If you’re a regular reader of my stuff (there may even be enough of you to field a full side of association football), you’ve seen how much ink I’ve spilled on Ted Lasso in the (almost exactly!) six years since it debuted.
I approached the impending season 4 with a very cautious optimism. I wanted to believe. I knew how good the show had been originally— the rare show that’s good enough to make its subsequent shortcomings easier to spot. I also knew how the cracks that showed in season 2 became full-blown structural failure in season 3.
First, we’ll talk about the weird fans, who popped back out for the season premiere. I’ve mentioned them before, too. It’s not just the cult of toxic positivity attitudes, it’s that they seem to have watched an entirely different show than I did, based on how they discuss it or what they say it’s always been.
“Nice people being nice to each other”? Do these people remember the first season? It was one kind person being kind to two nice people and a bunch of assholes.
“Broad, silly, and unrealistic”? Season 1 was none of those things! What made the first season work so well was that it was plausible, connected, and showed us every step of the process, whereas season 3 faltered by just skipping over scenes that were really important to the story, dragging out irrelevant side stories, and having complete blind spots to the toxic relationships in the show.
Of course, the superfans’ attitudes aren’t healthy either.
Oddly, none of these people showed up to comment on the second episode, which was legitimately quite good and the inspiration for this title. When I sincerely love a show, I want to discuss the good episodes. Their disappearance from those only furthers my belief that they really just want to harass people. (One of the most common recurring lines among the Ted Lasso toxic-positivity cult is that people who criticize the show must “love misery” or “hate fun” or some such. Considering they only show up to talk about the show in reaction to other people’s criticisms and never for its better episodes, I think they’re describing themselves.)
Anyway, the second episode introduces the women’s team and the acting head coach, and they bring a lot to the show and set up the season. We’re now five episodes in, and that’s probably been the best episode so far. The new characters inject some life into the show, particularly Tanya Reynolds as coach Alice Chilton1, and my favorite of the new players has been Jude Mack as Boots the goalie, although Faye Marsay showing up as Lizzie the midfielder is certainly a welcome touch. Maybe they’re going back to the season one formula, but to be honest, I don’t care if they recycle the formula from the first season, because that was so effective.
The execution, on the other hand, has been occasionally successful. While that second episode was quite good, and the new characters bring a lot to the table, many of the returning ones seem stuck in plots that are more generic and trivial than what this show does uniquely well, and occasionally the writers miss opportunities with their stories. Rebecca owning a women’s team and how she manages Keeley and her expectations for it could be its own story, especially since Rebecca’s attempts to shield Keeley from the financial realities of the club are infantilizing; there’s a natural conflict between the two of them there. It never really materializes, though, and Rebecca’s story spends a lot more time on her relationship with Matthijs (including silly sitcom shenanigans like her constantly having to cancel their dinner dates because she, you know, is an owner of two football clubs).
And Keeley… well, there are bits and pieces of her role with the AFC Richmond women’s team, and that’s her best material, but… look, the Dating Plan plot of season 2 of Sports Night was one of the most insane, bizarre, misogynistic things I’ve ever seen a TV show do, and recreating it does not reflect well on this show at all. It’s all especially frustrating because there are potentially very good and very compelling stories to tell about Rebecca’s and Keeley’s roles with the women’s team, and instead the show strands them in romcom plots, which feels like a trite approach to the material (and the plots are often trite themselves).
But, there is still enough good stuff that this is clearly better than season 3. I do wish we’d get a little more detailed and specific about the women’s players. While a handful of them are clearly highlighted as the characters we’re going to follow, we haven’t gotten many traits for most of them– there’s The Fighting Twins, The Couple, The Team Mom, The Ace with a personal history and animosity against Alice… really, Boots is the only one that feels particularly specific at this point in time. Five episodes in, the men’s team gave us a much clearer picture of Roy, Jamie, and even Sam, and then-secondary characters like Isaac and Colin were still better defined at this point than almost anyone on the Richmond women’s team so far.
It’s not season 1, but it’s better than season 3 so far and has the potential to be more. Occasionally, it has lived up to it. I hope for the second half of the season, they develop the new characters more, and focus more on the team-building in general and the stories that are unique to a sports team, than sticking so many characters in tired romance plots2 and skipping over the team-building aspects of the story.
Other stuff
It’s Always Sunny is back for season 18! The first three episodes were quite good, although I thought the fourth lacked in comic execution (which is a pretentious way to say “it wasn’t as funny as it could have been”).
I finally started watching President Curtis. The pilot wasn’t bad, with a few very good jokes and mostly solid throughout, although I feel like it does suffer from a little bit of the same problems as Grimsburg, which I like, did early on: Trying too hard to give characters stacks of quirky traits in lieu of real development. Grimsburg was much better on this point in season two, and President Curtis already improved after the pilot; the fourth episode is probably my favorite so far, but they’ve all been fun and entertaining. If you were worried about it being weighed down by its attachment to Rick and Morty, don’t be. Fun detail I enjoy: President Curtis singing a song in the shower over the end credits about the events of the episode.
Caught up on the new season of Futurama, and it’s solid. Nothing gangbusters, but none of the lowlights we’ve seen a few times since the Hulu revival, either.
Chad Powers season 2 drops on Hulu today. TBD if I end up having more to say about it.
Your turn
I mean, you tell us what you watch every day, but now do it more so.
- If you wanted to make a Box Tops / Big Star joke here, I assure you everyone else thought of it first. ↩︎
- To say nothing of Beard and Jane, which, while it hasn’t been as big a part of the story as in the past… Jane surfaces again in the fifth episode, and considering how dysfunctional and toxic to the point of mentally ill and abusive she is, I don’t think she adds anything to the show other than diminishing Beard for not kicking her ass to the curb. ↩︎
What did we watch?
M*A*S*H, Season Four, Episode Twenty, “Some 38th Parallels
Hawkeye: Frank’s right! You give these people a taste of our garbage, and next thing you know, they’ll be wanting New Jersey!
Hawkeye: Shh! My wife is here!
Radar: Hawk? Hawk?
Hawkeye: She always hawks like that.
Hawkeye: He could sell brass knuckles to Gandhi.
This is a pretty good episode; it’s the one where Hawkeye is temporarily impotent while Frank is selling the camp’s garbage to Koreans. The latter is an example of Frank trying to be an American grifter, a classic archetype I’ve been preoccupied with lately. They pretty much fall into two categories – lovable examples who scheme their way to the top, and comic failures like Frank. Come to think of it, Hawk is a pretty good example of the good grifter himself. He does resolve his impotency issues by dropping garbage on a callously indifferent colonel.
Speaking of, it really says something about this show that there’s a subplot about Radar saving a soldier’s life by alerting a doctor, making friends with him (under the unspoken principle that you save someone’s life and you become responsible for them), and then is sad when he dies.
Elementary, “GRender and Then Seize Her” – An accurate title that gives away the ending. A software engineer develops the tech to make what is now called deepfakes, and uses it to help fake the kidnapping of his business partner’s wife. A few weird red herrings here – for three minutes it looks like the kidnapping is about an attempt to blackmail a mobster about a murder from the 80s, and the fake kidnapping victim “escapes” from her captors and insists they are Pakistani – but rest assured that Sherlock sees through it all (and is also appalled by the woman’s racist story). Meanwhile, Sherlock is asked by Gregson’s girlfriend (the returning Virginia Madsen) to investigate the doctor she is seeing for MS for shady billing, and he discovers she is struggling to pay her bills. So even though he usually hates the institution of marriage, he urges Gregson to marry her, both so she can be on his insurance and because, well, it would make Tommy happier. The kidnap victim is played by Kim Director, which leads to a bit of a weird echo. The proof she was not kidnapped and held in a tent for three days is that the part of her breasts visible in his blouse are tanned. Director previously played the woman in Inside Man who complained she was accused of being part of the crime because of her bust. I cannot imagine it feels great to be defined twice by her body like that Oh, and speaking of bodies, this starts with a witness being murdered. At a nudist camp on Staten Island. Not sure what that was doing here.
Doctor Who, “Underground” – In listening to the Dr Who podcast “Pull to Open,” I discovered that somehow I missed this episode when I did my watch-through. My guess is that someone at Britbox watched this and decided it was too boring to include. There are a few very good moments for Tom Baker and Louise Jameson, but this slog stops being interesting after the second part starts. Apparently a lot of fans hate it for its extensive use of early green screen tech to make the cast look like they are in caves when they are clearly not, but it’s the script and most of the acting that kill this one.
Barney Miller, “Horse Thief” – It’s Bicentennial time in NYC (even though this aired in 1975), and the city is going nuts. Most notably, someone steals a hansom cabbie’s horse, and a man is beaten up by the sex worker he hired when he refused to pay, and then refuses to admit he was with anyone. A ton of really good gags and a good time capsule of how insane the Bicentennial was (especially compared to the wet turd that was this year’s July 4). Guests include Jack Dodson of Andy Griffith Show fame as the john and Ron Masak (Murder She Wrote) as a cavalry officer.
Year of the Month updates:
This September, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1937.
Sept. 4th: Gillian Nelson: Moose Hunters
Sept. 6th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Lenin in October
Sept. 18th: Gillian Nelson: Pluto’s Quin-pup-lets
Sept. 20th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Hobbit
Sept. 22nd: Lauren James: Stage Door
Sept. 25th: Gillian Nelson: Donald’s Ostrich
Here’s how we’re wrapping up August:
Aug. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Walt Disney Treasures
And here’s all the movies, albums, books from 1998 you can sign up for this October!
Oct. 3rd: Gillian Nelson: Movie Surfers
Oct. 9th: Gillian Nelson: Mighty Joe Young
Oct. 30th: Gillian Nelson: Halloweentown
Gonna take Pi for October 4th and Who Moved My Cheese? for October 18th, please Sam.