I can't believe that here we are, 3.5 seasons later, and a story that started out as a short comedy skit about an American football coach going to be the manager at a football/soccer team in England, and is completely clueless about the job and sport yet somehow manages to pull it all together just by being a good guy.
Of course this wouldn't actually work out in real life and while I do not follow sports at all, let alone English football, I think I knew more about the game than Ted Lasso did in season 1.
in season 4 I had my reservations about whether or not this show was going to continue to be good or not and this was because I noticed in the trailer that Ted was headed back to England after relocating to America again, to go and coach a professional women's team.
I thought that it was going to be filled with anti-sexism, anti-patriarchy, feminist nonsense and while it does have a bit of that, they managed to not make it too preachy and it is kind of an afterthought. Mostly the show is about Ted still being a bit oblivious about the sport and also finding it very difficult to manage women since he isn't even supposed to go into the locker room without checking to make sure everyone is dressed first.
The show itself is endearing though, even though a few of the women in the team are seriously annoying and kind of appear as though they don't have a great deal of acting experience. That's gotta be a tough thing to pull off because I have made the comment in the past that the men's team (or the actors playing that is) didn't appear to have any sport skills and the action shots were just a joke.
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These two are meant to be twin-sister rivals, but mostly they are just annoying whenever they are in a scene
So I think they may have gone a different route this time by hiring actresses that can actually play and then worrying about whether they can act or not later. This works out during the action sequences but the kicker (pun intended) is that this show isn't really about how the team performs during games, it is more about the relationships that they form and how the various parts of the team manage to come together and make things work even though they are competing in a game that most of the world (and the UK as well) doesn't really turn up to watch and win or lose, most of the time the population doesn't really care.
This might be one of the main ideas behind why this show was made, to try to guilt people into going to watch women's sports. I don't know. I'm not going to read into it that much although it wouldn't surprise me if this show had an ulterior motive since so many other things seem to.
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it doesn't hurt that there is something about this lady that absolutely does it for me
Ted remains a very nice person even when faced with people that are being rude to him. He takes it all on the chin and never gets angry. I think this is the most unrealistic part of the show actually. For someone to be able to keep their cool despite everyone going after you, would be something that not many people would be able to pull off.
Ted is a leader, even though nobody around him has any faith in his ability to actually know the sport very well. The idea that something like that would actually work is a pipe-dream but you do end up learning a few things that probably would work in real life.
Even if they don't work though, the jokes are pretty great and there is something very strangely addictive about this show. I thought I could turn it on at 11pm and watch just one episode and the next thing I know it is 3am and I am upset with myself for screwing up my sleep schedule but the show is just so wonderfully made that you just can't turn it off.
Lucky for me this show is being released week-by-week so after 4 episodes the choice to turn it off was made for me. The only problem at that point was that i was now sort of buzzing from watching a good show and couldn't get to sleep. Let's just say the next day at work was kind of tough!
This might be because there just isn't that much in the way of good series that are on my radar at the moment but I have been really enjoying this a lot more than I thought I was going to. Had they really tried to push home the "girl power" side of things I would have walked away a while ago, but I think the AppleTV people must have had a meeting about this and decided to not push that too hard. I'm sure some feminist executives are fuming about that but don't worry about that being a factor in this show. It's not.
I highly recommend that people check this out. Your ability to enjoy women's football isn't really a factor. You don't really need to be a fan of sports.
The only way to legally stream this show is with an AppleTV+ account.
