If I want subtle, exquisite characterisation and deft, agonising exploration of everything precious and depraved about the human soul- wait, no, I do want that, but not from this show. Its very clever writing team are clearly capable of both subtlety and snark and choose neither, which is the screenwriter equivalent of big dick energy. Welcome to a world where humiliation and failure are borne with dignity and homemade biscuits and where everyone is redeemable, except Anthony Head, who spends two villainous seasons chomping on the scenery like a happy drunk at Nandos in his best role since Rocky Horror. On that basis alone, you’d think the Left would love this show. Witness, for instance, how many millions of pundits, critics, snobs, anxious fans and joyless critics are frantically anticipating the failure of Ted Lasso, a show which is literally about how winning isn’t everything. Ted Lasso is a transatlantic show which manages to be both profoundly sincere and deeply silly, and to some critics its success is final proof of the theory that irony died decades ago somewhere in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre. The British can’t stand sincerity, and Americans are suspicious of silliness, and in both cases a basic fear of being vulnerable sours our cultural narrative and severs us from our better selves. But what Ted Lasso is really about is belief, and hope, and other painfully embarrassing things that only Americans get away with addressing directly, like the possible upsides of not being an absolute prick all of the time. It’s far more than a football show, although Ted Lasso effectively explains the rules of the game most of the world calls football for the benefit of American cultural hegemonists and those of us who spent their schooldays wearing black and dodging sports. That’s what Ted Lasso is, technically speaking, about.īut it’s actually about more than that. In the process, a whole lot of cranky alpha males get to learn the power of self-belief and teamwork in blizzard of folksy wordplay and feel-good football-themed shenanigans. (Coincidentally, I feel the same about you lot, which is why this review is as near-as-dangit spoiler free.)įor anyone who hasn’t taken the plunge, Ted Lasso is a story about an American football coach who finds himself training a British premier league soccer club despite knowing nothing about the game or the culture and eventually wins everyone over by being an unlikely human firehose of gosh-darn down-home Yankee optimism. Astonishingly enough, Ted Lasso just loves you and wants you to be happy. I’m old enough to know that when damaged men let you into their private emotional worlds they often lock you in and expect you to start scrubbing.īut there’s no trick here. I’m old enough to have learned what happens when you underestimate human cruelty, even in fiction. For those of us who came by our hypervigilance honestly, Ted Lasso is hard to watch with your back to the door. It’s hard to trust a show so transparently about masculinity, where spoilt young men are taught safer, kinder ways of relating to the world and its disappointments and it all somehow works. It’s hard, after decades of being flayed alive by the a culture of toxic individualism and mashed under the heel of toxic white supreemacist heteropatriarchy, to trust a story where authority is basically benign, where gentle people make relentless dad-jokes and toss out such cloyingly cross-stitchable slogans as “I believe in hope. It’s a show so pure and heartfelt it’s hard to trust. Nor did I, as it happens, but if I had done it wouldn’t matter, because Ted Lasso is above that sort of petty point scoring. They hate it because it’s popular, and most of them didn’t get a chance to like it before it was popular. That, in fact, is one of the best bits of the inevitable backlash to Ted Lasso, the violently wholesome Anglo-American sports comedy that just scooped up an eyewatering number of Emmies in advance of today’s season finale and is currently the biggest show on television. Personally, I find few things more delicious in these dark times than watching judgy fuckers try not to enjoy themselves and fail. For some people, pleasure is always suspicious.
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