Journal of Popular Television, The - Current Issue

Ted Lasso (2020–23) has garnered much acclaim from both fans and critics, racking up an impressive 21 Emmy nominations for its final season. Commentators repeatedly highlighted that the show’s emphasis on kindness, compassion and empathy was a key aspect of its success. This article will investigate how this emphasis played out when tackling complex issues such as racism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in the context of English football and its fandom. I argue that the show used special episodes and emphasized individual action with regard to systemic issues, employing post-racial narrative logics, appeals to multiculturalism, tokenism and strategic Whiteness, to deflect from organizational and societal accountability for entrenched discrimination. The same pattern is also seen in the narrative arcs of Sam Obisanya and Nate Shelley. Though the two have contrasting depictions – the latter turning villainous for a time while the former remains virtuous – I maintain that both reflect a larger disinterest in the interiority of characters of colour relative to their White counterparts. I will also examine how the show sidesteps systemic racism in English football fandom to portray fans as largely positive. Finally, through an analysis of Edwin Akufo, I argue that the show’s commentary on issues in world football also reinforces racist stereotypes.

The first season of Ted Lasso (2020–23) was filmed in 2019, before the outbreak of COVID-19, and released on Apple TV+ in August 2020, while much of the world was still in various stages of lockdown. The series has been praised by many critics and scholars for its focus on reconstructed masculinity, healing and kindness, set against the backdrop of British football. These themes have contributed to the perception that the show’s success was due to it espousing uplifting and positive feelings that were needed escapism during this unprecedented global experience, which was greatly informed by apocalyptic discourse. This article thus examines Ted Lasso not as escapism or as utopianism, but as a regenerative apocalyptic narrative in which many of the traumas of the real world are confronted and transformed. Close-textual analysis focuses on the characters of Rebecca Welton and Ted Lasso’s intersecting narratives of trauma and reconstruction to reframe an understanding of the apocalypse away from the global to the personal. I use this analysis to demonstrate how the series uses an apocalyptic framework to offer a path through trauma towards a culture of regeneration. Rather than providing an escape, I argue that the series offered audiences the tools to negotiate the complexities of a COVID-world. The article consequently shows how Ted Lasso represents an alternative apocalyptic narrative that undermines nihilism in favour of ‘the Lasso way’.

In television, there is a phenomenon of unexpected dance scenes in non-dance, non-musical texts. This article expands the currently limited research on this popular screen trope. Rich in dance and musical references, Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso (2020–23) presents an unexpected moment of dance in Season 2’s departure episode, ‘Beard After Hours’ (Season 2, Episode 9). I argue that the dance performed by Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) further unfolds the series’ exploration of masculinities and mental health by expressing and producing my original concept of ‘pleasant pessimism’. Generated from Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, pleasant pessimism resists cruel optimism and its fantasies of an unattainable good life, establishes acceptance of reality as is and offers an alternative way of being that is, however unintentionally, transformative. Merging this concept with gender studies and dance theory (primarily Laban Movement Analysis), I demonstrate how Beard’s dance into a world of pleasant pessimism expands masculinities and advocates for mental health through the production of (self-)acceptance. Ultimately, I argue, the moment of dance achieves the good life that is always out of reach with cruel optimism.

Co-creator of Ted Lasso (2020–23), Jason Sudeikis has summarized the Apple TV+ series as ‘what if Nora Ephron wrote a sports film?’ in an interview, opening it up to a close reading of how the dramedy uses popular texts of romantic comedy such as Ephron’s films When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), the Garry Marshall film Pretty Woman (1990), as well as the HBO series Sex and the City (1998–2004). The article highlights how this intertextuality (following Linda Hutcheon) is used to interrogate issues of personal growth, mental health and community over the expected heteronormative outcome of the romcom, subverting tropes. It further situates puts it into conversation with what Maria San Filippo has called the ‘post-theatrical romcom’ (2021) and Ephron’s idea of the ‘Jewish tradition’ of romantic comedy.

Leading up to the Ted Lasso (2020–23) series finale in May 2023, fans anticipated whether various white, heterosexual romantic relationships on the show would come to fruition. When the finale finally aired, there was considerable disappointment at the lack of romantic conclusions for their characters, rather than satisfaction in the friendships that were developed over the show’s three seasons. Yet, queer and feminist theorizations of friendship position friendship as central to the human experience and valuable in analysing the social impacts of cisheteropatriarchal norms. In our analysis of social media posts, we employ feminist queer analysis to critically examine the interplay between the show’s portrayal of friendship and fans’ reactions to these plotlines that were shaped by cisheteronormative imaginaries of what types of relationships we should expect in television while the show defied romantic comedy tropes to focus on friendship. We argue that the romance-focused fan reactions obstructed the full spectrum of possible relationships, platonic and romantic, that were developed throughout the show’s run. When taken together, these relationships deepen our understanding of the ways that Ted Lasso can be taken as an illustration of the importance of friendship and care in our everyday lives, which should be treated with the same gravity as romantic relationships in popular culture.