The Legend of Ted Lasso

If you’ve browsed the Internet or social media in the last month, you may have seen pictures, videos and/or memes of actor Jason Sudeikis accepting a Golden Globe from his living room while wearing a tie-dye hoodie. If you feel like you’re missing something, you probably are: Sudeikis’s hit sitcom, Ted Lasso.

If you’re a fan of feel-good sitcoms like Friends, Parks and Recreation, and The Big Bang Theory, you won’t want to miss Ted Lasso. With one season in the books and a renewal for two more, the sitcom is quickly developing into a pop-culture powerhouse. Already, the series has led to numerous awards, a twitter account for a fictional coach that boasts over 100,000 followers, and a myriad of infinitely positive Lasso-isms such as, “Smells like potential.”

By some counts, the Lasso phenomenon is nothing new. The series traces its origins to a four minute, forty-one second promo from 2013. The promo was shot for NBC, who had just acquired the rights to broadcast English Premier League soccer matches in the United States. In the promo, American football coach Ted Lasso, played by Sudeikis, has been hired to coach the English professional soccer club Tottenham Hotspur. Comedy quickly ensues as Coach Lasso deals with the media, players and a totally new version of football.

You can watch the original promo here:

The promo was so popular that NBC created a follow-up featuring Sudeikis’s Ted Lasso, now working as a soccer analyst and youth coach. By 2019, the legend of Lasso had grown sufficiently that Apple TV announced a series featuring the character.

The premise of the series is taken directly from the original promo: American football coach Ted Lasso is hired to coach a struggling professional soccer team in England (Tottenham Hotspur, the real club used in NBC’s promo, are replaced in the Apple TV series by fictional club AFC Richmond). Much of the comedy in the early episodes is reminiscent of the 2013 promo. Coach Lasso faces an uphill and often comical battle to prove himself to the media, the club’s supporters and his own players, all while coaching a game he barely understands.

While the show is every inch as funny as the original promo, it quickly exceeds the wildest dreams of even the most devoted Lasso fans. New characters imbue the show with complex relationships and an unexpected measure of humanity. In ten short episodes, the first season delivers deep, three-dimensional arcs for a diverse array of characters. Among these are savvy club owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), undervalued kit man Nathan Shelley (Nick Mohammed), and everyone’s favorite confidant Keeley Jones (Juno Temple). Even the team’s players are developed far past the shallow, overpaid professional athletes one might expect.

It is here, with the characters and their lives, that the series delivers more than just comedy; it delivers heart. That term can be difficult to define, but most of us know it when we feel it. It is the undefinable element that elevates an average sitcom to the heights of Friends, Parks and Recreation or The Big Bang Theory. It is the reason we cheer for Chandler and Monica’s engagement, the reason polar opposites Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson can be friends, and the reason we love Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj, even though most of us can only understand every third word they say. The show simply makes us feel good—about life, about relationships, even about this crazy world in which we live.

Ted Lasso is that kind of show. It is more than Coach Lasso’s boundless enthusiasm in coaching a game he barely understands. It is more than just jokes about English tea and soccer’s lack of overtime. It is laugh-out-loud, love-these-characters, season-two-can’t-come-soon-enough entertainment.

So, if you’re looking for a great sitcom, or if you need to fill the Pawnee-shaped hole in your life, or if you just need some positive, feel-good energy, Ted Lasso is your solution. The series is streaming on Apple TV, and to be honest, Apple TV is worth the price just to watch Ted Lasso. After all, in the words of Trent Crimm from The Independent, “If the Lasso way is wrong, it’s hard to imagine being right.”