'Ted Lasso' Is Life!

An interview with Jeremy Egner, the author of the new "Ted Lasso" book "Believe."

Has there been another show, in the history of television, that better demonstrated the inestimable importance of “right time, right place” than Ted Lasso? Premiering in the fall of 2020, a moment with more free-floating, ambient anxiety than most of us have ever experienced, Ted Lasso overcame its obvious challenges—a series unpromisingly based on a series of television commercials, premiering on a streaming platform most people didn’t have unless they just bought an iPad—to become an astonishing word-of-mouth hit. I remember texting my colleague Jennifer to tell her she had to watch this show, and I’m guessing that millions of similar conversations were taking place all across the country in those harrowing months.

Now, with Ted Lasso having wrapped after three seasons, Jeremy Egner, the television editor at the New York Times (full disclosure: Egner is my editor at the newspaper), has emerged with Believe, a wonderfully capacious oral history of the show. I got to talk recently with Egner, and we chatted about all matters Ted Lasso, although we did not kick a soccer ball around or belt out “Let It Go.”

I was moved by your writing about being seriously ill with COVID early in the pandemic as part of the book. How did that impact your first encounter with Ted Lasso?

I'm a jaded culture journalist. My default mode is to quickly categorize something and figure out whether we need to cover it or not. But going through the experience with COVID, it was in the early days, when there wasn't a lot of information. It was hard to even get a test, and they didn't know how to treat it. It was a very scary experience. You come out of something like that with a certain amount of survivor’s guilt, because lots of people didn't have the same good fortune.

But it also feels like a second chance, and leaves you a bit more introspective about, “How do I want to approach the rest of this? How should I be treating people differently? How should I be treating myself differently?” Even though I am somewhat cynical, just because my job has made me that way, I was uniquely susceptible to the message that Ted Lasso was offering.

Why do you think Ted Lasso felt like a genuine word-of-mouth phenomenon?

I think a lot of it had to do with where people were at. It was a very dark time. Not just the pandemic, we also had the summer of protests after the George Floyd murder, we had the presidential campaign coming into the home stretch. Lots of people were very susceptible to what Ted Lasso was about. I don't want to overstate the cultural context of it too much, because I do think that first season deserves a lot of credit for just being really, really good.

In the book, Jason Sudeikis discusses about the ignorance and arrogance that he saw kind of everywhere in the culture. He calls Donald Trump the Batman-villain version of that tendency becoming president. Does it make sense to you to see this show as a response to Trump's coarseness and ugliness?

With the caveat that I don't really talk about politics, it's not partisan to say that. Jason Sudeikis did say, look, Trump was the kind of person that we wanted to create the antidote to as a TV character, the shitty cocktail of a man who was both arrogant and ignorant.

But it was also a reaction against all the antihero TV of the early part of this century. Not just in drama, where we had The Sopranos and Walter White. But in comedy, we had Veep and Larry David and the British Office and even the early version of the American Office, [which] were all people acting in ways that we wouldn't necessarily want ourselves or our children to act. [Ted Lasso] was part of a backlash against that, which also included things like The Good Place, Parks and Rec, Schitt’s Creek.

I know that sometimes the biggest challenge for a project like this is just lining up the interviews. Were there particular interviews that required extra effort on your part to make happen?

To be candid, I talked to Jason Sudeikis multiple times during the run of the show, but in the end, he did decide he didn't want to do another one for the book. I did at one point text him, like, “Be curious, not judgmental about my book.” Using his own words against him wasn't effective.

The good news is, even when I couldn't get something that I wanted from somebody, there's so much out there. There was an enormous amount of awards panels and FYC events and group interviews. It was more about trying to figure out how to organize it all.

I was particularly struck by your read of Coach Beard as a kind of autobiographical version of Brendan Hunt, someone who belatedly finds his place in the world. Do you see that idea of second chances, or the idea of struggling to find who you're supposed to be, informing what Ted Lasso is as a show for you?

People talk about shows about kindness, about decency. But I really think it's about human potential, and about the ability that any of us has to change how we approach our lives in the world. You have all these people who are stuck in these self-destructive patterns, whether it's Rebecca in her post-divorce bitterness, or Roy not knowing what he will be after his career, Jamie and all his daddy issues, or Ted dealing with his own marital stuff. Through their interactions and through their own hard work, they're able to reorient themselves in a more healthy way. I think the point is, it's always within you to change the way that you want to be.

What you're saying reminds me of something in the book that I admired. You said, “The reason it's so important to be curious rather than judgmental, to treat others and yourself with kindness and compassion, to make strong connections and build deep relationships and foster supportive communities is because this thing called life, to quote a different songwriter, might be all that you get. It might be it. And wouldn't you rather spend it moving through the world with grace, with empathy and with people you love?” Is that a statement of purpose for you about why you wrote this book?

There's almost a Buddhist dimension to Lasso¹, as far as paying attention and taking care. I think we all know how easy it is to get caught up in the petty but definitely real stresses of the day and emotional turmoil. I read something the other day [from] Carlos Castaneda. I'll butcher the quote. It's like, “You have the power to make yourself happy, or you can make yourself miserable. And they both take the same amount of work.” If you're aware of that, if you're aware of how your brain works and your emotions work within you, you can be more in command of using them for good. With great power and emotions comes great responsibility. That was what made the show unique. There's lots of good shows, there's lots of smart shows. There's lots of funny shows, and obviously the show had its flaws. But there's not many that leave you with a sense of wanting to try harder, to be a better person.

I found all the details about the show’s CGI work, which I was entirely unaware of, to be fascinating. Why was that particularly important to you?

That was probably the most purely fascinating part of the reporting for me, because I didn't have any sense of it either. I didn't really think about how they make all these things until I started talking to directors. It's basically a bunch of actors kicking a ball around in a field, and then they dropped the entire game around them, including a lot of the fans.

I think we're probably of a similar age. If you look back at the movies of the ‘90s or early 2000s that had a lot of effects, most of it looks pretty dated, but the effects were like a feature. Whereas now, it's just part of the landscape, and the idea is you don't even notice it. You know you're watching mostly ones and zeros, but your brain is telling you you're watching the story. The guy who I talked to [said] “When I tell people that I did effects on Ted Lasso, [people say] there are no effects in Ted Lasso.” He's like, it's insulting, but also tells me that I did a good job.

As a critic, what's your take on the later seasons of Ted Lasso? Do you feel like seasons two and three live up to the success of season one?

Rewatching gave me a greater appreciation for all of it. TV [is a] serial medium, so you bring all these expectations and story hopes to the experience of watching it when it's coming out week by week. But when you're able to set those aside, then you can see more clearly what it's doing and what it's trying to achieve.

I will say, though, my initial sense didn't change, which is that the first season is terrific, the second season is good, and the third season was more uneven. I do think that part of the reason that the third season was a little choppier was it came from a place of narrative generosity, There was this desire to show that everybody was going to be okay going forward. You get these big chunks of episodes devoted to more marginal characters, like Colin is having a coming-out story, and there's so much more of Sam and his political awakening, and even a guy like Isaac, the team captain, he has a couple episodes where he's heavily featured. It takes time away from the characters that you care about from the jump, like Nate and Keeley and even Rebecca, and to a certain extent Roy. Roy and Keeley’s relationship was sidelined in that third season. I felt like Nate's redemption arc was rushed. I think it would have been more satisfying to see more of it onscreen.

I know that one of the things that ended up getting a fair amount of coverage when your book came out was Jason Sudeikis saying that audiences misunderstood season 3, that it was meant to be more like live theater. What do you make of that argument?

It was funny because he actually said that in a SAG panel in January. That quote has been sitting there on YouTube for months, for anybody who wanted to grab it. I kind of see where he's coming from, as far as saying that a story is a compact between the creator and the audience, that you are bringing your imagination, and you're bringing your openness to taking in the story, and you're adding your own layer of interpretation. I think that's a really magical thing that we take for granted.

Whatever he has to say, Ted Lasso wasn't theater, it was a TV show. And there is an expectation that you're going to show us what's important. So to say, “Oh, well, you just didn't use your imagination enough, and that's why you didn't like it,” felt like a bit of a copout.

Have you gotten responses from cast or crew members or people you spoke to about the book?

Chris Powell, [who] plays himself in the show, he was just texting me the other day. He's like, “Let's make season four happen!” There's people who are part of this thing who have this crazy devotion, and they all want to come back. There's a lot of superficial praise of everything. But this always felt really genuine, the emotion with which they spoke about their experience on the show.

And do you think there will be a season four, or a Ted Lasso offshoot, in the future?

There have been some reports about contracts being signed and a writers’ room possibly coming together in the trades. I've always assumed something would come of it. I think we saw that they were setting up, in that series finale, a couple different avenues of possible extensions, whether that's Nate and Roy and Beard running the team now, or a women's team in Richmond. I just think there's too much market pressure to not ever bring it back.

1. Yes, there is! Our own Jennifer Keishin Armstrong wrote about it for Lion’s Roar magazine.