superborb

This show would sound totally not up my alley from the premise. A comedy about sportsball?! But it was so highly recced by so many people that I had to check it out and you guys.

It is definitely worth watching!!

The premise: Rebecca Walton is the new owner of AFC Richmond after an acrimonious divorce and wants to tear the team down. It's the only thing her ex-husband truly loved you see. So, she hires Ted Lasso, a DII American football coach, as the next coach of this Premier League (association) football team. DII is the second of three tiers of collegiate level sports in the US; the Premier League is the top of the pro level football. Ted is (obviously) not prepared and knows nothing about football, but what he has is a gift for emotional earnestness. The sportsball part doesn't really matter for understanding the plot. Relegation bad, you can osmose that pretty quickly. (Presumably you understand more of the jokes if you know football.)

Let me get the things I didn't like out of the way so I can gush after. First, Ted apparently never learns even basic rules about football even at the very end of the season. Yeah, it's played for laughs, but c'mon, that's way lazy. It's lampshaded a real tiny bit near the end, but I didn't like it!

The other problem is it leans a bit hard on the stereotypes for secondary characters-- and because most of the core cast is white, this means many of the characters of color get little more than a happy-go-lucky (or other) stereotype with a bit of padding. The show does try to subvert expectations -- at one point Ted gives a little Army toy (that his son gave him to keep him safe) to one of his players, but well, the player points out that he doesn't have pleasant associations with the American military. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of the main cast is white, and that's the result of that choice.

And the tiniest complaint: the accent Ted uses is real weird. After listening to the actor's interviews, it seems that he has a midwestern accent and is putting on a southern accent?? W-why not just keep your distinct midwestern accent, which surely registers as a very American accent??

OK Now the stuff I loved. I am a total sucker for EARNEST FEELINGS and well, you get a lot of those. They do not spare those. When the situation calls for a serious talk, a serious talk is what happens! (But like, with jokes. Not so serious as to be boring.) I mostly don't like comedies because second hand embarrassment is a huge squick, but Ted Lasso does a neat turn around each potential moment that meant that I never cringed away from the screen.

Keeley, a B list model who dates the star player, and Roy, the aging, angry captain, sometimes do feel like a little bit too stereotyped at the beginning, but I quickly fell in love (much as Roy reluctantly comes around to Ted...) by the middle of the show. Really, I think they cast so well. All the actors delivered so well, during the comedic moments and the emotional ones.

Trent Crimm, a skeptical journalist who is extremely reluctantly charmed by Ted, and the other Richmond fans who are also extremely skeptical yet reluctantly charmed, were exactly as great as you can imagine from that description. Love it.

Also I ship Keeley/Rebecca. Though Roy may be more emotionally aware than Rebecca, hard to say there.