Minor spoilers ahead.
Sophomore seasons are full of pitfalls, especially when they follow beloved first seasons. And there haven't been many shows with first seasons as intensely beloved as "Ted Lasso." The show does some of the sneaky, contrived things I expected it to do, like wrangling certain characters back into Ted's orbit who have no good reason to be there, and unlikely love matches that we all know are doomed from the outset. However it also does a good job of building on the momentum of year one, and setting up for year three, while being very entertaining for at least eleven of its twelve episodes.
This season is more comfortable with following individual members of the ensemble on their own storylines. Keeley and Roy are often off on their own, Rebecca's love troubles take center stage a few times, and Nathan has a huge subplot that is one of the best things the show has done to date. We get one new major player, Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles), a sports psychologist who is hired to work with the team after a crisis in the premiere, and proves totally immune to Ted's usual charms. Nigerian player Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) is also promoted to main character status, and the show does some fun stuff with him. However, a few characters inevitably get the short end of the stick. Coach Beard gets an entire episode to himself, a sort of surrealist, "After Hours" digression that I don't think really works. This is one of the two extra episodes that was added to the season order in light of the show's success, and it feels like padding because it is.
As for Ted Lasso himself, his mental health struggles really come to the forefront this year, and he's not nearly as much fun as he was last season. While Ted still has his moments of charm and insight, and Sudeikis is still delivering a fantastic performance, he's deep in personal crisis over multiple episodes, and a good amount of the narrative hinges on how this negatively affects his role as a coach and as a mentor. He's mostly back on track by the end of the season, but it still feels like Ted is MIA for a long stretch. I found my attention shifting more toward Keeley and Roy this year, as it's more fun to watch the two of them grow and mature as people. They currently have my favorite romantic relationship in any form of ongoing media. And on the flip side, watching Nathan's ambition and inferiority complex turn him into a monumental asshole is absolutely infuriating. I know Nick Mohammed is doing a great job based on how much I wanted to strangle him by the end of the season.
Individual episodes focus on different characters from week to week, and are best consumed a little at a time instead of all at once. "Ted Lasso" has been steadily becoming a hangout show for me, where I check in with my favorite characters every week to see how they're doing. My favorite installment this year is the Christmas special (the other extra episode), where nothing related to the larger story arcs happens, but we just get the various characters celebrating the season, and Hannah Waddingham gets to belt at the end. The ins and outs of the football season are still present, and we get to look in on different corners of the UK sports industry and culture, but it's not as central to the show as it was previously. The big game still happens at the end of the season, but it's not nearly as important to the show as the decisions made by various characters about their futures in the closing scenes.
The production looks great. The show's success means that the "Ted Lasso" crew now have access to more locations, like Wembley Stadium, and more real football figures making cameos. And as much as I may have my quibbles with particular choices made for particular characters, on the whole the writing and the acting are consistently strong. "Ted Lasso" could easily keep going like this for another decade, and I'd be happy to watch. Alas, all signs point to only one season left, and I'm already impatient to see it.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment