Not helping matters, Apple extended the season to 12 episodes after the writers had plotted out 10, leading to two awkwardly inserted “specials”-a woeful Christmas episode and a dreamlike homage to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours-that further broke up the flow. Ted Lasso has flunked at form, wildly throwing around plot points that it belabors (Rebecca’s romance with the Richmond player Sam) or never mentions again (the team’s financial woes post-relegation). Without conflict, as the Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh pointed out on Twitter, a show struggles to deliver either drama or comedy. Season 2, having reformed all of its villains via Ted’s contagiously sunny disposition, had a harder time homing in on an animating tension. The story, its tropes ripped wholesale from sports movies, Westerns, and even Mary Poppins (a magical outsider teaches a broken family to love one another), functioned so gorgeously that it resisted critique. Season 1 benefited from having a tangible plot arc (underdog American coach hired by Premier League team), a primary antagonist (the team’s owner, Rebecca, a heartbroken divorcée who secretly hired Ted not to save Richmond but to bury the only thing her feckless ex-husband ever truly loved), and a whole universe of skeptical naysayers to be won over by Ted’s evangelical hope for both soccer and human nature.
What’s undeniable is that, structurally and stylistically, Season 2 just hasn’t been as good as the show’s first 10 episodes. Read: When a show about kindness gets darker He has to be plausible, too, or our only icons of “inspirational” masculinity would be Joe Rogan, Ice-T, and Dr.
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The series, other writers said, isn’t doing enough to further conversations about sex and power in the workplace, or “ heal the trauma of patriarchy.” In an incisive piece for Time, the TV critic Judy Berman observed how Ted’s cartoonish qualities, his unrecognizability as a real human being, are part and parcel with his seeming “so deliberately constructed to teach other adult men how to behave in the world.” Expectations for what this comedy can do have become so disproportionately high that Ted can’t merely be an entertaining character, or even a likable one. “Ted Lasso Can’t Save Us,” The New Yorker argued.
And so the backlash, and the counter-backlash, to a show that won acclaim for simply being nice was probably inevitable. Moments like this might have been what the Peabody Awards had in mind earlier this year when they honored Ted Lasso for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity.” Heavy expectations have thus been placed on the shoulders of a show whose main character (played winningly by Jason Sudeikis) is essentially a Labrador retriever with a mustache. “I will channel my raging enthusiasm into ways to help my community.” The landlady smiles at this reluctant display of personal growth and gets back to pouring pints. “I will … knock over a chair,” he counters. “I swear, if we actually win this match, I will burn this pub to the ground,” one boasts.
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In an episode halfway through the new season of Ted Lasso, Apple’s sweet and strange series about an optimistic American coach thrown into the cesspool of British soccer, the three AFC Richmond fans who compose the show’s dim-witted Greek chorus get ready to watch the FA Cup quarterfinal in a pub. This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of Ted Lasso.
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