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.
“Miami Vice” 
“Magnum, P.I.”
“Hunter” 
“Booker”
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.
The character originated in 2013 in NBC Sports promos that Sudeikis created with his old improv buddies Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly, executive producers on the series. (Hunt also stars as Coach Beard, Lasso’s sidekick.) The spots were clever and the character amusing. But when he arrived in series form on Apple TV+ in August 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, a bitterly divisive presidential election and a summer of police violence and racial justice protests, the deeply decent, endlessly upbeat Ted Lasso was like a cultural balm.
“It’s as if Sudeikis et al. foresaw the chaos and terror of the summer of 2020 and wanted to prove that America could do something right,” the Times TV critic Mike Hale wrote in his review. Similar sentiments were widely and repeatedly shared as the show traced the same trajectory as its protagonist, winning over people with the surprising emotional depth and charm beneath the goofy exterior.
Jeremy Egner, “‘Ted Lasso’ Is Back, but No Longer an Underdog,” New York Times, July 14, 2021
Who can even remember, at this point, the last time we had an adult male protagonist of a mainstream TV series that wasn’t, on one end of the archetypal spectrum, a violent crimefighter or, on the other, an oafish buffoon? If Sudeikis and his collaborators had done nothing more than offer an alternative to those pernicious, self-affirming stereotypes, Ted Lasso would’ve been a welcome pop-cultural outlier, but they’ve also retrieved a basic narrative principle conspicuously out of fashion in our postnarrative era: simple plots; complex characters.
“Ted Lasso” doesn’t just avoid toxic masculinity; it actively rejects it. Just about all the would-be tough-guy footballers of the series end up shedding their protective macho layers over the course of the season to reveal the kind, sensitive men who exist underneath all the bravado. “Any kind of machismo that is there is very much ridiculed,” Waddingham says. “There’s always a nod to it being ridiculous, which is really lovely”. . . .
Watching a show about people learning to be empathetic and not to fear their own vulnerability, let alone a sports comedy, is an undeniably large part of how “Ted Lasso” won so many hearts and minds since its release amid a devastating pandemic. “People have just loved the fact that the show has people being nice and kind to each other, and trying to improve themselves,” says Waddingham. “That shouldn’t be unusual!”
Caroline Framke, “With ‘Ted Lasso,’ Hannah Waddingham and Juno Temple’s On- and Off-Screen Friendship Flips the Sports Comedy Script,” Variety, July 15, 2021
Ted Lasso’s commercial success stands as evidence that audiences haven’t merely been starved for fiction that espouses an ethos of radical kindness—though certainly that—but prescriptive fiction of any form. Stories that are about something. That have a theme—a controlling idea, an agenda beyond their own storyless self-perpetuation. That in no way require we make meaning of them through exhaustive (and Sisyphean) “fan forensics.” That challenge us to explore their thematic subject with the storytellers, and reward us in return for our time and attention with catharsis. Ted Lasso has reminded us of the tremendous value—and tremendous pleasure—of cathartic fiction, of aspirational narratives.
Yes, “Ted Lasso” can lean heavily on the sentiment; the new season has a Christmas episode you could frost a gingerbread house with. But it’s far more nuanced than the hugging-and-learning sitcoms of TV’s early years—often challenging whether Ted’s winning-isn’t-everything attitude is the right fit for every situation, and whether it’s even entirely healthy.
James Poniewozik, “How TV Went From David Brent to Ted Lasso,” Critic’s Notebook, New York Times, July 26, 2021
This, dear friends, is what morally imaginative storytelling is all about.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
While it lacks Ted Lasso’s feel-good optimism, AMC’s Kevin Can F**k Himself is also a morally (and creatively) imaginative indictment of toxic masculinity, about a working-class woman in Worcester (Allison, played by Annie Murphy of Schitt’s Creek) unhappily married to an insensitive, puerile boor (Kevin, as portrayed by Eric Petersen). A standard-issue TV-show setup, I’ll grant.
Here’s where things get interesting: All the sequences in which Kevin is the dramatic focus are presented as a King of Queens–style multicamera sitcom, complete with canned laugh track. When Kevin barges into a scene, whatever might’ve been happening stops on a dime and he becomes the sole object of everyone’s attention; his problem du jour supersedes all other matters. Hell, it never even occurs to Kevin there is a scene underway before he enters a room; he’s that insufferably egocentric.
Allison’s scenes, by contrast, adopt the aesthetic of our contemporary “prestige dramas”: sullen, self-important, underlit, overplotted. Extramarital sex, drug deals, murder schemes—Allison’s miserable side of the story has it all. Except, of course, a scintilla of levity, because prestige TV is too “realistic” for that. Such is the joyless, hopeless, endless existence to which poor Allison is condemned.
Kevin Can F**k Himself should in no way work. How does one present a coherent narrative across two incongruous, even incompatible, televisional formats—while leaning into the hackiest clichés of both, no less? And yet more than merely a subversive deconstruction of studio-audience sitcom and serialized drama conventions alike, Kevin bathetically juxtaposes those genres to say something insightful about socioeconomic hardship and our Peter Pan culture of developmentally arrested, impenitently self-involved manchildren.
Ted Lasso and Kevin Can F**k Himself are, each in their own way, the antithesis of both the cynical nihilism porn of Robert Kirkman’s relentlessly dreary The Walking Dead, which celebrates the collapse of civilized society and all of its legal and ethical constraints (despite occasional and disingenuous lip service to the contrary), as well as the stunted-adolescence superhero worship of Kirkman’s critically lauded new animated series Invincible, about the seventeen-year-old son of an omnipotent, Superman-esque alien savior coming into powers of his own as his seemingly noble father is revealed to be a mass murderer (à la Darth Vader) and his (human) mother spirals into alcoholic depression.
Yeah.
I wonder: What, exactly, was the pitch for Invincible? “It’s for everyone who adored Super Friends in the eighties, but wished it were more grounded and elevated with gratuitous profanity and wanton bloodletting”? If that sounds too on-the-nose to be true, king of the Gen X fanboys Kevin Smith, director of the Jay and Silent Bob chronicles, those increasingly (and unconsciously) sad paeans to pueri aeterni, openly acknowledged that as the very creative approach he took when tasked by Mattel to produce “a sophisticated, adult continuation of the ‘He-Man’ animated series from the 1980s”:
“I know how to Marvel-ize this shit,” Smith said. “They re-served me my childhood with fresh recipes, and I get to eat the same meals that made me happy as a kid all over again. But it’s a trick. I’ve been studying Kevin Feige like crazy for 10 years. They give you something that you feel like looks like your childhood. But when you go back and compare it to your childhood, it’s way better. And that’s what we did here.”
Adam B. Vary, “Kevin Smith Made Netflix’s ‘Masters of the Universe: Revelation’ Specifically to Please ‘He-Man’ Fans. Some Got Mad Anyway.”, Variety, July 24, 2021
Such shows—alongside “harmless entertainment” the likes of the Fast & Furious movies and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One—are the morally unimaginative, self-serving wish-fulfillment fantasies of a generation raised by the (literal) action figures of the Reagan era. These narratives exist to reaffirm, loudly and proudly, a juvenile worldview in which acting exclusively and unapologetically in one’s (trivial) self-interest isn’t merely altogether appropriate, it’s unassailably heroic.
What’s a (he-)man, after all, but someone who sees himself as the central character—the white knight—of his own epic story? Just ask the self-righteous (and self-deluded) male protagonists of The Walking Dead, Invincible, Fast & Furious, and Ready Player One—all of which are the brainchildren of Gen X writers who’ve assimilated the corrupt values embedded in the corporate entertainment they consumed in their youth, only to now pass down those principles wholesale in their own works of popular fiction.
STAND BY ME
Jason Sudeikis is less than a year older than I am. He grew up on all the same pop-cultural touchstones—he’s clearly a fan of Major League, too—so it’s all the more impressive and inspiring that, with Ted Lasso, he’s created both a show and a character that consciously opposes the celebrated narratives and archetypes of our generation’s upbringing. That takes moral imagination, a quality in demonstrably short supply these days in Tinseltown.
As it happens, I’ve been at work on a series of wish-fulfilment stories about boyhood in the 1980s, including Spex, a novella of magical realism in which two impressionable 12-year-olds—obsessed with the same comics, cartoons, and cop shows all of us Xers were back then (and many, through corporate conditioning, still are)—come into possession of a pair of magically functional “X-ray specs,” and soon begin to see not everything behind closed doors, or even in plain sight, is quite as it appears.
Writing about the adventures and friendships particular to that twilit period of innocence, with its inevitable disillusionments that mark the transition from childhood to adolescence, has necessitated an immersive inquiry, what you might even call a Ghost of Christmas Past–guided tour, of my own youth—particularly the Keyser Söze–esque revelation of my father’s alcoholism when I was twelve, which served, on the subject of disenchanting experiences, as the prologue to my parents’ divorce.
How starkly apparent it is to me now that I spent my teenage years as a boy in search of absent father. Same goes, I would reasonably speculate, for the three other members of my grade-school gang: One guy’s dad vanished when he was born and never came back; the unemployed father of the other two struggled with what was clearly a case of undiagnosed depression and slept most of the day away, while his waking hours were marked by spontaneous explosions of his Irish temper. None of our dads offered any measure of emotional (let alone financial) support. Other than our beloved Hollywood detectives, no one was modeling for us what it means to be a man.
After public junior high, the four of us, to our unwelcome surprise, wound up at all-boys preparatory academies (different ones, at that—so we couldn’t at very least be miserable together). No one at those schools took much of an interest in us, either. Nobody ever had a single conversation with me—and I know this is true of the two brothers in my gang, as well, both of whom are still close friends—about what the point of, say, a dress code was, and why we were expected to observe it. About how to behave like a gentleman on a date. (Or simply how to ask a young lady out on one, not that there were any opportunities for it.) About the confounding changes that were happening to our bodies; we certainly didn’t get any spoiler alerts about those plot developments.
Sure seems to me those would’ve been subjects worth integrating into the broader curriculum, else what was even the point of being consigned to a boys-only environment at such a key stage of social development? Why do that if you’re not at least making an effort to teach those boys how to be men? If nothing else, it would’ve been nice if someone had just explained how to shave, something the school required—on punishment of detention—but just assumed we, like, knew how to do. I mean, they taught algebra before they tested us on it, but personal grooming didn’t merit the same systematic instruction? That left me to study a scene from—and I wish I were kidding—Lethal Weapon 3, released during my sophomore year, whereby Danny Glover shows his fifteen-year-old son how to “go with the grain.” I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I looked to my action heroes to teach me about manhood—and I was far from the only fatherless kid who did.
And if there couldn’t be fathers, or father figures, around to look up to, I at least wish there’d been more fictional role models like Ted Lasso—the kind that could’ve demonstrated virtues like perseverance, humility, civility, teamwork, and goofball humor; that cynicism is for the unimaginative, and that it’s in fact optimism that takes real courage; that physical fitness is about staying healthy and respecting one’s body, not trying to achieve the impossible physique standards of Hollywood actors who spend eight hours a day in supervised strength-training sessions while their onscreen characters do nothing but chain-smoke and guzzle Budweiser; that making the occasional bad call doesn’t necessarily make us a bad person, so long as we acknowledge, apologize for, and make amends for our mistakes; that forgiveness isn’t merely an act of compassion we show those who’ve trespassed against us, but one we show ourselves by letting go of grudges; that “tough guys” are a dime a dozen, and it’s the nice guys who deserve our admiration; that kindness is cool; that we fail more than we succeed in life, but we can choose to show patience over grievance, resilience over resentment, and optimism over bitterness in the face of our setbacks and disappointments.
Our competitive culture celebrates winners, but what if we were taught—I mean consciously, intentionally encouraged—to instead appreciate the value of trying and losing, especially when the odds are long? That’s how you teach pragmatic optimism. Because optimism isn’t thinking “I’m gonna win”; rather, it’s accepting the likelihood you won’t, but deciding nonetheless a given cause is worthy of your best effort anyway.
For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helpin’ these young fellas be the best versions of themselves—on and off the field. And it ain’t always easy, Trent, but neither is growin’ up without someone believin’ in you.
Ted Lasso from “Trent Crimm: The Independent,” written by Jane Becker
Has a truer sentence ever been uttered? I vividly recall the adolescent yearning I nursed for that—for a father figure who believed in me. I imagine there are a lot of boys out there—a lot of kids of all genders—who ache for it, too. And I believe it’s precisely because we’ve so spectacularly failed to provide young people—particularly boys—with emotionally healthy male role models, be them flesh-and-blood or fictional, we now have a generation of middle-aged men who’d rather be boys themselves than mentor any, who’d rather complain about the state of the world than do anything productive about it. Ted Lasso relays his own experiences with such manboys when Rebecca’s ex-husband Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head), a cruel son of a bitch who thrives on the pain of others, attempts to publicly humiliate Ted by challenging him to a game of darts:
You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I was drivin’ my little boy to school and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman painted on the wall there. It said: “Be curious, not judgmental.” I like that.
So, I get back in my car and I’m drivin’ to work, and all of a sudden it hits me: All them fellas that used to belittle me—not a single one of ’em were curious. Ya know, they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimatin’ me? Who I was had nothin’ to do with it. ’Cause if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions. You know? Questions like, “Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?” To which I would’ve answered, “Yes, sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father, from age ten till I was sixteen, when he passed away.”
Ted Lasso from “The Diamond Dogs,” written by Leann Bowen
It is in no way an instance of creative happenstance that Ted’s anecdote involves both his father and son. We need to do better by all the sons out there—to help them be the best versions of themselves. And that doesn’t mean having all the answers—quite the contrary. It only means taking an interest in the emotional development and wellbeing of a young person—the kind like I once was: one with a lot of gaps in his knowledge and no one to step in and address the questions he doesn’t even know he has.
Serving as that kind of mentor means being curious, not judgmental. And I’m not too proud to admit I’ve often been one of those guys who rendered judgments rather than asked questions. In the past, I’ve taken the one talent I was given—knowing how to string words together—and weaponized it instead of using it to express compassion and curiosity. Self-righteousness is easy—and worse still, it’s addictive. Take it from someone for whom manhood was modeled by a bunch of tough-guy action heroes who knew better than everyone else, who proudly didn’t give a fuck—each and every one (self-)ordained to save the rest of us from our own abject plebeian conformity. Ha! I don’t suppose it’s realistic or even possible to apologize for every instance of selfishness and sanctimony I’ve ever demonstrated throughout my adult life, but I sure as hell won’t be exalting that crap in any fiction I produce.
We need more commercial storytellers willing to exercise and expand their moral imaginations—a creative approach I might even suggest calling “the Ted Lasso way.” Speaking as a storyteller who devoted his period of self-quarantine to the search for a hero who embodies a renewed ethos of sympathetic coexistence, cooperation, and kindness, for Ted Lasso, who swooped in from nowhere just when we needed him most, I have three words: I appreciate you.
Wow, Sean–when you give a review, you don’t muck about. As a side issue, I thought you’d enjoy this little six minute video–Star Trek: it’s dead, Jim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BiyH8lENRs
I have an possibly interesting hypothesis for you, given that I seem to be a few years older, (I’m at the beginning of Gen-X). I watched the cultural demise of Christianity happen in our society. We went to church in the 60s just because everyone did. In the seventies, people just stopped going, and that very potent societal safeguard just…went away. I lived through much of the same family emptiness that you did, with side helpings of extra cruelty.
But I at least had a place where life seemed to have real meaning.
And as a lover of stories, I’ve watched our tales grow ever further from the old Christian themes, which at first can seem to be liberating, but in the end has led us to where we are. I got tired of wallowing in the cesspool, and I’ve mostly checked out of popular culture. It’s so fragmented anymore that it’s not like anyone can tell. I mean, it’s not like you show up at school and you haven’t seen the latest episode of Welcome Back Kotter so you feel socially awkward.
Popular culture has nothing to look forward to. It can’t find a real hope of any optimism when our society doesn’t have any.
And I’m so sick of the nihilism that I don’t usually even bother to rage against it. But it’s not as though my books are flying off the virtual shelves, either, even though they’re competently written with worthwhile themes.
In many ways we’re on opposite sides of the current cultural divide, and I often bite my tongue or just forego commenting because this is your space, and I don’t want to challenge you in it.
But just as food for thought–with all the stories being written and filmed, how many of them are any good? Okay, that number was always a minority. But it seems to be shrinking, and it shouldn’t be.
Hey, Cathleen!
Thanks for the link to the Star Trek obituary. There are a lot of those videos out there — some of them amusing, a few of them even genuinely critically insightful — but I sort of find them problematic in their own way. They’re often indicative of a mentality I cite in the closing paragraphs of the essay above: a proclivity to complain about things rather than do anything about them. And someone like the Critical Drinker might argue in response to that: “Well, there’s nothing any of us can do about Star Trek. We have no control over the creative direction the franchise takes!” True — but there is one thing within our power to do: Let it go. Decide right now you’re not renting out any more space in your head or in your life to Star Trek. Just like that. Here’s how it’s done. I’ve tried to encourage the folks over at STD SUCKS to do likewise, but they’re too sanctimony-addicted to let it go, and to reinvest their money, time, and attention in other pursuits. So be it.
To you other point: I think what happened was that around the turn of the millennium, we lost or abandoned or forfeited (or some combination thereof) our very sense of narrativity. This is a topic I first wrote about six years ago in “Journey’s End.” Whether it was the “hero’s journey,” or the Judeo-Christian narrative, or even the American Dream, we decided we’d had enough of those stories:
Without a sense of narrativity — without beginnings or endings, without arcs and goals — we found ourselves stuck in a state of presentism. This is reflected in all the fiction of the last twenty years, from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones to Lost to Seinfeld to Family Guy to the “multiverse” of the DC and Marvel transmedia franchises. Our fiction keeps us suspended in a perpetual state of right now: no goals, no growth, no catharsis. And we had fun, for a while, living in a reality devoid of narrative patterns, “of succumbing to the chaos of a postnarrative world,” as Rushkoff says. But after a while, presentism started to feel like nihilism.
And for reasons I examined in “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga,” I think we’re ready once again for prescriptive/aspirational narratives. We ache for noble goals, and for forward motion. And I think we’re seeing that sociocultural shift in our pop culture (Ted Lasso), in our politics (the American Jobs Plan), and perhaps even in our religious organizations (Pope Francis is certainly making an effort — not without controversy, I’ll concede — to endow the Catholic Church with a relatively more progressive ethos than his predecessors). There will always be pessimists and nihilists — Ted Lasso doesn’t present a world without bullies and naysayers — but we can choose to reject that worldview. I do. And the best way to fight it — in our fiction or in our everyday lives — is to model antithetical behavior to it. You know? When one gets gloomy about the state of the world — and I do — the best antidote is to go out and do something kind.
As for pop culture: I have a lot of friends who would love for me to commiserate with them over beers about how the new Star Trek and Star Wars, et al., have retroactively ruined our childhoods, but I just tell them I don’t bother watching those franchises or bitching about them, because that isn’t a worthwhile investment of my money, time, and attention. I’d rather seek out, discover, and celebrate stories that point the way forward. Too many of my friends want only to gaze backwards, and I can’t go down that road with them.
Thanks for popping by, Cathleen! I hope your summer has so far been a healthy and productive one. You are always very welcome here, so enter freely and speak freely anytime you like!
SPC
You just ran through a long list of shows I enjoyed. The trailers for Ted Lasso didn’t seem appealing but I am now rethinking that. Thanks to you, Sean!
Thanks, Jacqui! God knows the last thing any of us need is another must-see TV recommendation — I’m all for turning off the television and getting back out on the street! — but I had to share my enthusiasm for Ted Lasso. I can say without a doubt it is my favorite show of all time; it even unseated the two-decade titleholder, Gilmore Girls!
Hope your summer has been one of good health and good times so far!
Sean
Your essay-posts give your readers a lot to think about. Honestly, I usually have to read them 2-3 times to get all the nuances and references that you so richly include in your writing! This is not a negative — it’s great that you challenge your readers to think.
It makes logical sense that our entertainment is geared to the political and social climate, but I agree that there does come a time to “let it go.” I am physically moving forward out of quarantine and I am eager to take my brain out of quarantine too.
I look forward to exploring “Ted Lasso” about which my first thought was “is this a show about a lasso-talented cowboy?”
Thank you for the details, the references and nuances, and the reminder to think about what we are watching, reading, and dealing with every day.
Jackie!
You read these posts two or three times?! Christ, I feel like I owe you an apology! I can’t stand to read this Delphic shit that many times! I suspect the reason my wife encouraged me to start blogging was because she was tired of being the sole audience for this mind-numbing esoterica over dinner. Years ago, she suggested I change the blog’s tagline from “Writer of Things That Go Bump in the Night” to “Highly Academic Discussions about Really Dumb Shit”!
Joking aside, I’m sure I’d have more readers if I hadn’t made the blog’s intellectual barrier to entry so damn high! I would love to be the kind of essayist that takes little episodes from his daily life and spins them into pithy 800-word anecdotes — the way, say, friend of the blog Suzanne Craig-Whytock does so hilariously at mydangblog, or Wendy Weir does so movingly on Greater Than Gravity — but I have accepted that I’m beholden to different creative impulses. I get a bone in my teeth about something, and by writing about that subject, I come to better understand it. I often start these posts thinking they’ll be maybe a thousand words… but it isn’t long before they’ve ballooned to 3,000-word doctoral dissertations! Haha! I am very lucky that I have a loyal readership that indulges me — yourself included. Thank you. (Or as Ted would say, “I appreciate you.”)
Narrative art/entertainment reflects the sociocultural and -political climate of the times, for sure, but it affects the culture, as well. It’s a feedback loop. The stories we tell create the reality in which we live. The police thrillers of the 1970s (Dirty Harry, The French Connection) were indicative of the new war-on-crime mindset established under Nixon, and, correspondingly, the buddy-cop comedies of the 1980s represented the full fetishization of law and order under tough-talkin’ cowboy Ronald Reagan. With conservative values reigning, our popular culture trained us to accept the unassailable judgment — and unaccountable actions — of police officers (a subject I covered in “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown”), so when, say, Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton took power in the early ’90s here in New York City and decided they were going all-in on so-called Broken Windows policing, how convenient for them that we’d been conditioned by decades of cop movies/television to trust in the benevolent wisdom of our law enforcement. The culture influenced the pop culture which in turn affected the culture, full circle.
That is, admittedly, a major oversimplification of a complicated series of sociopolitical events, but you get the drift. But at the same time television was normalizing police violence (via NYPD Blue, et al.) — a bad thing — it was also normalizing LGBT culture (Will & Grace, etc.) — a good thing! Media is just a tool for communicating moral lessons, which is why we are so dependent on morally imaginative storytellers like Jason Sudeikis.
And hell — sometimes TV shows promote both worthy values and questionable ones at the same time, like The X-Files, which embraced ambiguity to an extent seldom seen in our procedurals before or since but was also predicated on an assumption of nefarious governmental conspiracy, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which represented a new kind of feminist action heroine while still leaning into the same old messiah narratives of our superhero fiction. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, morally imaginative doesn’t necessarily mean morally immaculate.
When storytellers understand their role in both reflecting and setting the tone for the culture, they write with greater moral imagination. And for twenty years now, we’ve indulged a lot of open-ended dystopian fantasies in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal,” whereby the terrors unleashed by global warming are easily subjugated with a chainsaw or an assault rifle (Sharknado, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell), and they’re often visited upon us in the first place not by corporate fossil-fuel extractors, but by crazed environmentalists (Avengers: Infinity War, Aquaman, Godzilla: King of the Monsters). What we really need in order to inspire action on the climate crisis is more teamwork-centric commercial entertainment like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which the mode of problem-solving isn’t gunship diplomacy but rather nonviolent cooperation.
Last November, I placed a bet that the election of Joe Biden signified a hunger for forward motion, for noble goals, and for cathartic experiences once again, and I suggested that would manifest in more aspirational storytelling after a long period of dormancy. Sudeikis and his collaborators evidently saw that coming before I did; they were ahead of the curve with Ted Lasso. Let’s hope more storytellers learn from their example.
Thanks so much, Jackie, for your time and attention, neither of which I take for granted. I hope your gradual emergence from quarantine is a smooth and healthy one. When you get a chance to see Ted Lasso, leave a comment here (my posts never close!) or send me a note and let me know how you enjoyed it.
Sean
You just put Ted Lasso at the top of my “watch” list, Sean. As I was reading your post, I thought about how brilliant the choice was to make him a “coach” in a “sports” comedy… that caught my husband’s interest immediately, and he’s the type of guy that gravitates toward high action, no plot, and shallow characters (exaggerating, of course, but it is hard to get him on board initially).
Your post also made me think of Schitt’s Creek which we loved and binged in a weekend. Great characters with human foibles and wonderful hearts trying to do the best they can. Love and kindness was the underlying theme and It was refreshing. More watching options that make us laugh and grow and value the strengths of kindness, compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness are welcome in this household.
On a tangent, I wonder about the hyper-violence and portrayal of masculinity (and humanity in general) in video games. My grandson, who is 8, isn’t interested in television at all – not one tiny bit. The whole post-cartoon young generations seems to have left television viewing behind (other than weekend movie-night). Is television just for us older folks who grew up on it? Are we missing the boat entirely by worrying about re-envisioning masculinity for the 30+ folks, when kids and teens have moved on to another source of entertainment?
The grandson wants to play the video games his friends play. He is blocked from doing so (which he thoroughly resents). There is nothing kind or cooperative or uplifting about these games at all. Their interactive nature is addictive. Just wait until VR gets it’s hands on impressionable kids and they’re experiencing shooting each other. This is something Grammy worries about all the time!
Hey, Diana!
Well, I certainly hope you and your husband enjoy Ted Lasso! These days, I determine all my viewing commitments by a single metric: Is this a worthy investment of my money, time, and/or attention? And the older I get, the more valuable those commodities — particularly my time and attention — are to me, and I am, as such, spending them more selectively than I used to. After squandering my resources for years on long-in-the-tooth nostalgic franchises, Ted Lasso is providing the kind of ROI I worried I’d never again see.
Funny you should mention Schitt’s Creek. As I noted in “Challenging Our Moral Imagination” last spring, Schitt’s was one of those shows that got away from me in this era of Peak TV, but a few weeks ago my wife and I finally sat down to watch it (mostly because we were so impressed by Annie Murphy’s performance in Kevin Can F**k Himself). We’re currently about halfway through the fourth season and powering our way onward! Schitt’s Creek is definitely part of this new trend of radical kindness in television programming, which includes Ted Lasso, The Good Place, The Last Man on Earth, and All Creatures Great and Small. (And I’m always on the lookout for more, if anyone cares to make suggestions!) I don’t think there’s any question that these shows are, each in their own way, a reaction to the cynicism, selfishness, and tribalism that seems to have reached a fevered pitch over the last few years — in our politics, our entertainment, and our everyday lives. The pendulum is swinging the other way now, and that in itself is reason for optimism.
I am not a gamer, but I am certainly aware that a lot of our videogames (The Last of Us) and MMORPGs (World of Warcraft) contain many of the same violent tropes and themes as our movies and TV shows, which includes an unambiguous emphasis on hypermasculinity. You are absolutely correct when you suggest that movies and television are antiquated modes of storytelling that have little to no appeal/value to anyone under thirty; no less than Matt Damon recently suggested “[m]ovies as we know them aren’t going to be a thing in our kids’ lives.” I argued as much last year in “The Road Back” — that the kind of linear, closed-ended, self-contained narratives those media formats have traditionally supported don’t resonate with brains hardwired for the Digital Age.
Instead, today’s young minds are engaged by immersive, nonlinear, hyperlinked transmedia initiatives, which, alas, are mostly just encoded with the same questionable values — Randian individualism, toxic masculinity, consumer capitalism — as the movies and TV shows that inspired the Gen X creators of today’s mega-franchises. They’re absolutely addictive; anyone who’s tried to have a conversation with a 14-year-old transfixed by TikTok knows this to be true.
Further complicating matters is that our multimedia franchises (the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe, Star Wars, etc.) exist to encourage and monetize automatic and accelerating behaviors — to train viewers not to pause and reflect, but to click and buy. It’s corporate storytelling, contrived and calibrated to serve an Industrial Age model of extractive capitalism with Digital Age algorithmic efficiency. As I argued in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 2,” that’s something parents of young children need to keep in mind: that like the syndicated cartoons of the 1980s, today’s multimedia entertainment franchises — because it’s no accident they’re called franchises — are training programs for a new generation of lifelong subscribers. As adults, we need to scrutinize the values being imparted to our children by the “harmless” entertainment they consume — now more than ever, being that smartphones have made our kids
captivatedcaptive audiences to corporate messaging — and ask hard questions about whether these are the moral lessons we want them to be unconsciously assimilating.Thanks for engaging me on this subject, Diana. There’s probably an entire essay to be written in response to you comment — i.e., how to raise children responsibly in an era of corporately hijacked narrativity. I don’t have the answers but I think it’s worth at least asking the questions. Your grandson is lucky to have someone like you worrying about him!
Sean
“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.”
Sean, you have brought this important list of human qualities and values, that have mostly gotten lost under our society’s slide toward Harvard-Business-School models of transactional behavior, into such clear focus that I had to stop for moment and re-read the paragraph. I felt like I was remembering old friends long gone from the world.
Your essays are presented as analyses of TV and film writing but capture and expose so much more than that! I couldn’t agree with you more about the lack of education in important areas that affect us as we go through our school years. How to shave, yes. How to balance a check book. How to stand up for yourself when that is needed and how to graciously adjust your stance when you recognize your perspective might need widening. How to even know how to recognize how you feel behind the automatic, defensive postures we so often hide behind. How to recognize what your talents are and how to go about honoring them.
I could go on with that list for far too long. The point being *your* point in so much of your writing: we are influenced in major ways by the media and entertainment that we consume and it would be a huge boon to humanity if the creators and storytellers took responsibility for the consequences produced by what they put out into the world.
Thank you, Sean, for showing us the how to see past the surface.
I appreciate you!
Thank you, Tara.
School these days seems to prepare young people, nigh exclusively, for a transactional world — a world in which individual ambition and wealth acquisition are the most prized values, where the metric for success is How much do I have? rather than How much have I helped? Our schools should absolutely place greater emphasis (or merely any emphasis) on our social, civic, and physical/sexual educations. Community service should be required, and, more importantly, it should be encouraged. We need to teach our kids about the responsibilities — and the (noncapitalistic) rewards — of being active and engaged members of their community as well as citizens of their country.
Such is the reason I think solitary-savior narratives (supercop thrillers, postapocalyptic dystopias, superhero “universes”) aren’t helpful and are even, arguably, harmful. For reasons I’ve documented elsewhere on this blog (like “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″ and “In the Multiverse of Madness”), I am deeply troubled by this era of wholesale superhero worship, with grown adults investing fanatical interest in — even pledging religious devotion to — characters and concepts originally created during World War II to entertain nine-year-old boys. It shows an unwillingness to put away childish things, and, as comedian Bill Maher noted, “superhero movies imprint this mindset that we are not masters of our own destiny, and the best we can do is sit back and wait for Star-Lord and a fucking raccoon to sweep in and save our sorry asses. Forget hard work, government institutions, diplomacy, investment — we just need a hero to rise.”
Such is why, Tara, I implore our storytellers to write with as much moral imagination — a term I learned from our mentor Vice President Gore — as they do commercial imagination. It isn’t enough to come up with a cool concept; the moral messaging encoded in the narrative needs to be scrutinized. For reasons I wrote about here and here and here, storytellers will play an absolutely critical role in facilitating the large-scale transformation of virtually every aspect of our society to meet the challenge of climate change and, in the process, create a fairer, more sustainable world — one predicated on an ethos of sympathetic cooperation, not extractive exploitation. So, to our storytellers, I would suggest this: Study Ted Lasso.
I appreciate you, too, Tara — for embodying the virtues of kindness, teamwork, and open-mindedness! I encourage all my readers to visit Tara at her blog and get to know her better!
Sean
Another tour de force, and a topic that I’ve been thinking about too. The irony is that there have always been men out there like Ted Lasso but popular culture has marginalized them, at least within popular culture. But I know them–I work with them, have them in my family, and see them in my town–all men who lift each other up instead of adhering to stereotypes about what it means to “be a man”. And I think we need more of this in the narratives we consume, in the same way that I’d love to see more examples on film and TV of women lifting each other up instead of cutting each other down, because I get just as fed up seeing stereotypically combative relationships between mothers and daughters as well. And my blog may make people laugh, but yours ALWAYS makes people think:-)
So well said, Suzanne! The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to appreciate — better late than never — how our fictions shape our reality, and that our storytellers, consequently, have a moral obligation to tell better stories. And I am in no way suggesting that every story needs to be about kind people behaving considerately, à la Ted Lasso; the oeuvre of Martin Scorsese, for instance, is almost exclusively defined by bad people doing violent things. But the difference between The Departed and The Walking Dead, for example, is Scorsese has a lot of critical things to say about living immorally and violently; his films typically challenge accepted truths about manhood and loyalty and identity, whereas so many dystopian fantasies and action movies, by contrast, buttress them. (There’s no bigger pop-cultural offender right now than Fast & Furious, those odious odes to toxic masculinity. I loathe those movies.)
Ted Lasso doesn’t merely provide a healthy alternative to those self-perpetuating macho stereotypes, it also dramatizes grown women (Rebecca and Keeley) supporting one another personally and professionally, and even issuing good-faith criticisms when needed. But no catfighting. We need more prescriptive exemplars like that — stories that refuse to take the narratively convenient route of pitting women against one another. Last Halloween, my wife put on the old Harrison Ford/Michelle Pfeiffer haunted-house thriller What Lies Beneath, and I was really taken by how it is ultimately a story about women caring for the welfare of other women. None of the women in that movie (including the ghost!) are at odds with each other; on the contrary, they support, look out for, and believe in each other (despite the frequent dismissive condescension of the men). I didn’t necessarily pick up on that the first time I saw it twenty years ago, but then I guess the movie’s feminist subtext is what lies beneath its slick supernatural thrills.
For those who may not know, Suzanne’s own collection of frightening fiction, Feasting upon the Bones, is now available from Potter’s Grove Press. Order your copy here.