Wvfunnyman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Geoff Carter
At first glance, Paramount TV’s production of Ted Lasso seems like your generic fish-out-of-water story: Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis), an American college football coach, is hired by Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) the owner of the English soccer club AFC Richmond to coach the team—this despite the fact Lasso has never coached soccer and knows only the rudiments of the game. Right.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before; it’s been done and done again: Wildcats with Goldie Hawn, Ladybugs with Rodney Dangerfield, or even The Mighty Ducks with Emilio Estevez. We know the formula—a reluctant coach is persuaded/forced to coach a losing team that wants nothing to do with him, but—through a series of serendipitous circumstances the two sides begin understanding each other and end up working together to create a feel-good team building, ass-kicking, championship-winning combination. We know this story. Or, up until now, we thought we did.
Ted Lasso has all the elements of a feel-good underdog sports story, but it pushes the envelope in unexpected and fascinating ways, unveiling a new and unlikely sort of sports hero—the folksy—and relentlessly good-willed—Ted Lasso. When we first meet American transplant Lasso, he seems little more than a corky dope spewing cliched pleasantries and folksy anecdotes. In fact, it turns out the only reason owner Rebecca is hiring Lasso is to get back at her ex-husband by guaranteeing that his beloved soccer club will fail when Ted takes the helm. It turns out that Lasso is aware of this but doesn’t seem to care.
It seems obvious at first glance that he’s either a total idiot or a completely clueless rube, but he displays a strength of character that is strangely impervious to both insults and criticisms. He fields it all with grace and goodwill. During press conferences, he freely admits he knows little to nothing about soccer, confusing the term field for “pitch” and not even knowing what the positions are on the soccer team. The press, of course, goes after him like a herd of ravenous jackals, but Lasso is impervious to their attacks. He simply continues to be pleasant and honest. Relentlessly.
AFC Richmond is a losing team plagued by infighting. Veteran Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and up and coming star Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) are at each other’s throats. Some of the first things Lasso does in the locker room is to hang up a placard saying “Believe” over his door, a seemingly inane gesture greeted with disdain by most of the players. He then puts out a suggestion box, and then gifts the players books shrewdly chosen to convey Lasso’s specific message to each player. Kent is given a copy of A Wrinkle in Time, a story meant to convey the difficulty of assuming the mantle of leadership.
Slowly but surely, his relentless bonhomie wears the players down and they begin to enjoy themselves and the game, and—somehow, the same thing happens to the audience. We start rooting for Ted, appreciating the way he wears down Rebecca with his daily gift of biscuits (which we discover are—sweetly—homemade), his championing of the young kit master Nathan (Nick Mohammad), and his determination to win over the irascible Kent. Lasso’s foil, assistant and best friend Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) is the dry voice of reason (sometimes cynicism) in the locker room.
Rounding out the cast of characters is the irrepressible Keely (Juno Temple) the young ambitious model who eventually becomes marketing director of the team, Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) the browbeaten but shrewd Chief of Football Operations, and Sam Obisanay (Toheeb Jimoh), a young, idealistic—and homesick—Nigerian player.
Ted Lasso is a comedy, and a good one, but its appeal, along with its seemingly vacuous plot, goes deeper than a belly laugh (although there more than a few of those) into areas of the surreal (see the episode “Beard After Hours”), tragedy (“No Weddings and a Funeral”) and romance (which is all over the place). Aside from the outstanding writing, the series is fueled by the relentless confidence of its main character Lasso, a contagious optimism that ropes in the entire audience.
Ted’s belief that there is good in everyone, and his ability to recognize that good, and using its ability to create camaraderie and even love on his team is his primary mission. Not winning. Winning is secondary. A man that cares that much about players he barely knows and his determination to transform his team into a family is beyond endearing. He is, in a very weird sense, sort of an American Mary Poppins.
He succeeds in transforming Roy Kent into a team leader, making prima donna Jamey Tartt into a team player, and making Nate into an assistant coach. He helps owner Rebecca start to deal with the frustration and anger of her bitter divorce and young Sam cope with his homesickness. If this sounds like a Disney movie or a Pollyanna tale, well, it sort of is—except for the wonderful twists turns taken by the story. When ebullient new player Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernandez) accidentally kills the Earl the Greyhound, the team mascot, a new character, sports psychologist Dr. Fieldstone (Sara Niles) is introduced. After she counsels Dani, team members flock to her office seeking help. And so, the story makes a gentle left turn from straight feel-good comedy into psychological drama.
We learn early on that Ted is reluctantly going through a divorce and suffers from being separated from his young son. After learning most of his team has been to be counseled by Dr. Fieldstone, Ted goes to her office but cannot sit still. He wants to talk but cannot—until he blurts out the truth.
At this point, the main characters begin to reveal their complexity. Ted is no longer just the good-guy coach. He is vulnerable, even fragile. Nate’s character takes an unexpectedly cruel turn, Roy falls in love, and so, while Ted Lassoremains first and foremost a comedy, it has taken a turn into left field (the far pitch). However, based on the bedrock of its characters and dialogue, and its feel-good vibe, while these plot turns may be unexpected and even shocking, they will no doubt be delightful.