I'm just a little bit in love. With Ted Lasso.
Looking for something a bit uplifting, a lot funny and that shows the best of England.
It's Ted Lasso.
The premise is really quite simple. Ted Lasso, an American football coach from Kansas, is recruited by Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), a newly divorced Owner's wife who got the Richmond FC in the divorce settlement and is wanting to see the team relegated from the Premier League out of spite.
Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) is the epitome of the American Midwest. Completely hokum, dreadfully nice, extremely polite and terribly optimistic, the exuberant Ted is thrown into coaching this team of misfit soccer (football) players. Not that he's ever coached soccer before, but he did a good job with an American team in the past for one season. So this is a show about Midwest America meets ordinary South London.
Then you meet the team.
There's Roy, the angry captain, who underneath is just a big softy. There's pretty boy striker, Jamie Tartt (doo doo de doo de doo) a man baby who needs to grow up. There's coach beard, who doesn't say much. There's Nathan, aka Nate the Great, the bullied equipment manager who begins to find his own voice. And the downtrodden Manager of Football, Higgins, who's a bit like a member of Dad's Army, trying his best to please Rebecca. Oh, and of course there's Keeley, the aging WAG who ends up being the marketing guru for the whole outfit.
And it's quite possibly some of the most perfect comedy I've seen in ages.
It doesn't the fish out of water thing brilliantly.
There's all the team dynamics which are funny and tragic all at once. When a replacement striker comes in for a while, a South American by he name of Rojas, he's hysterical.But it sends a number of characters on new arcs.
For a little show, it's got a tremendous heart to it.
And I need to find somebody to talk Ted Lasso with. Especially as Giles from Buffy (Anthony Head) played Rebecca's odious millionaire ex-husband.
I love the observations of the other characters. I love Ted's interactoins with them all. I love that Ted bakes biscuits for Rebecca, possibly helping him soothe his own angsts. And I love that it shows a bit of London in which I lived for a few months which gets me all homesick.
Mind you, I'm only halfway through the first series.
But it's near perfect television, and we don't get that very often.
Ted Lasso streams on Apple TV+.
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1 comment:
Yes! I've been sucked into this great series too. One of the things I love is it flips the tired stereotypes often seen on American television where you have the rude, loud, cosmopolitan Americans versus the overly polite and mild-mannered British. Here Lasso is the polite one and the Londoners are sweary and curt.
I'm hoping another stereotype they might break is the idea that if you like someone, if you have a love connection then that love has to become romantic or sexual. [possible spoiler] Ted and Rebecca seem to be 'soulmates' but I'd love to see it remain a respectful, platonic love of deep friendship rather than the oh-so-predictable plotline of them becoming lovers.
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