Ted Lasso: What Makes An Emmy-Winning Football Comedy So Special?
Key Sentence:
- Perhaps the most crucial thing about Ted Lasso is that you don't have to like football to enjoy it.
- After all, the show's title character himself barely understood the rules.
But that hasn't stopped the well-meaning American coach from changing the fortunes of a fictional Major League team. His somewhat unusual "kill them with kindness" approach and unconventional coaching style were initially ridiculed before he gradually attracted grumpy and arrogant players.
The Apple TV comedy has made word of mouth in the months since its release last August and won several major Emmy Awards on Sunday. This level of awareness reflects the show's broad appeal and the extent to which it connected audiences for a year of fear and uncertainty amid traffic jams around the world.
Here's everything you need to know about the Emmy-winning comedy series. Brett Goldstein and Hannah Waddingham's captions win Best Supporting Role and Actress for Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso tells the story of a friendly, well-meaning American coach interested in saving a fictional soccer team from the AFC Richmond Premiership - despite being completely inexperienced.
"I've never coached the sport you call football at all levels," he said in the opening episode at a press conference. "Fuck you; you can fill two websites with what I don't know about football." But something else Ted doesn't know is that he was hired by club owner Rebecca Welton (played by Waddingham) precisely because she wanted the team to fail to disappoint her ex-husband.
His unconventional coaching style and unwavering optimism took time to get used to many hot-tempered players, with ridiculous consequences. It's a classic comedy with a clash of cultures. We follow Ted as he struggles with British sarcasm and cynicism as he slowly but surely triumphs over those he meets.
Ted Lasso may have done the same with television audiences. Instead of targeting just football fans, the show followed the Friday Night Lights model of using sport to explore friendships, relationships, and being part of a team.
Ted Lasso's first appearance on television was actually in a series of television commercials in 2013. In the ad, Lasso is described as the new head coach of Tottenham Hotspur. He builds on the premise of "fish out of water" as Lasso struggles to master even the most basic rules of the game.
("Any team I coach will play hard in four quarters," he told a news conference before a reporter told him the game was made up of two halves.) The short promotion went well with audiences, and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence was hired to develop a TV series based on the character in 2017. Several lines of dialogue from the original TV commercial were reused in later series.
Many reviewers praised how much more depth has been added than the original Super Bowl commercial. "The character of Ted Lasso, the American fool in advertising, has become a tall, optimistic, even charming man," said Matthew Gilbert of The Boston Globe. But other reviewers argued otherwise, arguing that Ted shouldn't have been toned down for the series. "I wish it was written better, smarter [and] clearer," Camilla Long told the Sunday Times.