“I hope he fails miserably. See, my ex-husband truly loved only one thing his entire life: this club. And Ted Lasso is gonna help me burn it to the ground. I want to torture Rupert. I want him to feel like he’s being fucked in the ass with a splintered cricket bat, just in and out, over and over in a constant loop.
It likely started with Saturday Night Live. The show was roaring in the 1970’s, and along the way some ideas that made great 3-minute skits got appropriated for movies and even television shows. A few of them have become classics. The Blues Brothers is one fine example. Most have retreated into obscurity. I can only think of a two examples where something like that became a dominant force for years to come. In the 1950’s, Jackie Gleason was hosting his own variety show called The Jackie Gleason Show. One of the skits was about a bus driver named Ralph Kramden. That eventually stood on its own as The Honeymooners. Probably the best example takes us back to the 1980’s and the arrival of a fourth television network in FOX. One of those first shows was The Tracy Ullman show, and that variety hour often featured little animated shorts about a horribly dysfunctional family: The Simpsons. Nearly 40 years later the series is one of the most successful franchises in the history of television. So what if we took a character and circumstances from a television commercial and tried the same thing. Would it work? The answer is yes … for a little while.
That’s How Ted Lasso got its start. Jason Sudeikis co-created the character of an American football coach who gets hired to coach a team in the Premier League in England. The commercials were used to promote NBC’s coverage of that same league when it was added to their sports coverage. They used the amusing advertisements to help introduce Americans who were/are mostly ignorant of the world of soccer (yeah, they call it football, but don’t even get me started). That was all the way back in 2013. It was a clever idea. We’d learn by watching 60-second antics of a soccer coach who was just as ignorant of the sport as we were/are. Did the spots work? I’m not sure it did anything to bring up the ratings of the NBC coverage, but it was one of those things that just wouldn’t go away. So Apple +, looking for new streaming ideas, collaborated with Sudeikis and his friends to flesh out the character and stories, and the result was three seasons of Ted Lasso on the streaming service.
Ted (Sudeikis) and his coaching partner, Beard (Hunt) have been hired to come to England and coach the soccer club for AFC Richmond. The idea is completely bonkers. Why would anyone hire a coaching staff who never coached the sport and honestly didn’t even know the rules of the game? Give the writers here credit for coming up with an answer that kind of actually works. The team is owned by Rebecca Welton (Waddingham). She got the team in a nasty divorce settlement with ex-husband and serial cheater Rupert Mannion, played by Buffy fan favorite Anthony Head. You see, the club was one of the most important things in the world to Rupert, so she basically hired Lasso to drive the team into the ground to hurt Rupert. It’s rather a clever and amusing idea. Still bonkers … but OK, I’m buying it.
The show is populated by a really smart ensemble of actors/characters. Nick Mohammed plays Than “Nate” Shelly. He starts out as an equipment manager, which is basically like a ball boy here in America. Of course Ted is clueless, and Nate has a couple of good ideas. The team tries them out, and Nate ends up being promoted to the coaching staff. He ends up turning into one of the show’s villains later but gets his shot at redemption before it’s all over. Mohammed does a nice job with perhaps the most nuanced character on the show.
The players are a collection of smart personalities that allow the stories to go pretty much anywhere, and often they do. Brett Goldstein steals many of the episodes as the most interesting of these guys. He plays Roy Kent, who was once a huge star, but age is catching up with him. He’s a bit of an emotional cripple who sees things rather in stark terms of black or white. He doesn’t say a lot, but he’s the kind of guy that needs only shout out an Oi, and those around him tremble. He works with F bombs at a Samuel L. Jackson league of his own. It’s amusing how one little naughty word can mean so many things from the mouth of a true artist. Throughout the show he has to transition from star player to motivational coach. His nemesis/friend is Phil Dunster as Jamie Tartt. He’s the new rising star but has an ego to match. These two guys share some of the best chemistry in the three seasons of the series, and it’s a relationship that grows with tons of nuance. It helps, or it doesn’t help, that Roy is dating Jamie’s ex. She’s Juno Temple playing Keeley Jones. She’s a dynamic character who is trying to make her way as her own boss in a male-dominated culture. She ends up sharing some nice moments with Hannah Waddington as Rebecca, but I just couldn’t quite warm up to the manic story arcs she’s given. The team dynamic is rounded out with funnyman Jeremy Swift as the team’s business manager, Leslie Higgins. He starts the show pretty much shy and on the outside looking in, but he ends up becoming a key member of the core group and one of Lasso’s Diamond Dogs, a group of barking guys who come together when one of the members needs to have some emotional support. At first he’s referred to strictly as Higgins, which makes me think of Magnum P.I., but as he comes closer to that inner circle he starts going by Leslie, and I kind of liked the change. While Rebecca brought Ted over to destroy the team, things quickly change. He might not be a very good coach, and he’s certainly out of his element, but he has this knack of creating very much a family dynamic with the inner core and even with the players. The team loses more than it wins, and there’s a lot of hype over how good getting a tie can be in that league. See, there’s where you lose the American sports enthusiast. Who was it that said a tie is like kissing your sister? In England, apparently it’s more like kissing a hot cousin.
One of my favorite recurring characters was James Lance as sports writer Trent Crimm. Lance has powerful presence, and I think someone pick4ed up on that by the third season when he was no longer a writer, but embedded with the team to write a book. Also it was really cool to see Anthony Head play a pretty rotten guy after so many years as another Rupert, Rupert Giles, the mentor to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Very sweet change of pace here.
It does come down to Jason Sudeikis. It’s a character he wears with comfort. He’s full of contradictions, and no matter what he does, he leaves you with a warm and fuzzy feeling. He’s the perennial doormat who always sees the glass not as half full, but full, no mater how little is in the glass. Yeah, those guys can make you sick to your stomach, but Lasso plays it just right.
The first season contains 10 episodes that are about 30 minutes each. It’s nothing short of brilliant. The relationships and the antics of these characters is quite compelling, and if you love fish-out-of-water scenarios, you can’t get better than this. Lasso has a lot to get used to, from ties to drinking tea and tonic water. The first episode is almost always funny and always amusing.
Somewhere along the way someone decided if 10 episodes at 30 minutes is great, 12 episodes at about 40 minutes will be even better. Sadly, that’s not true here. The half-hour format was just about perfect before the schtick had a chance to get stale. The longer the show went, the less funny it started to become. The complicated story arcs started to get in the way of the entertainment, and before the second season ended, the show was already starting to get stale. Did they attempt to re-right the ship for the third season? No. They doubled down on everything that was killing the show. Episodes started to approach an hour, and by the last handful of episodes, they were going as long as 80 minutes. Suddenly it mattered that there really wasn’t much of an evolving story here, and the series lost all of that wonderful shine and luster. Yes, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
You get all 34 episodes with no extras here. I was quite disappointed that there was nothing taking us behind the scenes with the characters. It’s a bare-bones set, and there is rumor of a spin-off featuring Coach Beard. I do hope this isn’t the end of the road for these characters. With the correct handling and an understanding of how and why the show works it could be interesting to see down the road. Until then, “Let’s just call it a night.”
