Title: Ted Lasso
Rating: 5 Stars
I know. I’m very late to jump on this band wagon. In my defense, I did not previously have Apple TV. I signed up to watch Denzel Washington’s Macbeth, and as long as I had the account, I thought that I’d check out Ted Lasso. I’d heard good things about it and was curious. I’ve just finished streaming the first season.
The plot is as simple as can be. Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) is an American college football coach that is hired to coach an English soccer team. The owner hires him expecting him to fail. She is recently divorced, got the soccer club as part of the settlement, and wants to destroy it to spite her ex-husband. That’s the plot. There is absolutely nothing original about it. A sports team owner that wants to sink their own club? Check out Major League. An American goes to England fish out of water story? Check out King Ralph. A down on their luck sports team that just needs a coach to inspire them? There are any number, including Bad News Bears, The Mighty Ducks, or A League of Their Own. Inspirational speech before a big game? Again, there are innumerable, but check out Hoosiers or Any Given Sunday. I’m sure that I could go on with all of the tropes that it employs.
It shouldn’t work. I should be bored. I should be rolling my eyes at the pablum.
After all, besides the inspirational coach and the apparently evil owner, you have the following characters: the owner’s sycophantic sidekick, the obnoxious, cocky superstar in his prime, the once great but now past his prime world weary team captain, the sweetly innocent player just coming up, and the meek mild mannered equipment coach who’s actually an unrecognized soccer genius. How predictable is all of that?
Even so, shockingly enough, I have really enjoyed it and can’t wait to start watching the next season.
Why? It’s not exactly a trick question. It’s the writing and the acting.
Sudeikis does outstanding work as Lasso. He has to walk a very thin tightrope between a kind of knowing irony and a Mr Flanders level of sweet sincerity. He nails it perfectly. You laugh at him, with him, and are moved by his overt non-ironic respect and care that he gives to all that he meets. He’s an impossibly saccharine character that Sudeikis makes us believe in. The others, especially Hannah Waddington as the owner that is soon shown the error of her ways by Lasso, Brett Goldstein as the aging team captain, and Brendan Hunt, as Lasso’s taciturn long time assistant coach, all bring their characters to life.
Even though the path is well trod by so many previous films or novels or series, the writers keep it interesting, amusing, and often moving. Sports films generally have many opportunities for bathos and pathos. Here the writers never miss an opportunity for either. The dialog gives the actors many opportunities to shine.
It is an excellent example of the genre. Given that we’re in the third calendar year of a global pandemic in which people are willfully choosing not to get free vaccinations and are oh so quick to assert their own individual rights without regard to any larger social good, perhaps the perpetually positive, earnest, and cheerful Ted Lasso is exactly the kind of tonic that I needed.
dorkenstein 