“Ted Lasso” Can’t Save Us

In Season 2, our eponymous coach is withering, bucking against the themes of therapy and self-help—a welcome contrast to his belief in unabating optimism.
Ted Lasso
The sports comedy, now in its second season, has been praised for providing a “charming dose of radical optimism.”Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad

Naturally, “Ted Lasso,” the picture of a Midwestern gentleman, introduces the lady first. In the opening scene of the series, which premièred last year on Apple TV+, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) gazes at a Hockney on the wall of her new sky-rise office, oblivious of the activity taking place on the soccer field below. Rebecca has recently become the owner of AFC Richmond, an English Premier League soccer club, which she received in a divorce settlement from her cheating husband. The plot is set off by Rebecca’s convoluted act of sabotage: she recruits the small-time American-football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) to lead Richmond, in the hope that he will steer the team—her ex-husband’s second-favorite plaything—to failure. Ted, who is from Kansas, has never been to England, and knows nothing about soccer. His folk candor is immediately apparent: we meet him as he is exiting an airplane bathroom, on his flight to London.

But I would wager that even diehard “Ted Lasso” fans might have trouble remembering the particulars of that arc, so incidental was the plot to the broader seduction at hand. The sports comedy, now in its second season, is almost alarmingly unsexy, and yet it’s expertly attuned to the romantic and the sentimental, as if engineered by Pixar. You don’t discuss what the show is about but, rather, how it feels to watch it, which is comforting, or, as one headline put it, like “a warm hug of nice.”

Our coach is khakied, mustachioed, and heavily accented. Like Ned Flanders, he works with an almost religious determination. His mission is not so much to guide Richmond to victory—the team struggles to win its matches—but to fix broken relationships in the club. In these early episodes, the placid grin on Sudeikis’s face is immovable, as if it has been painted on. Ted seems to be not a character but a kind of powerful infection: his can-do aphorisms, which increase in good-natured absurdity in the course of the season, confuse and madden the dry Londoners. The club’s fans hate him, and designate him a “wanker,” which he transforms into a term of endearment. “Fuck me,” Rebecca exclaims, when Ted brings delicious biscuits to her desk. “I’ve had it with your mind games,” Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), the team’s elder statesman and resident grump, says, in response to one of Ted’s lighthearted schemes. Eventually, everyone is disarmed. That’s the viewer’s experience of the show as well: you’re resistant, worn down, and then, happily, you submit.

This medicinal effect can overwhelm the finer nuances of the story. “You know what the happiest animal on earth is?” Ted asks Sam, a fainthearted player who’s just been berated by a teammate. “A goldfish,” Ted continues, because “it’s got a ten-second memory.” Sam is inspired by these words, and we watch as he bounds, puppylike—actually, many of the players’ personalities are canine—back to the pitch.

Here is the molten core of the series, the power source that’s too hot to truly touch: Ted is a figure of great pathology, a sloganeer drifting in a purgatorial state. The simplicity of his language betrays his inner turmoil. When a colleague informs him that there are four countries in the United Kingdom, Ted replies, “Kinda like America these days.” At one point, he encourages two feuding players to “woman up,” since manning up hasn’t been so successful. He’s a gender-equality warrior, and yet the relentlessness of his world view has alienated his wife, who wants a divorce. The Richmond gig serves as an escape. But, even in the new place, Ted can’t help but rebuild his cheery hell, his fantasy of perpetual triumph through adversity. In fact, he seems to convert practically the whole country to his way. He’s quite the powerful white man.

“Ted Lasso” was a long-gestating passion project for Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt (who plays Ted’s assistant, Coach Beard), Bill Lawrence (the creator of “Scrubs”), and Joe Kelly (a writer on “Saturday Night Live”). The comedy machers drew the premise from a couple of NBC commercials from the early twenty-tens, starring Sudeikis as an American coach in London, which promoted the network’s coverage of the Premier League. Back then, Ted was the butt of the joke—all red-blooded bluster and hubris. In the intervening years, he has been domesticated into a myth of American earnestness. “Ted Lasso” is trying to redeem the bygone phenomenon of the cultural diplomat; the show itself has become a tightly controlled piece of diplomacy. The coach is not a dandy, but we are reminded, while watching him, of the jaunty comportment of Barack Obama and his koans. (“I believe in hope,” Ted says, in Season 1. “I believe in believe.”)

And then there’s Sudeikis himself. The performer, who grew up in Kansas, and who was previously known for his goofball turns on “S.N.L.,” was never a philosopher-actor, nor was he a source of celebrity intrigue. Lately, he has been coyly encouraging the slippage between creator and character. At a screening for the second season of “Ted Lasso,” in July, he wore a T-shirt that read “Jadon & Marcus & Bukayo,” in support of three Black British soccer players who faced racist abuse online after they missed their penalty kicks in the European Championship final against Italy. Total Ted move. In interviews, Sudeikis speaks in a down-home, Lassovian tongue—regarding the recent dissolution of a long-term relationship with a famous actor and director, for example, in a GQ profile last month, he said, “It’ll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.” Many fans are getting off on having the permission to be openly credulous about his star power. Maybe Ted Lasso could be real. Maybe we can trust male television creators again.

The same day that the GQ profile was published, it was announced that “Ted Lasso” had garnered twenty Emmy nominations, the most for a début season of a comedy show. The series had already won a Peabody, with praise for providing a “charming dose of radical optimism,” and “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity,” and so forth. Increasingly, on social media, the contents of some character’s revelation—about a romantic insecurity, a professional fear—are yanked out of context and presented as snippets of motivational speech. In Topeka, as part of an April Fools’ Day gag, Ted Lasso beat six real coaches for the Kansas Coach of the Year award. The Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, used the show to advance a gospel of bipartisanship in his last State of the Commonwealth address. It is only a matter of time before Ted Lasso meets President Joe Biden. (Interestingly, Sudeikis used to portray Vice-President Biden, on S.N.L., as a virile war hawk, a prescient counter to the contemporary image that has emerged.)

The writers of “Ted Lasso,” resisting the lure of fan service, have opened up the second season with a kill. Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernández), the team’s smiley Mexican striker, a fan favorite, inadvertently launches a ball into Richmond’s mascot, a greyhound. The dog’s death sends Dani into a spell of despair and athletic catatonia—“the yips.” Even Ted’s aggressive positivity is unable to draw him out of the darkness. Enter Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles), an enigmatic sports psychologist. The character is a risk: to correctly foil Ted, Dr. Sharon must be stern and unyielding, which brings her awfully close to a television stereotype: that of the competent Black woman—often a therapist or, in police television, a judge—who uncomplicatedly brings her charges to nirvana. Thankfully, Dr. Sharon is endowed with enough of an inner life to ward off the alarm.

The eight episodes I’ve seen of the new season (there are twelve in total) can feel underbaked and free-floating, the writing formulaic, the plots even slighter than they were in Season 1. (The Christmas episode is so indulgently saccharine that it made me feel paranoid.) The inconsistency of quality has the effect of intensifying the successes. One triumph is an homage to “Sex and the City,” focussing on Roy Kent and his girlfriend, Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), who evolves from WAG influencer to the team’s brand consultant. The arc delivers a perfect shot of nostalgia and a rare flare of eroticism. Over all, the performances, even those of characters who are no more than filler, are always strong and convivial. Running gags, such as those given to Dr. Sharon, Roy, and Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift), Richmond’s dopey but beloved director of operations, amount to a kind of charming, retro vernacular.

Charm, though, can be deadening. Is “Ted Lasso” subject to the same curse as its protagonist? Does the pull of ancient sitcom roots—I lost count of how many references there were to “Cheers”—slow the show’s momentum? In the first season, there was a satisfying climax of anger from Ted, but it was quickly drowned out by the resumption of snappy, pop-culture-savant quipping, and everyone was content—or endeavoring to be content—in the end. So, in Season 2, the show goes through a necessary crisis. This time around, Ted is publicly withering, bucking against the themes of actual therapy and self-help, a welcome contrast to his belief in unabating optimism. As the presence of Dr. Sharon reveals the sharper edges of Ted’s ego, you can feel the show pulling away from the coach’s centripetal force. I can’t say that I particularly miss him. ♦


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