and angry and off-putting … I love a great number of those shows, but I just felt like it’d be nice to play someone [different] as a little bit of a challenge to myself. Someone who doesn’t swear. A show that doesn’t use snark as a currency. It was an exercise in trying to prove to myself that it’s possible to be a good person and still be interesting.”
Ted Lasso is funny without being cheap and heartfelt without being cheesy. Plus, this series gave me my new favorite words to live by from American poet Walt Whitman: “be curious, not judgmental.” And as the semester is drawing to a close, that’s all I can hope for when future employers and/or grad school application boards look at my grades for the last year.
*Graphic by James Clayton.
Sage Souza is a junior studying political science and Spanish. In her free time, she enjoys long walks on the beach, making too many playlists on Spotify, and retweeting Karl Marx fancams.
—sage.souza@usu.edu
@sageksouza