Everything about Ted Lasso should set off alarms. He’s too nice. Too folksy. Too earnest. It can’t possibly be authentic. Even the push broom mustache, once the facial adornment of heartthrobs in the ’80s, now conjures fuddy-duddy Ned Flanders at best or Stanley Tucci’s “No adults allowed!” predator from The Lovely Bones at the absolute worst.
Within the context of the show, Ted is a middle-aged white man from the Midwest who has been hired away from American football for a high-level job coaching British soccer, one for which he is entirely unqualified. We should hate this guy. Jason Sudeikis even acknowledged in a recent GQ cover story that “the vessel that my soul is currently, you know, occupying” feels genetically engineered to depict jerks, blowhards, and hateful doofuses.
Finally, there’s the dubious provenance of the character itself. “Ted Lasso” was a marketing gimmick created for an NBC Sports promo. Now the show those ads inspired just collected 20 Emmy nominations, and its second season, which starts July 23 on Apple TV+, is something viewers the world over are splashing toward like it’s an emotional lifeboat amid our culture’s raging sea of discord and unhappiness.
The other characters on the series initially react to him with mistrust, contempt, and deep and abiding caution. They are cynics, brutes, survivors. Others are the perpetually dismissed and bullied. Ted Lasso wins them over, just as he does viewers, by simply proving over and over again that he actually is pure-intentioned; he actually is kind; he actually is folksy and genuine, all the way down to his core. He is a good guy.
It shouldn’t work, but it does. That’s what Vanity Fair decided to explore with showrunner Bill Lawrence, best known for Scrubs, Spin City, and Cougar Town, as we discussed the show that people—and Emmy voters—love because it proves all their worst suspicions wrong.
Vanity Fair: Ted Lasso was such a bright spot, something so many people looked forward to when, frankly, there were a lot of painful things in the world to deal with. I don’t think you could anticipate any of that when you were devising the show and shooting it, but can you talk to me about what it was like to see that reaction as it debuted?
Bill Lawrence: Look, we certainly couldn’t have predicted the dumpster fire that was going to be the last year-plus. I can tell you what Jason and I and [cocreators] Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt [who costars as Coach Beard] and the whole writing staff talked about beforehand, which was that the world discourse, specifically on social media and in politics, had gotten to such a cynical, dark place that it was just pervasively gross. We even joked in the writers room that if I was to meet someone like Ted Lasso in real life, I wouldn’t be happy. My first assumption would be, I can’t wait for a week from now when this person reveals himself to be an asshole like everybody else.
That’s the shocking twist. He’s for real.
When that person turns out to be actually kind and forgiving and empathetic and lovely, then you’ve got to look at yourself. That’s the point of this. We were all very grateful to be working on something that was inherently optimistic. In many ways, it felt almost therapeutic to be working on it. That was without knowing at all, whether or not it would work.
You have to feel vindicated that it did.
I think the coolest thing was we created a positive experience on the gig, and the fact that other people seemed to be responding to it was just, man, it was overwhelmingly cool, unexpected, and fun to watch. Because you get to watch that stuff kind of happening in real time now.
Is it hard to write comedy that’s upbeat, that’s positive and optimistic? The best comedy tends to have sharp edges…
Here’s what I would say to that. First, I always want to make a caveat because there are trends in comedy. Right now in Hollywood, I’ll meet people like, “Hey, we should do that optimistic thing that you love.” I’m like, “Look, that was that [particular] show.” I’m still a guy who watched every episode of Veep twice, and if you asked me to describe that show, it was literally different characters figuring out new ways to be horrible to each other. And it was brilliant.
How do you describe what you’re doing on Ted Lasso?
With what we call “optimistic comedy,” I think what we’re really talking about is, on some level, writing with heart and empathy. I always dug doing that in Scrubs. It was a lot easier in that case just because they were characters that were of service and cared about whether or not people lived or died. The medical adviser on that show was the real J.D. [Zach Braff’s character]. He’s actually still a cardiologist here in L.A. and an amazing guy. And his only [stipulation] about that show was, “You can do anything you want, but it can never be at the expense of the patients. These doctors always have to be trying their best.” He was in that same kind of hopeful, optimistic world.
Is it harder to sustain that kind of comedy? I assume you have to make sure the sincerity doesn’t turn the comedy maudlin.
I think it is tricky to always stay there. But [with Ted Lasso] there’s the smoke and mirrors of pervasive optimism. You’re still talking about a show in which, at the end of the day, Ted has panic attacks and his wife left him. Just cheery optimism is nearly impossible. It has to be amongst the real pathos of life in order to work.
How do you keep it real instead of feeling like a Hallmark card?
I think that what you’re really talking about is a mindset of trying to stay positive and be of service and be kind and forgive even while you are not glossing over the fact that everybody’s life, especially nowadays, is full of some layer of shit. Somebody asked me how quarantine was with my two boys still at home. I said the word relentless.
I have two kids too. And relentless is the word. That is the word.
Everybody’s in it to various degrees. So I think the key to making optimism and hopefulness land is not sugarcoating that. To some extent, we’re all in a world of crap.
I think of Ted Lasso and Mister Rogers as kindred spirits. Two men who show a kindness that others reflexively doubt. Was Fred Rogers and influence on the show at all?
I can tell you that we’re fans, but the biggest influence on this, and it’s something I haven’t talked about a lot, is that Jason and I really connected over the idea of mentors. He made every writer that we met with answer who their mentor was, whether it was someone who got them into further education, or who convinced them they could be a writer. And I think that that was really the true spirit of this.
Who was yours?
I had an English teacher in high school named Bob Cox. I was kind of a fuck-up and he told me I was a good writer of dialogue and kept pushing me on it. I ended up naming Dr. Cox in Scrubs after him. And Jason talked about a basketball coach or a first professor that pushed him: “You’re funny. You can do this type of thing for a living.”
Are there similar characteristics in all the different mentors?
From what we talked about, the greatest versions of mentors were inherently optimistic. They told you that you could do anything and it could work out. They didn’t grab you by the neck and white knight you and make you do something. They just pointed you down a different path, a different choice. I think the stuff that you’re responding to is really an amalgamation of all of our mentor stories.
Yet when people meet someone like that, they’re suspicious of them, right?
I don’t think we used to be.
But now it’s like: Why is this person interested in me? Unfortunately, sometimes the “mentor” can have bad ulterior motives.
That’s what’s so interesting. We were talking in the writers room, when I was a kid and I was like, “Why does this English teacher I’ve had for one class, why has he convinced me to stop going across the street and drinking beers and to stay here and talk about movies and TV shows I like, and then to take the time to say, ‘Hey, I’ve read some of your stuff. You can write dialogue.’” Nowadays we’ve reached the point that if that happened to one of my kids, I would be like, “Oh, is that guy a creeper? What’s his story? What’s his reputation?” I’d be immediately suspicious. So I think that we have gotten to a place in time that we’re all suspicious of that. And that’s a bummer.
The nice thing is that Ted Lasso’s creators seem to model this behavior. I have a journalist friend named Mike Ryan who interviewed Jason once, and when the reporter’s father died Jason sent him a truly moving personal letter. Mike has never shared the letter publicly until just now, but I knew it happened a while ago, and know what it meant to him. I think of that as an example of something Ted would do. I’m glad you guys contributed something to the culture that makes people think about how they behave and what others around them are going through.
Oh, that’s so nice, man. Look, if there’s one sentiment I can get out there in any way, it’s how grateful we all are. We were doing it because it put us in that place in real life. And the fact that it had any effect on anybody else, man, I’m not only tickled, but eternally grateful about it.
I’ll cut you loose and let you get back to your relentless home life.
I really appreciate it. You made my day.
This interview has been edited and condensed, with some questions added or expanded for context and clarity.
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