Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt and Nick Mohammed in Ted Lasso. Photo / Supplied
Jason Sudeikis’s uplifting comedy returns to Apple TV this week for series 3. Its trick? Not trying to be too realistic
At first it seemed as if the football comedy The Red Zone had it all. A script by the award-winning sports writers Barney Ronay and Jonathan Liew, and the involvement of Sam Mendes through his production company. There had already been a read-through and casting auditions when the six-part series was placed on the list of Netflix’s forthcoming projects.
“A comedy about football, but also not about football,” the promotional blurb read. “It’s a story about the people and the surfaces that collide in the orbit of this strange, obsessional world of bluffers, sharks and genuine talent.”
Sounded grand. Then something happened. Apple TV’s Ted Lasso happened. Coronavirus delayed The Red Zone and by the time it was over, Mendes was distracted and the story of an American college football coach mischievously placed in charge of the fictional AFC Richmond had become a phenomenon.
“We thought we could be the anti-Lasso,” Ronay told me when we met at Wembley Stadium recently. “Yet, as time went on, it was plain that wasn’t going to happen. Ted Lasso took over. It became, ‘Could you make it a bit more like this; could you make it a bit more like that?’ And by then it had become so big they just cancelled. They wanted to have the first big, successful football comedy. And once it was obvious they couldn’t have that, it was over.” Netflix denies that Ted Lasso was a factor in not taking the project forward.
Ted Lasso was first broadcast in August 2020 and returns to our screens for its third series today. It began as a character invented and played by Jason Sudeikis to promote NBC Sports’ coverage of the Premier League in 2013. Back then Ted was a buffoon who thought games were played in quarters, footballers wore helmets and kicking the ball over the bar earned three points. He thought his new job with Tottenham Hotspurs was going well and revealed that the players had even given him a nickname. “Wanker,” Lasso explained. “I think it just means great. You know, a nice guy …”
Sudeikis played Ted strictly for laughs, teeing up the slogan “It’s football — just not as we know it”. Yet Apple TV+ felt there was life in the project and in 2019, with English football bigger than ever in the US and now on NBC’s main channel, Lasso was resurrected.
Today he is less of a clown, more of a well-meaning optimist with a direct line to the human spirit. He is appointed because the club’s owner, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), wants to tank her unfaithful ex-husband’s pride and joy. Yet while Sudeikis’s character is still out of his depth at times, the narrative is uplifting, with Ted’s charm and personality eventually winning the day. What Ted lacks in football smarts, he makes up for in understanding and soulful insight. It’s feelgood, high on positivity — and its success is quite exceptional.
Ted Lasso works as a commercial project — its premiere was the most watched programme on Apple TV+ and the second season increased the viewership six times over — and as an artistic one. It has garnered 40 Emmy nominations, and won 11. Times have changed. The 2013 Ted was an idiot, utterly without self-awareness and sacked from his job within six hours. He didn’t know the rules, the language or the culture, but had a foolishly unshakeable belief in his own ability. Resurrected amid a global crisis, Lasso is now about kindness and positivity. Before, he could only flop. Now he invites the world to rise with him. It’s a transformation.
And as far removed from the reality of football as it is possible to imagine. Ted gives a half-time team talk about embracing change. He’s actually working through the separation from his wife, contemplating allowing those you love to move on, but in his mouth the folksy decency becomes moving and inspiring to his players. A real half-time team talk is more likely to sound like the one delivered by the Leyton Orient manager John Sitton, and unsparingly caught by a documentary team, during a 1995 match with Blackpool. Some excerpts:
“Now don’t be coming back at me when I’m shouting at you above the crowd, right? Because I run this f***ing football club until I’m told otherwise by the f***ing circus upstairs.”
“I’m wasting my breath on some of you. What have I said about good players? They want to be good players all the time. Don’t you know how profound that is? Have you not examined the f***ing words? Because you’ve had two good performances and you think, ‘I’m f***ing Bertie Bigbollocks tonight. I’ll f***ing play as I like.’ But you won’t play as you like because I’ll stick the f***ing youth team on. Because if I’m going to take abuse from the bunch of cockroaches behind me, I’ll take abuse by doing it my way. And that is f***ing conformity, not f***ing nonconformity.”
“So you, you little c***, when I tell you to do something and you, you f***ing big c***, when I tell you to do something, do it, and if you come back at me we’ll have a right f***ing sort out in here. And you can pair up if you like, and you can f***ing pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your f***ing dinner. Because by the time I’m finished with you you’ll f***ing need it.”
Unsurprisingly we prefer Ted Lasso. And that is perhaps why football doesn’t work as well as it should on screen. It’s actually too gritty for a subject that is supposed to be fun. A redemption story, the eternal optimist triumphing against the odds, is what we want from sport; not grim, furious, often powerless men, swearing and threatening in a shabby dressing room. The original script of Escape to Victory, a film about a football match being played between Allied prisoners of war and a German XI, had the hero goalkeeper dribbling around an entire team of opponents to score the winning goal. It was left to the film’s football advisers to point out that this would never, could never, happen. That, even in Hollywood, sporting narratives had limits.
It is perhaps why the documentary Welcome to Wrexham is so watchable. It has enough reality — being real — but a Hollywood aesthetic in its storytelling. Rob McElhenney, one of Wrexham’s owners, has co-written 18 seasons of the comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Ryan Reynolds, his partner, is nothing less than a proper mega film star. Together they capture the innocent abroad feel of Ted Lasso, married to the harsh reality of life in football’s fifth tier. And the action is real too.
Another problem for football on screen is how false the playing scenes appear. The Damned United is a fine film, but the depiction of Billy Bremner, a great footballer and Scotland’s captain, as an unfit little man with a pot belly would irk any football fan. Nobody would have fancied a fight with the real Bremner, who is recalled by friends confronting a gang of heavies in a nightclub during his playing days. The Leeds captain turned to his team-mates. “Pick up a chair, lads,” he ordered. “We’re leaving.”
The best football film? It’s a personal opinion, but The Club, based on the play by David Williamson, deserves a much wider audience. It’s a different football — Australian Rules — but the cast of characters is familiar. The chairman, Ted Parker, living vicariously through the team to cover his own inadequacies; the bitter, conniving and vindictive club legend Jock; the put-upon coach; the expensive tyro, struggling with the pressure of his big-money move. The Club yields to the sporting cliché of redemption by the end, but is still well worth locating. In the meantime, for football that’s all kindness, heart and gentle wisdom, there’s Ted Lasso. It’s not how it is; but it’s what people want to believe.
The Club (1980)
Find a Top 30 or even a Top 50 list of sports movies and Bruce Beresford’s The Club never gets a mention. All the more reason to make it No 1. You don’t even need to know Aussie Rules football because the characters are so perfectly drawn and immediately recognisable. As at most clubs, the boardroom intrigue is as entertaining as the action.
Raging Bull (1980)
Like all the best sports films, it’s barely a sports film at all, even if the fight scenes are startling in their brutality. Martin Scorsese hated boxing. It was Robert De Niro who persuaded him to tell Jake LaMotta’s story as one of pain, failed relationships and human cruelty.
Senna (2010)
Before Asif Kapadia won the best documentary Oscar for Amy, he made this fascinating examination of the life, and death, of the Formula One driver Ayrton Senna. Using unguarded archive footage so intimate its very existence is miraculous, he paints a portrait of a man who was competitive to the point of destruction. By the time the story reaches Imola, the sense of impending doom is palpable.
Caddyshack (1980)
Goofy, stoned, crass, childish but also hysterically funny, Caddyshack rises above the mopey teenage love story at its centre to unleash peak Bill Murray as the greenkeeper Carl Spacker and the late Rodney Dangerfield as the brash nouveau riche golfer Al Czervik. There are too many great lines to mention, but try to hold a club without inwardly narrating Murray’s Masters commentary once you’ve seen it.
The Fortune Cookie (1966)
Another non-sport sports film, and the first on which Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau collaborated. Billy Wilder directs a tale of an injured sports photographer and a scamming lawyer. “This guy is so full of angles and gimmicks and twists — he starts to describe a doughnut and it comes out a pretzel,” says an insurance man of Matthau’s “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich.
Written by: Martin Samuel
© The Times of London
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