There was a rumor in the US media. They said there were problems in the writers' room for Ted Lasso, the series that won two consecutive Emmys for best television comedy, because Jason Sudeikis was not satisfied with the scripts. It came to question whether the third season, which could be the last, would be on time for its premiere this spring. So when it finally came out, there was curiosity to see if the bar would live up to the bar of its co-creator, executive producer, writer and lead actor. And, with nine episodes behind him, one truth is clear: Coach Lasso should have taken a look at the Spanish television tradition to understand a fundamental principle of television. The comedy, if brief, twice funny.
The 63 minutes of the sixth were a good indication of this problem. After losing a game against Ajax, the Richmond players receive an instruction from their coach: have a good time that night to regain a sense of unity and morale. So, fiction is divided into multiple plots. Rebecca has an absurd romantic story after falling into one of the Amsterdam canals with a local who invites her to dinner while she dries his clothes; Colin is absent to visit gay clubs in the city, meeting Trent; Jamie teaches Roy how to ride a bike in the quintessential urban cycling city at night; Ted has a false hallucination that tells him the strategy to follow as a coach; Beard disappears on an adventure, his style; Higgins and Will go to the red light district to see jazz under the suspicion of those who wonder if he goes to whores; and the Richmond players argue in the hotel lobby over what plan they should make. There are plots and more plots in an episode that, as much as it should serve as a turning point in the season, is still a failed experiment in charmless, humorless, blurred, largely leftover crossover stories.
The feeling given by the episodes of more than fifty minutes is that Ted Lasso thought he was above comedy or redefining the parameters of the genre, that 30 minutes were not enough to present and resolve the episodic plots, develop the character arcs and above all. all introduce jokes and endearing moments. While Spanish scriptwriters spent decades struggling to write short series, aware that their works suffered from having to keep pace, the volume of gags, and having to add plots by force to fill the footage, the Apple TV series, under Sudeikis's orders, he was moving against the current. The season that should have been the climax has become the first great creative defeat for coach Lasso.
These artistic airs are perceived, for example, in the protagonist's conflict. After suffering anxiety attacks in the previous seasons, he now finds himself in a silent crisis of realizing that, even though he is surrounded by good people, he is further away from his family than he would like. The conflict, which was clear from the first minute, has served to offer an extremely boring Ted. You can understand what they were trying to do, since the character was emotionally stunned, but this doesn't mean that the experience of seeing him on screen has to be equally numbing.
Added to this watered-down and stagnant Ted Lasso is a string of uninspired plots. Keeley, disconnected at the plot level, has her own spin-off of hers inside Ted Lasso with a lesbian plot as deep as an espresso and, at the same time, without enough time to develop her own universe in her communication company. Shaped up for a comic book villain arc, Nate has had another spin-off since he signed for the Richmond, one that includes a romantic story with a flimsy waitress, built on leaps of faith and a disappointing evolution of Nate. After building him up as some sort of Joker are we supposed to feel sorry for him because Rupert is an even worse person when his evil conversion had nothing to do with Rebecca's ex-husband?
Rebecca, on the other hand, found out that she wanted to be a mother through a psychic while the scripts keep her apart from Sam Obisanya, one of the great finds of the second season. The discovery of Colin's homosexuality, until it hatched in the ninth episode, had an impersonal treatment that did not help to elevate a character that until now was filler. We even had to suffer the temporary addition of Zava to the team, a godlike footballer who didn't go beyond caricature in a series whose secret lay in the search for humanity and goodness in people. And, in this utterly unfunny mess, the only one who survived was Jamie Tartt, with a consistent and endearing arc, partly due to the fantastic work of Phil Dunster.
This Ted Lasso without rhythm, without charm and without claw, for the record, could be on a comeback. The seventh and eighth episodes, despite having little agility in the introduction of the episodic plot (the Open Arms conflict was very forced), were more solid, and the ninth was directly good. It cannot be a coincidence that the unquestionable quality came from the hand of inspirational and optimistic plots in the dressing room with Ted in charge of the situation, from Keeley and Rebecca sitting in their office and without the appearance of the company of the influencer turned public relations, and of a shorter duration.
