Getting Roped In

Ted Lasso a series by Brendan Hunt et al.  On Apple TV. With Jason Sudekis, Hannah Waddington, Nick Mohammed, Juno Temple.  ****

A suitable subtitle: Portrait of a Doofus.

It’s hard to believe that my wife and I spent three or four evenings (once a week, on our Friday movie night) being somewhat exasperated but often entertained by this totally goofy show, which my wife read about in a column by Jennifer Senior, one of our favorite writers for the Times.  Senior saw it as an antidote to four years of the Trump era, where we had to put up with any amount of ugliness, nay saying, cynicism, profit making.  Ted Lasso is quite the opposite, to the point where it seems a story from an earlier time.  We would have watched this show in the fifties without blinking an eye.  Yep, that’s reality.

Take the fact, for instance, that this coach of a British professional football (soccer) team says he is not concerned with wins or losses, but with developing each player to his fullest.  That he not only sees the kit man (equipment manager) as a fully human being, but consults him about strategy and psychology.  That he bakes biscuits (cookies) for the team owner every morning.  And that he is willing to give his wife space to the point where he accepts a divorce, even though we don’t quite see the problem.  Except that she made the mistake of marrying a doofus.

I should mention, though, that Ted’s attitude toward winning is the same as that of John Wooden, the winningest coach in all of college basketball, and a person who, if anything, was more of a Goodie Two Shoes than Ted Lasso.  (I’ve also heard that he was a fierce bench jockey and rode opposing players unmercifully, suggesting that maybe he really did want to win.)  Ted has Wooden’s pyramid of success framed on his wall.

The premise of the series is preposterous.  The team owner, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddington) has inherited the team in a divorce agreement from her philandering husband.  He loved nothing more than his football team, unless it was the younger women he kept fooling around with.  So in order to take revenge, Rebecca decides to run the team into the ground, hiring a coach who was only a smalltime American college coach in the United States.  But he coached American football.  He knows nothing about British football.  All he’s got are his basic smarts about life.

I found the premise ridiculous, and might have stopped watching after the first episode.  But we watched four at a crack, and I must admit that, after the first evening, I felt somehow better about life, even though all I’d done was watch a stupid TV show.  The way Ted (Jason Sudekis) treated everyone well, the way he saw the problem of managing this team as primarily one of psychology, the way he lost and didn’t make any excuses, faced the fans and press corps and took their criticism: all that was endearing.  Everything worked against him, but he was fundamentally decent.

I eventually got tired of Ted being such a doofus (the one exception was the dart-throwing episode.  That was brilliant), but took interest in the people around him.  His equipment guy Nathan (Nick Mohammed), though he was not an athlete himself, and though he’d been overlooked all his life, had plenty of ideas for things the team might do.  The two best players on the team, Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster), were a veteran past his prime and a young guy completely full of himself; getting them to play together was a major part of the coach’s task.  The team was an international cast of characters, so there were problems of race and ethnicity.  And the fans were merciless, out for blood from the start.

The female characters proved to be among the most interesting.  Rebecca was actually a complex person, full of animosity for her ex-husband and the entitled attitudes of the wealthy but also oddly unconfident about herself, despite her brash exterior.  Juno Temple (Keely Jones) is the girlfriend of the young hothead Jamie Tartt, but she sees past his brashness and his own philandering, and becomes an ally for Ted.  She also becomes an unlikely and raucous companion for Rebecca, who learns a lot from the more confident younger woman.

Ted’s somewhat confused wife comes to Great Britain in the middle episodes in an attempt to reconcile, but the scriptwriters don’t fall for that and send her back home seeking a divorce.  The team wins a game or two but doesn’t do anything too startling or impressive, so it isn’t one of those sports movies where the good guy wins the championship.  The fans keep calling Ted a wanker, but it becomes a grudging sign of respect.  The players don’t undergo any startling changes, but Ted manages to pull them together as they are.

And I must say that this doofus is on to something.  In most games, college and pro, coaches have the same knowledge of the game, and can easily learn from one another anyway.  Technical strategy only goes so far.  The best coaches have some je ne sais quoi that enables them to get something out of their players that others can’t.  Ted shows us what that might be.  Now if he could just learn how the game is played.