Something to watch tonight: Ted Lasso (seasons 1-3)

The argu­ably unne­ces­sary¹ fourth sea­son of Ted Lasso has just star­ted stream­ing on Apple TV. I’d like to take this oppor­tun­ity to have a wee skite about being the first NZ crit­ic to spot the show and respond to it.

From September 2020:

Dan Slevin hates it when he likes things he is sup­posed to hate.

It’s a very odd feel­ing – to stumble across a TV show late on a Saturday night that in every aspect appears to be some­thing you’ll hate but then find after about ten minutes that you love it and you binge all six cur­rently avail­able epis­odes in one go.

I don’t really do com­edy. I’m more of a prestige drama man, now. 30-minute sit­coms are even less my style. I’ve watched the greats, obvi­ously. Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and a few epis­odes of Cheers, but for the most part I have found life to be too short and there are too many good actu­al films to get caught up in “shows about noth­ing” or “shows about groups of friends”.

I’m not a big fan of Jason Sudeikis, either. In fact, I have giv­en him scath­ing reviews for this very web­site. I usu­ally find his pseudo-likeability to be the oppos­ite of charm­ing – a one-joke schtick that gets old very quickly.

And don’t start me about foot­ball. Football is the blood run­ning through my veins, a source of dis­tress and drama. As a West Ham fan, foot­ball is tragedy played out every week². Football is not a source of com­edy, espe­cially not an easy­going, soft-centred, delight­fully watch­able com­edy like this one.

You can read the rest here. I think I called it pretty well.

---

Where to watch Ted Lasso

Worldwide: Apple TV (formerly known as Apple TV+)

---

1. But is any tele­vi­sion really neces­sary? ↩︎
2. This was writ­ten before West Ham became Lasso’s nemes­is club and we became the butt of even more jokes. ↩︎