By Coren Feldman
I watched the entire first season of Ted Lasso because the internet was raving about it and there aren't that many new things on AppleTV. The show also promised the idea of a wholesome, positive male role model, which is also appealing to me. But when I actually watched it, I found it extremely grating.
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| The character is about 50% mustache. |
Ted Lasso actually started as a series of ads starring Jason Sudekis in the same role to promote NBC buying the airing rights to the British premiere league. The ads used him as a foil for the American audience that doesn't understand the appeal of the sport or how it works.
In the new incarnation of the concept, Sudekis' Lasso is a southern, mild mannered football (American) coach who gets picked to coach a football (British) team despite having no experience. Ted's defining characteristic is that he's just a really nice guy without a bad bone in his body. He and his assistant coach fly over to find that their new team isn't crazy about this change and refuse to work with him. To top it off, the club manager, unbeknownst to him, only hired him to sink the team in an effort to get back at her ex husband.
The reception of the show has been overwhelmingly positive, so when I finally got around to watching it, I was extremely disappointed.
Most of the jokes in the show (in my opinion, obviously) fall flat, though they do get a select few good laughs in each episode. The plot is predictable and uninteresting: just like basically every single sports story, you have a fish out of water coming in with fresh ideas that don't seem like they'll work and an antagonistic team begrudgingly learning to love him as they improve.
The characters are also lacking any kind of depth. Lasso can only be described as "nice" and "southern" and that's more than they give any other character. There's an embarrassing effort to inject depth into him by adding in a divorce story (which, you guessed it, he's being super swell about) but he's such a cliché that it doesn't manage to tip the scales.
What I've come to realize makes me intensely dislike this show, though, are none of those things.
The writers of Ted Lasso set out specifically to make a show that revolves around a wholesome male character, and in doing so, have put him on a pedestal. He's nice, sure, but it's a symptom of how low the bar is set for men in media and in general that you can revolve an entire show around it. If you've seen the show, try to imagine a gender swap where Ted is a woman. Would the show still have the same tone, or are we just impressed with him because we expect so little of men?
To make matters worse, Ted is always right about everything and has no character flaws to speak of. The fact that he can do no wrong just further removes the character from being a believable real person and role model.
Real wholesomeness doesn't need to be held up and drawn attention to. So many shows have wholesome male characters - Steven and his dad in Steven Universe, Ben Wyatt in Parks and Rec, Uncle Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender and Patrick in Schitt's Creek, just to name a few. If the show kept Ted as a nice guy but didn't focus so heavily on it, I might have found it more palatable. But celebrating a man for not sucking every single episode wears thin and contradicts what a real wholesome message would be: That this behavior should be commonplace.
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| Coren Feldman is the founder of CorenTV, which is now launching CorenTV+ with original shows such as the gritty Brady Bunch reboot, "Brady", where the kids are played by actors in their 30s and the parents are played by actors in their 40s. |