Month: August 2021

The Emmy-nominated comedy series Ted Lasso doesn’t merely repudiate the knee-jerk cynicism of our culture—it’s the vaccine for the self-reinforcing cynicism of our pop culture.  In a feat of inspiring commercial and moral imagination, Jason Sudeikis has given us a new kind of hero—in an old type of story.

As a boy coming of age in the eighties and early nineties, I had no shortage of Hollywood role models.  The movies offered smartass supercops John McClane and Martin Riggs, vengeful super-soldiers John Matrix and John Rambo, and scorched-earth survivalists Snake Plissken and Mad Max, to cite a select sampling.  Sure, each action-hero archetype differed somewhat in temperament—supercops liked to crack wise as they cracked skulls, whereas the soldiers and survivalists tended to be men of few words and infinite munitions—but they were, one and all, violent badasses of the first order:  gun-totin’, go-it-alone individualists who refused to play by society’s restrictive, namby-pamby rules.

Yippee ki-yay.

The small screen supplied no shortage of hero detectives in this mode, either—Sonny Crockett, Thomas Magnum, Rick Hunter, Dennis Booker—but owed to the content restrictions of broadcast television, they mostly just palm-slammed a magazine into the butt of a chrome Beretta and flashed a charismatic GQ grin in lieu of the clever-kill-and-quick-one-liner m.o. of their cinematic counterparts.  (The A-Team sure as hell expended a lot of ammo, but their aim was so good, or possibly so terrible, the copious machine-gun fire never actually made contact with human flesh.)  The opening-credits sequences—MTV-style neon-noir music videos set to power-chord-driven instrumentals—made each show’s gleaming cityscape look like a rebel gumshoe’s paradise of gunfights, hot babes, fast cars, and big explosions.

It might even be argued our TV heroes exerted appreciably greater influence on us than the movie-franchise sleuths that would often go years between sequels, because we invited the former into our home week after week, even day after day (in syndication).  And to be sure:  We looked to those guys as exemplars of how to carry ourselves.  How to dress.  How to be cool.  How to talk to the opposite sex.  How to casually disregard any and all institutional regulations that stood in the way of a given momentary impulse.  How to see ourselves as the solitary hero of a cultural narrative in which authority was inherently suspect and therefore should be proudly, garishly, and reflexively challenged at every opportunity.  The world was our playground, after all—with everyone else merely a supporting actor in the “great-man” epic of our own personal hero’s journey.

Oh, how I wish, in retrospect, we’d had a heroic role model like Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso instead.

THE LAST BOY SCOUT

The premise of Ted Lasso, which recently commenced its second season, is a can-do college-football coach from Kansas (Sudeikis) is inexplicably hired to manage an English Premier League team, despite that kind of football being an entirely different sport.  Ted, we learn, has been set up to fail by the embittered ex-wife of the club’s former owner (Hannah Waddingham), who, in a plot twist that owes no minor creative debt to David S. Ward’s baseball-comedy classic Major League—which the show tacitly acknowledges when Ted uncharacteristically invokes a key line of profane dialogue from the movie verbatim—inherited the team in a divorce and is now surreptitiously revenge-plotting its implosion.

But, boy oh boy, has Waddingham’s Rebecca Welton—a refreshingly dimensional and sympathetic character in her own right, it’s worth noting—seriously underestimated her handpicked patsy.  With his folksy enthusiasm and full Tom Selleck ’stache, Coach Ted Lasso unironically exemplifies big-heartedness, open-mindedness, kindness, courtesy, chivalry, civility, forgiveness, wisdom, teamwork, cultural sensitivity, and prosocial values—all with good humor, to boot.  His infectious optimism eventually converts even the most jaded characters on the show into true believers, and his innate goodness inspires everyone in his orbit—often despite themselves—to be a better person.  And if, like me, you watch the first season waiting for the show to at some point subject Ted’s heart-on-his-sleeve earnestness to postmodern mockery or ridicule—“spoiler alert”—it doesn’t.