Ted Lasso Seasons 1&2

2020-2021 - AppleTV+
Developed by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly

Season 1 of Ted Lasso was an absolute phenomenon.  I know this, because it's a situation comedy about a sports coach and Toasty loved it(!).   Oh, and it won a whole shit-ton of awards and stuff and everyone was talking about it.  But for Toasty to love something that was so steeped in sports, to me, resonated far more than anything anyone else could say about it, or any award that could be given to it.

The only problem with Ted Lasso, as far as I saw it, was that it was on AppleTV+.  Sigh, not another streaming service...

The common description of Ted Lasso season 1 was, affectionately, "kindness porn".  Just people being their best self, or working hard at making other people their best self, with Jason Sudekis' Coach Ted Lasso the chief instigator. 

Ted is an American college football coach brought on by AFC Richmond's new owner Rebecca Welton (who won the team in her divorce settlement.  Rebecca's ex, loving the club far more than he ever loved her, wants revenge, plain and simple, and thinks that the best way to get at her ex is by tanking his beloved team, and she does this by hiring Ted and his right-hand assistant, Coach Beard (yes, he has a beard, but that's just his name).  They made a splash by coaching a little known college to an NCAA championship in one year.  Ted knows nothing about Footie or its rules...but he coaches the people as much, if not more so, than the game.

Ted slowly wins over Rebecca, gets the team to unify under its captain - the hard-as-nails but past-his-peak team captain Roy Kent (hey!) - and even gets through to the selfish, egocentric young phenom Jamie Tartt (I like that people in the crowd sing his name to "Baby Shark").  Ted even lifts locker room manager/doormat Nate up under his wing to becoming an assistant coach.  All Ted's positivism masks the pain he has underneath, putting an ocean's distance between himself and his wife and son, as she has asked for space, so he's giving her as much as he can stomach.  But the pain he's experiencing trying to ignore that his marriage is over and missing his son is applied somehow into a lemons-out-of-lemonade positive manner.  Every major, and most of the minor characters experience some growth, either directly or indirectly from Ted's influence.  It's so damn heartwarming and enjoyable. 

 And, well, it's pretty damn funny on top of it all.

 It shouldn't come as much of a surprise, with Scrubs and Cougartown creator Bill Lawrence on the team with Sudekis, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt (who plays Beard).  There's definitely a comedy pedigree on the creative team and in the writer's room.  There's a lot of great world building in and around the Richmond area, including a pile of fans Ted sees on the street or at the pub, and all the many players on the pitch.

Season 2 picks up following the big loss in season 1 looking sunnier than ever.  It's just bright and the optimism is almost unbearable, but an errant penalty kick is a tiding of bad omens and Season 2, while attempting to retain its positivity, gets both heavy and dark, frequently.  The team hires a sports psychologist to help the teammates where Ted can't, but Ted's history with therapy leads to a bit of a tet-a-tet with the new Doctor.  Ted himself starts experiencing panic attacks in the wake of his divorce.  Meanwhile Jamie Tartt's dad rears his ugly head, and Rebecca's dad dies.  But it's Coach Nate, as he starts to come out of his awkward shell, over-compensates, and winds up, very unexpectedly, turning the villain of the piece in a way, and it's quite unsettling.  I literally lost sleep over it after finishing the season.

It's not just the turn into darker thoughts (which mostly provide Ted and crew to find support and solace in each other and find the brightness amidst it all), it's rather the uneven and overly dramatic storytelling the season starts leaning towards.  Two episodes (a fun-if-schmaltzy Christmas episode and a very strange detour featuring Beard) were requested by Apple and added late in the season's production, but inserted into the season at midway points, kind of cutting the storytelling off knees with each episode for over 40-minute detours.  Past the halfway point, all of the episodes run at network TV drama length or longer which puts a fine point on the fact that the show started leaning far more into its dramatic elements than comedic ones.  And some of the drama just didn't play.

Season 2 effectively sidelines Ted with his own issues, which divides his attention and takes his influence out of a lot of the other players' lives.  With the title character busy with his own shit, seems like there's just less of a focused story than in season 1.

Rebecca, powerful, confident, determined in the first season, proving herself every bit the "boss bitch" Keeley dubs her, is relegated almost exclusively to looking for a relationship in the second season.  The match that the show makes for her never fits right, and the show never adequately justifies why either player is so invested in the relationship. Keeley, having moved on from Jamie to Roy in the first season, finds seemingly a perfect match in her new footie beau, but the show mismanages their relationship very late in the game, betraying the honesty they share for the sake of end-of-season drama.  Even the episode about Rebecca's dad's funeral misses a beat for certain characters like Nate and Jamie to reflect on their paternal issues.

There is still a lot of good in season 2, but when season one is pretty much a perfect season, there really was nowhere for them to go but down.  It's not like they could have quit while they were ahead, Ted Lasso was just too much of a freight train...but just like a freight train, it seems it was too hard for them to stop, or even slow down on certain story lines, with no possibility of them turning them around.

Season 3 has its work cut out for it.