One of the reasons I became a fan (in relatively recent years, it was long after it aired that I got around to watching it) of the old TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was the way that it played with and inverted tropes. The monster and the pretty blonde head down an alley—but in the end, it’s the Boss Ass Bitch Blonde who emerges and the monster who gets dusted.
The show was of uneven quality, as all, even good, long-lasting TV shows are, so it’s been a joy in recent years to see creators playing with trope-inverting or avoiding scenarios in series that are designed to be contained in a short run. Think “Derry Girls” or “The Good Place,” shows that reached a planned destination, destined to let the arc of their story burn out in a pleasant way.
No jumping the shark for these quick series. The experience of binging them is a bit akin to reading a good book—you get engaged, you grow to love somebody, and then, too soon, it all ends. Better too soon than too stale, however.
I don’t know exactly where she heard about it, but my wife, before her birthday this year, expressed a desire to experience the 2020 Apple TV show, available on DVD, “Ted Lasso.” It’s origin is a little weird because it is a series based on the premise of a humorous Super Bowl commercial, about an American football coach who heads to England to coach a soccer team.
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| Coaches from Los Angeles Times story, Apple image: Brendan Hunt, from left, Jason Sudeikis, Brett Goldstein and Nick Mohammed in “Ted Lasso.” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-09-01/ted-lasso-apple-tv-cast-episodes-guide |
Well, the watching of the three seasons of this short series turned into its own minor saga. We started, and loved, season one in November shortly after Audrey’s birthday—but the DVDs, that I had purchased online from Wal-Mart, proved flawed—at the end of each disk, the final episodes would deteriorate into a pixelated jumble like someone was drinking too much of Coach Beard’s girlfriend’s tea (opps, yes, on this blog post there may be some minor spoilers).
We made it mostly through season one, but decided not to proceed, instead returning the DVDs to their source and getting a refund (to Wal-Mart’s credit, that was not a difficult process). And then my wife, shortly before our anniversary, found copies locally—a different edition, but that gave us some hope. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what to get her for Christmas and suggested I would find a different source for “Ted Lasso,” when she fessed up that she had already bought me an anniversary present.
Yup. The day before our anniversary (Dec. 18 is when we got married), we jumped the gun and inserted the new DVDs, which proved less jumpy. And so, the first half of my Christmas break from university teaching this year consisted of a marathon, watching “Ted Lasso.”
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| From “Deadline” review, Apple TV image of Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddigham) and Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) watching the final game in the final show. Use Google and check out the cast, it’s amazing. https://deadline.com/2023/05/ted-lasso-hannah-waddingham-season-3-series-finale-interview-spoilers-1235383916/ |
And, liked Sam and Rebecca, although in a less doomed way, I and my wife fell in love. “Ted Lasso,” TL from now on, is marvelous. It you enjoy a sometimes funny, sometimes deeply poignant TV show, full of interesting, quirky characters and emotion, TL is for you.
TL succeeds for many reasons—an excellent cast, of course. But mostly, excellent writing that inverts tropes and expands the premise of a Super Bowl ad into a fully imagined, fantastical, fictional but real feeling, story.
A short summary of just some of the trope inverting: There is the optimistic, clueless football coach who knows nothing of soccer—who turns out to be an insightful, talented, intelligent man whose cheery demeanor can’t hide his intellectual depth, and who has his own complex back story that explains some of his quirks. There is the pretty model girlfriend, who turns out to be a scrappy, smart, hard-working, creative business woman whose sunny disposition again can’t hide street smarts and drive. The statuesque “Boss Ass Bitch” who begins the series intent on destroying the soccer club as revenge against her philandering ex husband (and who is inevitably converted to an ally, partly through the unexpected power of Ted Lasso’s baking skills).
The soccer players are self-absorbed pretty boys—who each has a real life and unexpectedly complex motivations. You hate the pretty boy bully at first, and later you don’t love him, but I felt way more empathy for him after you see him grow up a bit and you meet his disappointing, disapproving dad.
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| Zava, the avocado-raising Italian soccer miracle, leads the Richmond Greyhounds in pre-game meditation. Apple TV image used on NPR review of Season 3. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1170074939/ted-lasso-season-3-review |
It’s nice to see a TV show that highlights a point I remind myself of in my professional life when dealing with college students. Don’t assume their motivations. You don’t know their stories—and everyone has a story.
And it’s not just that in TL tropes and stereotypical characters are often reversed—the show, under the veneer of its breezy, silly premise, explores depths most TV comedies don’t touch. One of the recurring themes in TL is the challenges of parenthood, particularly fatherhood, and the long-lasting damage or positive energy a dad can deliberately or accidentally impart. Another theme is how most villains (with the possible exception of the watcher from Buffy who grew old and grew very, very evil) are not full villains, and most heroes have flaws and make mistakes. Few people are as bad as or as good as they seem.
The other quality of this show is the way it delivers unexpected twists. It’s a sports saga that, particularly in the first season, doesn’t go where you expect a sports saga to go. Sometimes, your team, with all its heart and moxie, doesn’t achieve its goals.
How can you respond to life’s disappointments and heartbreaks? The show has some ideas. “Be a goldfish,” Ted Lasso says—get over your mistakes and move along. Well, even he is not entirely serious about that in all cases, because some setbacks are too big to forget and some require a good confidant—be it wise girlfriend or therapist or circle of Diamond Dogs—to process and get through.
There are a lot of potential coffee mug sayings from this show: Be curious, not judgmental. Grow up and get over it. Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse—if you’re completely comfortable, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Good as they can be, these slogans aren’t TL’s main charm. Mostly it’s that, a bit like Buffy did, this is a show of consequences where the characters remember what happens to them and relationships change in lasting, transformative ways.
Ted learns to set his wife free, even though he does not want the divorce. Leslie Higgins (one of my favorite characters) has built a life with his wife and sons, but deeply misses and mourns his dead cat, Cindy Clawford.
In the end, I think the main message of the show is summed up by Roy Kent, the eternally grumpy player turned coach, when he asks the Diamond Dogs, “can anyone change?” Roy’s been trying, but feels like he is failing. The dogs bark various answers, and they aren’t simple nor straightforward. No, you can’t convert yourself into someone else, you can’t will yourself into perfection or an idealized version of yourself. But yet, the striving, the attempt to change, it can nonetheless help you build better relationships and a better life. Higgins said that, in better words, and you have to watch the final episode, or this excerpt, to get a better version of that advice.
In the end, we know Ted will come home to be more of a father himself. But we are cheered that Coach Beard fakes appendicitis to stay in England with his weird love who nobody else understands but who nonetheless completes him.
TL is, like all TV shows, a bit uneven. I felt the third season dragged a bit for me, and some of the story arcs in that season didn’t have all of the surprises nor emotional heft of seasons 1 and 2. But the seasons are short, and none are bad. You can binge the whole run of the show in a week, especially if there comes a cool winter Saturday, perhaps the shortest day of the year, where you and your wife can snuggle on the couch to watch the coach, snack on bad food and just spend that day seeing Ted and his friends and freinemies find their crooked path through this crooked world.
TL exceeds Buffy for lots of reasons. The characters are more adult, the run shorter and more condensed so it’s spicier, like chili left to simmer for a while. You can finish a 30-minute episode and be a bit off balance, startled at how much can happen in a short show. Maybe it’s the one where Coach Beard gets lost and finds himself in disco church. Or the one where Ted finally finds he needs a therapist. Or when a 13-year-old girl helps Boss Ass Bitch compose a business email. Whatever.
It's a show full of heart. It will leave you wanting more, and, paradoxically, grateful that there isn’t more because the show has logically played itself out and didn’t stay too long.
Like “Derry Girls,” TL is a TV show world that you may visit and binge again. Even if you’re not a goldfish, because you will always remember this.
