Bill Lawrence on Ted Lasso: “You Can Be Ignorant Without Being a Rube”
How an ad for the Premiere League transformed into the best show on Apple TV+
Photos Courtesy of Apple TV+
There’s a point halfway into this first season of Apple TV’s new sports comedy Ted Lasso when the coach tells his spoiled star player Jamie Tartt that he needs to go set up the cones for the rest of the players. Jamie had been faking an injury to protest getting benched and the other players finally stand up to him. The kit man, Nathan, who’s borne the brunt of Jamie’s abuse all season can hardly contain his glee.
“I must see it’s quite nice seeing Jamie put in his place for once. Thrilling, even.”
“No, no, no,” replies Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso. “This is a no-schadenfreude zone.”
That idea—that we’re here on earth to try to help people become their best selves, not celebrate when those who we don’t like are brought low—keeps coming back to my mind. There’s a warmth and an earnestness to Coach Lasso that on paper should come across as phony, saccharine, emotionally manipulative. Instead it’s a strange reminder of human dignity and human decency. Of seeing the good in people, even when they screw up or try to screw you over. This year, where divisiveness and catastrophe keep fighting for our attention, we needed Ted Lasso.
“I don’t want to do revisionist history and go, ‘We were aware there was going to be a constant onslaught of giant social upheaval and a pandemic,’” says the show’s co-creator Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town). “Nobody was. But by the same token, I think it is fair to say everybody here in the States especially knew we were living in a cynical time. In the writers’ room we spoke about not just politics but even normal human discourse here had gotten to a place—especially through social media and politics—that if someone like Ted Lasso came and you met them, immediately my first reaction would be, ‘Oh this person is full of shit. There’s no way they’re this sincere and kind-hearted, and in a week or so the mask will come off and I’ll see they’re truly horrible.’ What happens if in a week that mask doesn’t come off, and the person is that kind and generous spirit and intent? You have to look at yourself and you end up feeling like a piece of crap.”
But the mentor at the heart of Ted Lasso the TV series is a far cry from the bumpkin who starred in a series of hilarious sketches for NBC Sports, which had just secured the rights to air English Premiere League soccer for the 2013 season. The premise was the same—an American football coach inherits an EPL team despite not knowing the first thing about soccer. Neither understands the offsides rule, and both are quickly dubbed “wanker” by the local fans. But that Lasso could never have won over his team or the audience. A funny sketch stretched into a longer format can be painful, and no one should be more aware of that than an SNL alum.
When talking about the transformation of Ted Lasso, “You gotta start from Jason,” says Lawrence. “Most people know Jason as an actor, but he was a writer on SNL first.”
Sudeikis graduated from SNL, where he portrayed figures like Joe Biden, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and the Devil, to a recurring spot on 30 Rock and lead film roles in The Angry Birds, Sleeping with Other People and Driven. But any time he traveled overseas, he’d most often get recognized as Coach Lasso, a role he reprised in 2014 and which became a viral hit with a collective 20 million views on YouTube.
He’d been kicking around the idea with his former Boom Chicago improv and writing partners Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, who played his assistant Coach Beard in the NBC spots, when he mentioned the idea to Lawrence, who’d developed Scrubs and Cougar Town, at a pick-up basketball game.