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Why Ted Lasso’s syrupy all-American soccer utopia leaves Brits cold

Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton
Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton

Contains spoilers for the finales of both Succession and Ted Lasso


Two of the most talked-about television shows of the past few years concluded this week, in the forms of Succession and Ted Lasso. Despite the presence of Harriet Walter as a matriarch prone to giving dubious advice in both series, they otherwise have remarkably little in common. Succession is a misanthropic, cynical show about the worst aspects of human nature that ended, unsurprisingly, with its principal characters all betraying one another and being condemned to a purgatory of their own creation.

Ted Lasso, however, is a sunny, upbeat programme that celebrates the good in people, and posits the belief that everyone has the ability to succeed, as long as they are true to themselves and to their fellow man. It ended happily for everyone, save Anthony Head’s snarling and villainous rival football club owner Rupert Mannion, who found himself humiliated and cast adrift. That Head’s sneering one-liners often made him the most entertaining (or at least guiltily pleasurable) character on screen is by the by.

The existential differences between the two series – which are both amongst the most award-winning in recent years – are exemplified beautifully by their conclusions. In Succession, we end with the protagonist Kendall Roy adrift and alone, having failed in everything he’s sought from life. In Ted Lasso, however, the show finishes with Ted having thoroughly redeemed the football club he has been brought into, AFC Richmond, and having made everyone’s lives happier, richer and fuller thanks to his inimitable brand of all-American optimism, before returning home to his son.

The first show is an elegant and intelligent feel-bad opus; the latter seems designed to produce a rush of euphoria roughly akin to mainlining Richard Curtis movies while glutting oneself on chocolate for a week. Yet why is it that – in Britain at least – Succession is the show that everyone talks about, while Ted Lasso’s conclusion has barely raised more than a shrug?

There’s the obvious factor that the exploits of Ted and the others are shown on Apple TV+, which, despite the many and generous free trials that viewers are offered – the canny, or unscrupulous, need barely pay for it ever – has yet to take up public consciousness the way that other streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ have done. (Apple are presumably hoping that such blockbuster films as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon will change matters.)

Yet the reason why Ted Lasso seems not to have been taken to British hearts is that, underneath its beaming smiles and hugs and neat little self-improvement mantras, it feels strangely ersatz. It’s a show about football and life made by people who seem not to have any interest in the former, and a peculiarly narrow attitude towards the latter.

Ted Lasso's fictional football team, Richmond AFC - Colin Hutton
Ted Lasso's fictional football team, Richmond AFC - Colin Hutton

Now, admission ahead: I am not a football fan myself. Yet as Chris Bennion wrote so brilliantly here, dyed-in-the-wool aficionados of the beautiful game are likely to find Ted Lasso frustrating purely because of the number of mistakes that it makes in its depiction of the sport. As Bennion writes: “The show, clearly, has been made either for an American audience or for people who do not care about football, or both. The people I know who adore the show have little or no interest in football and are nonplussed when I say the show does not look or feel or smell like football.”

That was in 2021, and nothing has changed in any substantial way since. The show isn’t about football, but merely uses it as a vehicle for its concerns. The only minor (offscreen) concession to anything even approaching realism was that the usually mediocre AFC Richmond did not win the Premier League, losing to their perennial nemesis Manchester City.

Nonetheless, this is soft-pedalled and their win against Mannion’s West Ham United is, naturally, the big cathartic close: a scene in which every single cliché of the genre (trailing 2-0 at half time; the inspirational locker-room speech; the last minute victorious goal) is exhumed and presented with the apparent sincerity that the show has displayed over its three seasons, as if freshly minted.

James Lance and Billy Harris in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton
James Lance and Billy Harris in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton

Yet without any twists or surprises, the climax doesn’t become uplifting or thrilling, but simply predictable and cheap; it is an ending telegraphed from space, and as visible from there as the Great Wall of China is said to be.

It did not help that the major storylines revolving around the culture of football were woefully unconvincing. In an industry that is acknowledged to be far behind the rest of the country when it comes to the acceptance of homosexuality, there was, predictably, a plotline involving the Colin character, who comes out of the closet (aided by James Lance’s amusingly arch journalist-turned-club biographer Trent Crimm) to his team’s enthusiastic and wholehearted support.

And the progression of Nick Mohammed’s ‘Nate the Great’, from bumbling kit man to genius tactician to antagonistic rival manager to warmly received prodigy stretched credibility beyond breaking point. Although no doubt he is now a hero to any beleaguered third-stringer, forever shivering on the touchline and hoping for glory and recognition, to say nothing of the beauteous girlfriend that Nate eventually secures.

If the third and final season of the show had been better executed, then these issues would not matter. But after two seasons in which its writer-star Jason Sudeikis’s obviously optimistic and cheerful attitude, both on and off-screen, was infectious enough for occasionally thin material and weak storylines to be caught up in the slipstream of everyone having a good time, the last instalment jumped the shark in the most saccharine fashion imaginable. The Atlantic declared several weeks ago that “Ted Lasso has lost its way”, and went on to complain that “As it’s racked up viewers and accolades, a charming workplace sitcom has transformed into a bloated prestige drama.”

Juno Temple and Hannah Waddingham in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton
Juno Temple and Hannah Waddingham in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton

Matters did not improve with the ending, which viewers and critics alike have criticised for being unconvincing, formulaic and tedious. In its combination of almost self-parodic self-help mantras, neat and rushed resolutions for its characters and a peculiarly leaden kind of uplift, it felt at times more punishing than a close-quarters telling-off from the ever-profane Roy Kent.

I sat down wondering which much-loved soft-rock song would be chosen to accompany its finale, and wondered if it would be Coldplay’s Fix You or something slightly edgier – perhaps U2 – but in the end it was an elongated, somehow remixed version of Cat Stevens’s Father and Son. It started off nicely, outstayed its welcome and by the end was rather perplexing, even irritating: a perfect metaphor for the show.

And the fact that Ed Sheeran – the exemplar of unthreatening music himself – contributed the original song Beautiful Game to the final episode says it all.

Richmond itself has become a hugely popular tourist destination over the last couple of years, being transformed from a charming semi-suburb of London into a place thronged with American tourists. One of its major locations, the pub The Prince’s Head on Richmond Green – The Crown and Anchor in the series – finds patrons queuing outside dutifully before it opens, and the canny landlords have installed a “Ted Lasso corner”, complete with memorabilia signed by the stars.

Yet this is not a phenomenon that has extended itself towards British viewers of the show, who continue to regard Richmond, and football, in the same way that they always traditionally have – as something that is simply an ever-fixed mark in our lives, rather than something worth getting incredibly over-excited about.

It is hard not to applaud Sudeikis and his co-stars and co-writers for their obvious intention in creating a series that is fundamentally about good (if sometimes misguided) people, pulling together for the sake of one another and succeeding in life when they do. And there have been so many pleasures along the way – I’m thinking in particular of Hannah Waddingham’s magnificent and deservedly award-winning performance as the club’s owner Rebecca, who hires Ted to drive Richmond into the ground but ends up tearfully bidding him farewell at the airport – that it sounds churlish to criticise its heart-on-sleeve messages.

Nick Mohammed as Nate in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton
Nick Mohammed as Nate in Ted Lasso - Colin Hutton

I must confess that, amidst my groaning at the final episode’s contrivances, there was something in my eye during the scene in which the two parted. Perhaps it was an acknowledgement that the platonic relationship between the duo remained the show’s most affecting and interesting.

Yet as Ted himself seemed to become an increasingly peripheral figure, sidelined by the plethora of subplots and side-characters and often faintly bewildering incidents, the show lost its way, its heart and its focus. It’s thought likely that there will be spin-offs, probably revolving around Juno Temple’s marketing supremo Keeley, who comes up with an idea for the AFC Richmond women’s team in the closing moments. Sudeikis and others have been coy about the prospect of further incursions into the Ted Lasso universe, and it’s hard not to ask them to let well alone now.

One of the main appeals of Succession for British audiences is that, thanks to its English creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong, it has a rich and dark vein of ironic and bitter humour at its black heart that appeals particularly to inhabitants of this cynical, rain-swept nation. Ted Lasso is the opposite, an all-American show in British drag. It’s little wonder that domestic audiences have never really warmed to the idea of a smiling Yank – whether Ted or Sudeikis himself – coming over here and telling us how it should be done.

AFC Richmond may have won the day, but most British viewers, bombarded with feel-good sentiments so numbing that they start to feel like anaesthetic, might be forgiven for shuddering and fleeing to something altogether more realistic instead. And that, in a nutshell, is Ted’s failing. He may have won the day, but hearts and minds in his temporarily adopted country remain stubbornly unchanged, despite everything.