On the face of it, Ted Lasso, the new AppleTV+ series about an American football coach moving to England to coach and manage a Premier League team shouldn’t work. It sounds like the flimsiest of one joke ideas. It is literally based on an NBC advert from 2013. BUT, in the hands of Bill Lawrence, the mind behind Scrubs and Cougar Town, Ted Lasso is an absolute delight. The fact that the titular character is played by the ever charming Jason Sudeikis also helps a lot.
Charming is a great way to describe Ted Lasso. The series makes no bones about this American heading over to England to take over a football club in a sport he literally knows nothing about. On his first day he is thrust in front of the manic and vicious English media who are all trying to take him down. That scene is practically a line for line remake of the advert from 2013, and has all the touchstones of a football press conference, with jaded journalists baying for blood, trying to make the manager look foolish. Ted Lasso however is impervious to this. He is the very definition of the American southern gentleman. He is naive but not stupid. He is genuine without looking foolish. He has heart, which over the course of the first four episodes of the series, slowly begins to win over the jaded English football fraternity.
Ted Lasso is also an incredibly sweet series. And as my colleague put it, “Bill Lawrence is the master at doing sweet but not cloying.”
That “sweetness,” that “heart,” is set so wonderfully apart from the jaded state of affairs that is English football. Like the fans constantly shouting “wanker” at Ted Lasso, their own team manager. Or a skeptical journalist prepared to do a hack job only to get won over by Ted Lasso’s earnestness. Or just the British tabloids. Period.
Football in England is a tribal environment. When the English do a football movie, it’s dramatic like Tom Hooper’s The Damned United, or gritty like Green Street Hooligans and The Football Factory, or a parody like Mike Basset: England Manager. There is a tribalism to England’s love affair with the sport, and if you don’t like it you can piss off. Ted Lasso somehow manages to avoids all of that by being heartfelt.
I’ve been catching up on Parks and Recreation recently and there’s a certain familiarity between Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso and Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. They both feel naive to the situation they have found themselves in, Lasso in a foreign country and trying to manage a foreign sport, Knope trying her darnedest in a barely functioning, barely caring government office. Parks and Recreation, however, plays with a certain level of cynicism, how everyone else (even the audience) is in on the joke that is being played on Knope. She comes off as a clueless patsy, albeit a sweet one.
Ted Lasso feels more earnest. The show is genuinely good natured. The laughs are not at his expense. Lasso, the character, knows what he’s doing is hard, he may not quite grasp the situation he’s in, but goshdarnit he will give a real good go of it.
Towards the end of the third episode, as Ted Lasso and the skeptical journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance) are sitting down for a meal, Sudeikis delivers a line that we’ve all heard too many times but with such earnestness that you can’t help but root for him. It may be cheesy, it may be “lame,” but he believes it, and after everything you’ve seen of Ted Lasso, you believe that he believes it too.
When I first mentioned this series to die hard football friends, the response I got was that the premise seemed recycled, that it feels too late, and from another time. And you know what, it is. But that was a better time, a less cynical time, and it’s nice to be reminded of that once in a while.
Ted Lasso
AppleTV+, Season 1, 10 episodes
Created by: Bill Lawrence and Jason Sudeikis
Writers: Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis, Brett Goldstein, Phoebe Walsh, Jane Becker, and Jamie Lee
Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Jeremy Swift, Phil Dunster, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, Nick Mohammed, Juno Temple, Toheeb Jimoh, and James Lance
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