On the Unique Joys and Upcoming Trials & Tribulations of Saint Ted Lasso

Posted by Melanie on November 22, 2020 · Leave a Comment 

Like the buoyancy of its titular character, the exact vibe of Ted Lasso is hard to pin down.

 

 

 

It’s a family comedy with sex and swears, a deceptively simple drama about people trying real hard, dotted with very American jokes and thoroughly English sensibilities.

It’s the weird characters and team-microcosm-within-a-specific-organisation-within-a-specific-town of Parks and Rec, with the optimism and character growth/arcs of The Good Place, with a Schitt’s Creek tone, the earnestness of Friday Night Lights, the prattfalls and callbacks of early How I Met Your Mother, the multi-background character makeup and love-hate quickpatter of Brooklyn 99, a screwball comedy which addressed real traumas of My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the absurdity of Better Off Ted, (with whom it shares a few cast and crew), and the pop culture breadth and surprisingly wrenching interpersonal tangles of Gilmore Girls.

But I’m not here to sell you, or even sure I could. I’ll just say if you want to watch it, know its thesis is in the pilot when Ted says about Roy: “He thinks he’s mad now, wait til we win him over.”

Ted‘s got something for everyone, but it’s also got an insistent cheer combined with characters which may not be everyone’s bag, revolving around a super specific topic which is not the point of the show even a little (more on that below). It’s literally astounding, and if it doesn’t click with you, I don’t know how to sell it. Instead, this is for those who’ve seen Season 1, about a few things I think the show may do in its follow-up. 

 

 

1. Stick To The Game Plan

Networks like their shows to stay pretty much the same, no matter how innovative their creators want to get. But for cable and the new quasi-cable shows, often there’s a producer push to ‘keep things from stagnating’. While some shows can reinvent themselves – the aforementioned The Good Place did it at least once a season, and technically Ted Lasso has already done it once when it went from sketch to 10×30 comedy series – something which has been so delicately balanced as Lasso shouldn’t mess too much with its tonal ecosystem. what people want particularly right now is comfort food. Yes, I’m being incredibly optimistic that this show can be filmed in the next year.

So what’s Ted‘s game plan? Like Ted himself, it mostly rolls with “do good, have fun, the wins will come, if they don’t, you’re not alone.”

The show is theoretically about a premiere league soccer team, but is not actually about that at all. While you may not expect Moneyball or Friday Night Lights or even Remember the Titans level discussion of tactics or playoffs, Ted Lasso doesn’t feel the need to show a game or detailed practice every episode. When it does have a match, it’s clearly where production cut budgetary corners, preferring a few minutes of Arlo White commentary over actually filling more than a couple stadium seats with extras. It makes feints towards offsides and has a small plot point about set plays, but the former is a joke at Ted’s expense and the latter is not at all how soccer works. It touches on trading/loaning players only as much as it absolutely has to to get to its plot point.

To paraphrase Ebert, it’s not what sport a TV show is about, it’s how it’s about the people playing the sport. Ted Lasso is about growth and relationships and people trying desperately to be good even when everything around them is shit and everyone is awful to them, intentionally or not.

OK wait! I’ve got it. It’s as if Mike Schur made a comedy about the biblical character of Job, played by Jason Sudekis.

If the show tries to pivot and become too much inside baseball, it might gain viewers who want to see more sports, but could lose much else which makes it so indescribably special. I love soccer and follow multiple leagues on various continents, and honestly I’d watch the heck out of a behind-the-scenes, down-and-dirty Premier league drama, but not this show.

I love Ballers. But if Ted Lasso were to become Ballers: UK, I would drop it faster than Maradona drops a soccer ball inside the 18 against England in 1986.

That’s the type of very specific soccer joke Ted wouldn’t get, let alone make.  

 

2. Keep the Pace, Keep the Faith

I hate the “this TV miniseries is really a long movie!” commentary. It’s often a weird way to try and ‘bolster’ the standing of a TV show, as though one is better than the other. Beside that, not only are the basic formats different, so is the structure. Episodic structure *means* something, even if (as is hardly always the case) the writer and director is the same for every episode.

Caveat given . . . Ted Lasso does almost play out as a long movie broken into chapters, particularly in its pacing, setup, and character arcs. This isn’t a Netflix “eh, we have unlimited space, may as well have a 60 minute episode with less time and money spent in the edit suite than a 42 minute tight little hummer” sort of show, but a show which wants to give us a thorough picture into who these characters are before it concentrates on what they’re doing. Personalities are flagged immediately with things like books, wardrobe, and opening lines. Relationships are quickly established with similar signposts and interactions: Rebecca trods on Higgins, who grimaces and bears it; Ted and Coach Beard swap knowledge and make silly bets; Keeley and Jamie interact on a fun but purely superficial level, all waxing and topless photos and image management.

But the pilot doesn’t just show three snippets and zoom into plot; even most 22-episode hour-longs get main series engine pieces turning over faster. The producer’s EXPOSIT ALL MAIN POINTS IN THE FIRST 10 MINUTES! note is nowhere to be found. Instead we see Ted and Beard trundling through the airport, sightseeing with their driver, setting up their office, wedging themselves into a teeny English-sized car, running practice and gushing over the sports drink mix ratio with Nathan. We see Rebecca redecorating her office, dealing with legalities, controlling a room full of journos, bringing up to Higgins how he facilitated her husband’s cheating and using it as leverage. It gives us Keeley and Ted discussing waxing and beatboxing, hanging a sign correctly crooked, having a meaningful exchange over nude photos. All before it tips off the main conflict by telling us what’s really up with Rebecca offering Ted the job, and what drove him to accept.

It’s not slow in a Prestige Drama sort of way, but it requires a bit of faith in the audience that they’ll hang in and long enough to find out ‘why the heck has this guy been hired?’ It also trusts you won’t bail when they set up an eye-rollingly obvious and atrocious love triangle, then averts it, which is an even more impressive trick.

Most comedy pilots, especially short-run series, would cut to Rebecca saying “Now I want him to run this club into the ground!” after the SportsCenter news update gives the rundown on Ted’s history, or maybe after the press conference. Instead the pilot takes its time bringing Ted to the locker room and doing all those things above first. To be fair, they’ve got an extra 8 minutes, and they use it all perfectly.

As for the triangle, they use language most sitcoms use to clearly set things one direction, which is a pretty standard, yet awful, direction . . . before making several very different, all superior, choices. But in the interim, they don’t signal you to stay, they trust you will. Much like Ted himself.

Ted Lasso evolves quickly, along with its characters. The opening episode feels very sports-bro-y, and one expects the only two female leads would keep in their own spheres and serve specific story functions. But not only do both Rebecca and Keeley develop to much more than their introductions would intimate, they get put together more and more often, first joking, then passing the Bechdel test, then creating lovely small scenes, and finally bringing to a head the most perfect sort of soap-operatic-high-stakes-interpersonal-conflict the show has.

Yet despite how utterly perfect everyone is, and that I said “don’t mess with success” above, Season 2 will probably need new players.

 

 

3. Bring In New Players

As mentioned above, the season’s character arcs are more movie-like in how quickly people learn lessons about themselves, sex, vulnerability, etc. Like its character, Ted was likely to get only a single season to achieve the impossible, so it gave us no massive cliffhanger end, didn’t ‘save’ or drag out character development. Shoot your shot, act as though every day and episode may be your last, Ted Lasso.

But this means they’ll need a couple new characters for S2. They can’t bring Rebecca back to full villain or Keeley to full Manic Sexpot Dream Girlfriend. They’ll want a villain we can somewhat love/identify with/barrack for (as opposed to the delicious buffoon villains such as Rupert they can bring back in in small doses), and a more outrageous simple distraction such as Jamie Tart And His WAG, now that Jamie has developed a little further and Keeley is such a delightful, guiding-light character.

Which should be fine; in such an ensemble cast a new face or two is easier to integrate. Still, it’s always a risk to chemistry, especially if that person is going to have a bigger role, which I argue they’ll need to, likely as a main antagonist.

That Ted will be single means a love interest is likely, whether she’s the villain or not. They could bring back more minor characters (the street soccer girl, the pub mistress, the paparazzi) in bigger roles; they’ve shown great ability to use characters sparingly and grow them organically. But I reckon we get at least two new characters, one being a player, one other; maybe a truly villainous journo!

We need someone else for Ted to butt heads and ideologies with, who will try to utterly destroy him. Job’s wife and friends are sounding boards and commiserators, but without a true shit-stirring villain, there’s no story there. As mentioned somewhat in the show comparisons and again in the structural discussion, Ted Lasso operates with a more compact plot and specific seasonal endgame than many 22-episode sitcoms, it has one big self-contained story along which character journeys happen, so it needs that story driver.

 

 

 

A Balanced Attack and Defense

To operate at the pitch it does while keeping tone balanced is hella difficult; but Ted almost never tips into TOO sweet or TOO ridiculous or TOO dramatic, though comes dangerously near every one of those touchlines most episodes.

Ted stubs its toe on the turf occasionally, mostly by omission. For example, if there had been a little more around Jaime and Ted connecting before Jaime was returned to his team, the anger and betrayal (and Ted’ army man olive branch) would have had all the more impact; it seemed almost to be that they were trying to avoid specifics around transfer windows and so glossed over emotions around it, as well as plot. Ted As Father Figure was well set up in eps 2 and 3, but there was a bit of a lull there around the ejection until brought it around in the finale, which relied a bit heavily on our liking both Ted and Jamie separately, and having seen them growing as people along their own tracks, but not having done that work around the ejection weakened the impact a little. Still, that’s a tiny quibble in what is essentially a perfect season, a major triumph.

*salutes* Major Triumph

As it was coming in for a landing, several balls were in the air, and yet every road it took was the exact right one in hindsight. Sorry for mixing my metaphors, but if you’ve seen the season, I think you must agree.

For example, I thought for a moment when Jamie was running towards goal he was going to sky the goal, and there would be that tiny moment like in the final scene of Succession, where we would be unsure if he did it intentionally or not . . . and it would have absolutely worked! But the way they took it was still better and more true to the characters and season overall.

Speaking of Succession, it can be as clear how people inflict their pain felt upon others in a cycle of trauma, without ever going as dark, nasty, satirical, or hopeless as that show. In particular, the scenes in the final episodes where Rebecca has to face her betrayal of Ted, and we can draw a straight line to her pain from Rupert’s destroying her emotionally motivating her to enact pain on others, are brutal.

Hannah Waddingham absolutely knocks it out of the park; even more impressive when you see how she escalates her emotions perfectly across three scenes in three locations, likely shot days or weeks apart.

 

 

Extra Time: Notes on Tone

We tend to draw these really strong, arbitrary lines between comedy and drama, ‘prestige’ shows and fluff, satire and drama, ‘good shows’ and ‘guilty pleasure’ which is usually code for ‘shows about women which aren’t harsh dramas about their trauma.’ We pretend sci-fi shows are a different sort of important than shows about mobsters. We try to categorise shows such as Six Feet Under as straight dramas, because the absurdism, tonal shift, dark comedy, high and lowbrow art, over the top prosthetics, and such belong in the realm of Brian Fuller, and we don’t want to give TV’s highest awards to shows ‘like that’ so we pretend it’s ‘different.’

It’s not.

All TV can encompass many things. Some shows are bad at it, some shows refuse to cater to any but the lowest form of joke, and some shows punch down. But to pretend because a show takes a comedic form or involves vampires or uses broad actors or breaks into song or has procedural style or wears its heart on its sleeve, it is therefore ‘lesser’ is lazy, cheap criticism and a refusal to embrace the full range of things the art form and life itself have to offer.

Ted Lasso has no such hangups. He embraces all of life: its homemade biscuits and corny jokes, its tragedy and pain, its leaders and followers, its high art and disposable pop, its hangovers and heartaches. All art and events and people have their place, but so long as the core of the thing and of us are honest and pure and trying, there’s love to be found and growth to be made. That’s it. That’s the core of the man, and the show. 

Stray Observations

– Thanks to Chas Fisher for the comments about why Jamie’s betrayal and following was slightly underserved, and Dale Mundt for watching along and giving comps on tone.

– If you think Ted Lasso to Succession (both involving SNL alums) is a long bow to draw, I recently compared Gilmore Girls to Succession among others shows, so.

– In every scene, the tiny notes are done so well. Coach Beard is always perfectly reacting to back up Ted’s comments or jokes to others. When Nathan is given his surprise promotion, of course Rojas is out the door first, ever the enthusiast. Etc.

– A hella accomplished theatre performer, Hannah Waddingham also sings her own karaoke. More of her in comedies, please and thank you.

– As I noted on Twitter, the pop culture cuts are deep. 

The Sun to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Orson Scott Card
Jack Kerouac to Madeline L’Engle
Friday Night Lights to Footballers’ Wives
West Side Story to Oklahoma [deep cuts, too!]
Axe Body Spray to The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Spice Girls to Frozen

What’s your favourite? Mine, and possibly the best line written in all of television in 2020, is absolutely:

“Last time I saw eyes that cold they were going eye-to-eye with Roy Schneider.”
“Jaws?”
“Nah. All That Jazz.”

Filed under Comedy, Fictional Characters, Techniques in TV, TV, TV Pilot · Tagged with Screenwriting, Season 2, Ted Lasso, writing for TV