By Chris Satullo
In this world, I’ve recently concluded, there are two types of people:
- People who love Ted Lasso.
- People whom I really don’t need to have a beer with.
The hilarious, poignant and wise Apple TV+ show about an American coach uplifting a ragtag English football (OK … soccer) team just ended its three-year run. The acclaim and tearful thanks that its showrunners and cast have received from millions of fans are entirely merited.
The sneering critiques it got from a vocal minority of naysayers were not.
Cloying … saccharine … silly … undisciplined – those were some of the adjectives flung at Ted Lasso by sour voices online.
What needs to be said to all that is (thank you, Roy Kent): Oi!
Saccharine? While rewarding viewers with as bountiful a lode of funny scenes and exquisite one-liners as any show ever has (not to mention Roy’s copious, talismanic use of the F-word), Ted Lasso also dealt candidly with suicide, divorce, grief, anxiety, depression, homophobia, polarization and other modern ills.
Upon prayerful study of the negative comments online, I’ve reached this conclusion: The people judging the show harshly do so largely because, deep down, they feel judged – and found wanting – by Ted Lasso the series and Ted Lasso the remarkable character played by Jason Sudeikis.
The series hides homilies within its hilarity, just as Coach Ted cloaks his savvy inside wandering yarns. The show’s wisdom boils down to a lesson driven home powerfully in the final, bittersweet episode:
It’s a terrible feeling to be judged by your worst moments, which means it’s a cruel, unfair thing to judge others by their worst moments.
The loudest, most self-righteous voices on both sides of America’s polarized politics are, of course, addicted to judging other people solely by their worst moments. Political Twitter is a machine for doing that.
Ted Lasso may on the surface seem just a silly comedy about a sport most Americans neither care about nor understand. But it is slyly and insistently political, a dead-on, dead-serious commentary on what’s wrong with American political and societal attitudes today. And the series’ views on virtue are just the thing to leave ideologues of both the left and right frothing with ire.
The left: Ted Lasso, a white-bread Kansas City boy self-exiled to England, is decidedly not the ugly American. He is instead a beacon of what Americans used to think were their best qualities: optimism, helpfulness, teamwork, generosity of spirit. Over and over, Ted declines to judge, accepts apologies and forgives, offers second chances, puts kindness before scoring points.
How dare he? Doesn’t he know that Americans are supposed to bring racism, violence, cultural imperialism and capitalist exploitation wherever they stomp across the globe? Doesn’t he see that life is a war of good vs. evil, and the Other Side is evil and can never be forgiven?
The right: What about that side of the spectrum? Shouldn’t the people who want to “make America great again” cheer Ted’s buoyant Yankee optimism? Ha, not hardly. Just try to imagine Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Stephen Miller signing up to be Diamond Dogs. Trumpism is defined by who it hates and who it scorns; it’s fueled by mockery, denunciation and win-at-all-costs machismo.
Ted Lasso thinks that winning is nice but overrated – and shaking hands after you lose is not optional. It thinks women in the corner office are fabulous, being gay is superb, while hugging and sharing feelings is the secret sauce of great teams. What a snowflake that Lasso libtard is …
In my piece last week in this space, I ended with this thought: Joe Biden is the Ted Lasso of presidents. This week, please indulge me as I elaborate.
Ted Lasso is routinely underestimated and mocked by the media and his team’s fans because of his penchant for corny jokes, wandering syntax and clumsy stumbles. Joe Biden…check, check and check.
Ted finds two priceless allies in Rebecca and Keeley, two women dismissed as ditzes by many men. Joe had Nancy Pelosi and still has Jill Biden.
Ted’s nemesis is Rupert Mannion, a cruel narcissist obsessed with winning and prone to adultery. Joe…do I need to spell it out?
At the end of Season 1, Ted’s team, the AFC Richmond Greyhounds, gets relegated from the Premier League to a lower tier, a catastrophe for which he is roundly blamed by the team’s fans. Joe’s party lost the U.S. House in the first midterms of his administration.
Those noisy Richmond fans inside the Crown & Anchor pub are always sure they know more about strategy than that wanker Lasso, even though they have no clue what he’s really up to. Joe has noisome MSNBC and progressive Twitter.
Ted has to deal with and try to guide Jamie Tartt, an extravagantly talented but undisciplined and media-obsessed star player. Joe has AOC.
As noted, Ted’s practice and deep strategy is to offer opponents respect and praise, to meet failure with optimism and to forgive those who betray him – to the bafflement of Jamie, Rebecca and others, sometimes even his best friend and confidante, Coach Beard. Joe…well, how do you think he got the infrastructure package and the debt ceiling deal done?
The media and many fans continue to deem Ted a clown and a loser, even as, in Season 2, he gets Richmond back into the Premier League – and as, in Season 3, Richmond becomes a true team, nearly winning the whole damn thing.
Someday, perhaps, Joe Biden will get his Trent Crim – i.e., a journalist who finally gets it and writes the definite book on The Biden Way.
But even if that does happen, there’s no way this American scribe will have hair as spectacular as Trent (no longer “of the Independent”) Crim.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia