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Lassitude: What Ted Lasso Says about US
The World’s Worst Cultural Critic™ weighs in on your favorite show
Lots of people really like Ted Lasso, and Ted Lasso. I really don’t. That’s okay with me — though some people seem to take it as a personal affront if you don’t like the same things they like. A personal affront, or a character deficiency of some kind. I saw this in online discourse about Schitt’s Creek, a show I happened to love but that many people couldn’t get into. If someone on Twitter said they couldn’t get through Schitt’s Creek, other people would pop up telling them to “just be patient,” or “just give it five episodes,” or “keep watching.” When I said on Twitter that I wasn’t sure I could stomach this cloying Ted Lasso character — Ned Flanders in contacts, played straight — people who have never met me before were absolutely confident that I not only should keep watching, but that if I did, my longsuffering would be rewarded and I would love this character and this show. There was some suggestion that the character “gets more complex” as the first season progresses.
I know it takes shows a few episodes sometimes to hit their stride — honestly, Schitt’s Creek took four or five episodes, if I recall correctly, and I stuck with it — and it takes a while for caricatures to become characters. So I watched the entire first season of Ted…
