The Richmond Way
At some point towards the end of the summer of 2020, right about the time it was becoming clear that the worst summer of our lives was about to become an even worse winter, I started hearing about this show. It didn’t sound like my kind of thing. Sports comedy? Starring the guy who always played jerks on SNL? And it’s on that new Apple streaming thing? Wrote it off initially, “huh, lotta tv these days!”
But then I kept hearing about it. Hearing about it from the sort of people who normally don’t like that sort of show, both on-line and in real life, “trust me, you have to watch this.” Okay, maybe?
And then, right in the middle of that I bought a new iPhone, which came with the free trial of AppleTV+. Okay! Let’s check it out.
And then we watched the whole first season of Ted Lasso in one sitting.
It was stupendous! A fun premise—American College Football coach hired to coach a British Football team—fun characters, good writing. “Lightweight?“ Sure, it was a sitcom after all, but consistently managed to punch above its weight class thanks to universally good performances, tight writing, and an ability to constantly surprise through pushing against the standard sitcom tropes by always choosing to be kind and sincere instead of mean and sarcastic.
But also, a perfect match of a great show hitting at just the right time. Surrounded by a world that seemed intent to surrender to anger and fear, here was a show about solving problems with kindness, a show where the main character’s super power is radical empathy. This perfect bubble of hope and escapism in the middle of everything burning down. A salve, permission to imagine a better way.
It’s been interesting to want the reactions to the show change. The Disaster of the Twenties continues to roll on, but by summer of ’21 it had settled into something more akin to Gibson’s Jackpot, state of being instead of an imminent disaster, notwithstanding what the delta variant was doing to our fall plans.
The show came back, and there was a sense that its moment had passed. We had vaccines, COVID wasn’t on the same uncontrolled rampage, the election was over. We weren’t quite as desperate for something to take the edge of we had been the year before.
Popular shows always get some backlash when they come back, but the responses to Ted Lasso were vicious even by those standards.
All those people who wouldn’t normally watch a show about a kind guy being kind, those same people who kept recommending it as “normally I wouldn’t like something like this but you have to watch it,” all railed about how bad it was now, it had lost it’s way, it was predictable, the characters were boring, there was no conflict. All without any sort of self-recognition that maybe the show was exactly the same, and they had changed, or rather, changed back.
The show skipped summer ’22, and then just wrapped up it’s third and final season here at the start of summer ’23.
For the record, I though the end was perfect. The resolution wasn’t hugely surprising; the show was fundamentally about kindness being the answer, so if you stopped and asked at the start of the season “what’s the kindest thing the show could do for each character,” you’d probably be pretty close to the actual end. It was beautiful, tying up most of the character’s stories, and leaving just a few open-ended to let you wonder what happened next.
There’s a great beat in the middle of the season where recurring antagonist-turned-ally Trent Crim figures out what’s been happening this whole time, looks the camera dead in the eye and delivers the basic thesis of the show.
Ted Lasso himself always functioned more like a character in the vein of Mary Poppins than a standard sitcom hero; he arrived when the other characters needed him most, and once they had learned what they needed to, his work was done, he moved on, and the curtains closed since the story was about the other people learning from Ted. As the title character says towards the end, “it wasn’t about me, it never was.”
Even more so than last time, the criticism was… strange. A centerpiece of the blowback this year was that the show “lacked conflict”, which was a) literally wrong, but also b) tremendously missing the point. This was the resolution of three seasons of people becoming emotionally healthier and learning from Ted to also solve problems with kindness; the whole point was that now, there was still conflict, and it was still sometimes hard, but everyone was trying to be kind. It’s nearly unprecedented for an American show to resolve a conflict by having both parties realizing they’d rather be friends than rivals, it was clear that for a chunk of the audience that simply didn’t register as drama.
It’s telling, I think, that the other big show ending at the same time was HBOs’ “Mean People being Mean to each other, and then all Losing,” which was praised by all the same people that had turned on Ted Lasso’s “Kind People being Kind to each other, and all Winning.”
It’s easy to over-signify things, and I’ll avoid the easy generalizations here around the state of the world, but I’ll just say I think we’d be a lot better off if everyone who didn’t like the second and third seasons of Ted Lasso as much as the first would all take a moment and consider some reasons why that might be. Spoiler: the show didn’t get worse. Try thinking of what the kindest reason might be.