Is ‘Ted Lasso’ a bad show?

The Rise and Fall of Ted Lasso: A Critical Review

When “Ted Lasso” premiered on Apple TV in August of 2020, it quickly became a runaway hit. For years, prestige television had been obsessed with complicated anti-heroes like Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper. But then came Jason Sudeikis’ affable fish-out-of-water portrayal of a midwestern football coach who is now coaching an English football team and who spits dad jokes like fire and charms everyone in his orbit.

It helped that the show was helmed by Bill Lawrence, creator of the beloved sitcom “Scrubs,” who kept the writing crisp and made sure even minor characters were well-cast and well-drawn. Still, it was clear who the beating heart of the show was. Lasso was the anti-anti-hero — and to say that viewers were ready for a healthy dose of feel-good comedy in the middle of a global pandemic would be an understatement. The first season was indeed exceptionally good. The show was a pop culture phenomenon, and everyone couldn’t stop talking about it.

The Second Season: A Precipitous Drop in Quality

However, the second season was a disappointment. We’re now neck-deep in a lackluster season three, and people still won’t stop talking about it. Just a few days ago, The New York Times published a column on how Ted Lasso is a “holy fool” who “reject[s] respectability and embrac[es] humility and love.”

Out of deference to the earnestness “Ted Lasso” at least aspires to, I’ll spare you the lengthy treatise on what I think of the theological grounding people who score columnist gigs at The New York Times. Suffice to say, I expect that moralistic therapeutic deists are cheap enough dates that they’re content with the moralistic therapeutic pablum Ted Lasso is serving up — even sans a trace of any redeeming deism.

The Problem with the Characters

The first season of the show worked because there was an essential moral conflict at the center of the show. Ted Lasso shows up in the U.K. and has to win over a bunch of cynical Brits who call him a “wanker” all the time and prove his optimism and positivity is the right way to fix a foundering football club. But by the second season, Lasso has largely won over all his doubters. So either out of necessity or desperation, the show had to create an entirely new central dynamic for all of the characters in the show.

That dynamic was, in Radosh’s words, “watching good people support each other,” and he observes this is “not a recipe

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