“You’re a mess, Ted.” — Sassy. (Ted Lasso)
I don’t write about popular culture that often because frankly, much of it is simply not very good. Anyway, most of the time, I watch sports or the same old movies on Netflix, Amazon Prime or YouTube over and over for my entertainment.
But recently, I finally joined the 21st century and started subscribing to some of the streaming services, which gives me access to shows like Platonic, The Morning Show and Ted Lasso.
The form these dramas take differs fundamentally from both traditional film and TV in surprising ways. It reminds me of the writing in serials popular in early 20th century publications and of course also of early radio and later TV. It’s also more like the quarter system in college as opposed to the old semester system: Ten weeks instead of 16, sped-up, like modern life.
Beyond the form, however, is the content and that’s what really interests me. In the world of web design and digital media, we spent years trying to discover ways to provide immersive experiences.
But the design and technology options we experimented with usually lacked good story-telling, which is the key, in the end, to all media success stories, regardless of form.
So on to a review.
Ted Lasso has strong characters, good writing, and the kind of emotional punch only good story-tellers can deliver. The series takes on corporate exploitation, racism, sexism, gender identity, social activism, loneliness, isolation, pornography, friendship, competition, jealousy, ambition, betrayal and almost every other social or psychological issue of our time with a pretty consistent sense of balance.
Which is to say that it’s light-hearted until it isn’t. That’s as it should be — these are not joking matters, though humor is always one way to try to cope.
Most forcefully, it takes on divorce directly and forcefully in an unrelenting way. When it comes to the real world of breaking up — especially when there are children involved — things only very slowly resolve themselves, if ever. In many ways, the pain never ends, but it can lessen with time.
I like that the Ted Lasso producers get that. He’s a mess, as he should be. In one memorable scene he is drinking alone on Christmas Eve, missing his broken family, while “A Wonderful Life” plays soundlessly on a television in the background.
Perfect. Been there, done that.
The trouble with most Hollywood endings is that life virtually never turns out happily ever after for the great majority of us.
Oh, one other thing I like about Lasso, and then I’ll quit, is about sports, which of course is the purported focus of the series. I haven’t finished the third season yet, so this might change, but Ted’s team pretty much, in a word, sucks. They almost never win, especially in the biggest and most important games.
Sports movies are never like that, but real life is often like that. But as Ted says more than on one occasion, and here I paraphrase, “It’s not the winning or losing that matters.”
Naturally there is much I could criticize in the series — the tiresome overuse of expletives, which is just lazy writing, a number of predictably wooden background characters, and unconvincing performances by most of the “soccer players” on the pitch. And are all English soccer fans really that stupid?
I guess for the answer to that one I could look closer to home. It’s a football Saturday and you know what I’m gonna be doin’ today...
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