WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE LOVE TED LASSO? The Socratic Scribbler meditates…
Ted Lasso is not just popular. It’s good, getting rave reviews and recommendations from just about everyone…except the chronically grouchy.
Ted Lasso is based on a classic “fish out of water” premise. A Witchita State football coach is surprisingly hired as a coach for a professional British soccer team, AFC Richmond, by a Rebecca Welton. She is seeking vengeance on her ex husband. Her scheme is to make the team a miserable failure to the embarrassment of her cheating, ex-husband. Of course, just as in The Producers, the opposite happens.
“Fish out of water” stories, are winning big audiences these days. Consider the last year’s Emmy craze over Schitt’’s Creek, where a wealthy New York family loses its money and ends up living in a sleazy motel in the middle of a hick town. It was immensely popular, tapping into our inclinations to wish ill on the idle rich, who do not even know how to trim their own nails. Yet, the eccentric family somehow wins us over with their ingenious adaptations and rebirth.
Given the Covid plague, perhaps the whole world is feeling a bit like fish out of water these days. We all move around while wearing unbreathable masks and swimming our arms to keep social distance. This said, I suspect that Ted Lasso is more than just collective unconscious reaction to our weird plague world. After all, “fish out of water” stories have been popular since Aristophanes’ The Clouds, in which a regular guy tries to escape his debts by joining Socrates’ oddball Thinkery. The “fish out of water” story taps into a basic fear…the terror that began on our first in that place full of strangers our parents called kindergarten.
Yet, I think there is much more at work in Ted Lasso than a classic comic premise that taps into a contemporary fear. The “fish out of water” works as framework for a much more powerful comic plot. Ted Lasso is todays Don Quixote, accopanied by his Sancho Pansa, the taciturn, chess playing Coach Beard. The errant knight values that Ted Lasso proclaims are the positive American Sports Coach values consistently celebrated from Knute Rockne to Casey Stengel to Vince Lombardi to John Wooden to every great coach or manager of a sports team.
These are the heroic values we all learned in Little League or high school football: Teams win; egotistical individuals lose. People who know the game have left us great aphorisms, many comically paraphrased in Ted Lasso, often ensconced a Yogi Berra koan. And, just as Don Quixote is considered crazy for following the noble values of a knight errant, Ted Lasso is considered crazy for taking a coaching job in a sport he does not even understand. Ted tries to explain that the purpose of being a coach is not so much to win (pace Lombardi) as to build a winning team by helping all the players become their best selves. Ted appears so laughably naive in his mission that everyone tries to take advantage of him…the owner of the team, the players, the media, and the fans.
But like Don Quixote, Ted gradually wins people over to his noble mission and humble Will Rogers persona. Here is where the script writing of Ted Lasso is exceptional. The writers, like Cervantes, create one moment after another where Ted is set up for failure. And,like Don Quixote, he often does fail and takes a genuine beating. Also like Quixote, Ted nonetheless surprises people with his uncanny insight and intelligence, making his enterprise all the more difficult for people to understand. Why would he leave a wife and child home in America to come to the UK and submit to the arrogant wanker insults of Brits?
What’s even more peculiar is that Ted’s values are not only out of fashion, but also considered dangerous these days…the cracker white values of Trump’s Big Lie heartland. Is Lasso’s sly way of winning over of the Brits a dangerous reassertion of American exceptionalism? Or is it possibly something more profound? During all their wars, the Greeks had their Olympics. Somehow sports values were thought to transcend city state rivalries and battles. Politics today has lost its sense of sportsmanship and Fair Play; indeed, politics has even infiltrated the playing field before and after the game. One episode addresses this issue directly, only to resolve it by making it less a political cunundrum and more a matter of team members supporting their own. Aristophanes loaded his comedy with politics but never embraced an ideology. Instead he finds the human truth that idealogues seem to want to ignore.
Like Aristophanes, the comedy of Ted Lasso goes deeper than political palaver. It explores “responsibility” in friendship and love. The world of Ted Lasso’s Quixote is a a mean spirited world where everybody places themselves first and acts out of spite and vengence. A player rationalizes the bullying of Nate, the kit manager, by saying that Nate is weak and cannot do anything about it so he deserves to be bullied and it is fun. Right out of Thrasymachus in in Plato’s Republic. The women are the prizes of victory, to be discarded and replaced as they grow older. Ted encourages Rebecca, the team owner, to give up her Medea-like passion for revenge on her despicable ex-husband. The result: she paradoxically becomes stronger by allowing herself to be vulnerable as she attempts to date again. Inside that Medea is a teenage girl.
Again the artistry and wit of the writers impresses us from one moment to the next. The role of food in the story is worth its own exploration, from secret recipe shortbread baked by Lasso for a ritual meet with Rebecca to spicyhot Indian food to a happy birthday cake…Lasso reaffirms food its ceremonial role in life. When life loses its ceremonies…it’s like sports losing its rituals. Lasso has a bold Twainish honesty when he readily admits that he thinks tea taste disgusting….the truth at last. Innocents abroad.
Homer looked at the Trojan War through the lens of the anger of Achilles. The writers of Ted Lasso turn all their comedy on the exploration of Anger…of being rejected by a spouse, of being bullyied by team mate, of losing important games, of growing too old to play, of being snubbed in a restaurant (called A Taste of Greece..a punitentiary worthy detail).
After being forced to retire because of physical limitations, a Roy Kent, player famous for his anger, becomes passive and depressed. When given the forced opportunity to be a sports commentator, his anger breaks forth, insulting every aspect of the game in progress ….leading to cheers for his “telling it like it is.” He has diffused his anger by turning it into a mode of entertainment, like political commentators talk radio.
I notice that some people are put off by the sweet and happy resolutions in the storylines, complaining that Lasso is more of a crunchy comfort food indulgence than a biting comedy. Perhaps, but so many people are so angry these day. This is the real reason we are fish out of water…whether its politics, work, or romance…everybody is so angry that we don’t know how to cope without hiding or being mean. Despite enlightened advice to the contrary, it’s hard to be angry when you are eating an eclair or watching Ted Lasso.
Ted and his assistant coach consistently play with words and phrases for fun and delight, from awful puns to amazing bits of Second City verbal improv. These sword flashes of language remind us that playing with words is as important as playing on the field. When we lose our sense of play, we again lose our sense of ritual. The irony of play is that it uses repetition and ritual to discover a new way of seeing the familiar. Better to tilt at windmills, than to see everything as irredeemable. After all, windmills are the comic cross we use to crucify our prophets. It’s good to see Ted lasso a few Emmys along the way.
