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Ted Lasso [TV-series 2020-...] - As Sweet as Apple+ Pie


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7 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

F1 tends to be followed by anyone in my experience, but obviously for the most part only reasonably well-off people can regularly participate in motorsports.

True, although current seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton is from a very working class, BAME background. But three other drivers (Latifi, Mazepin, Stroll) are the sons of billionaires and most of the rest picked up expensive backing of one kind or another. I believe Esteban Ocon is the only other driver you can say came from a working class background.

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11 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Football, boxing, darts and snooker working class (football's become more for-everyone in the last 20 years and there's been some, ahem, resentment about big clubs clearly catering to the middle classes, but it's still working classie at heart).

Tennis, rugby, cricket, golf more middle class/people with money (though rugby depends on location a lot too, and rugby league - as opposed to union, the overall more famous version, or at least the one more covered by media based in London - tends to have a more working class fanbase based in more northern areas). Cricket tends to cross class boundaries a bit more though I think, and it's also very popular with immigrant populations from India and Pakistan regardless of class.

F1 tends to be followed by anyone in my experience, but obviously for the most part only reasonably well-off people can regularly participate in motorsports.

Fascinating.  Seriously.

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9 hours ago, Werthead said:

although current seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton is from a very working class


I don't want to besmirch how hard Lewis and his dad worked to get him into F1 but even that is slightly overplayed. Yes, his dad had to work three jobs at times, but that speaks to the expense, not a desperately humble backround, since Anthony Hamilton was an IT manager, not a typical working-class job, and one of the things he did to fund Lewis' early career is remorgage his house, also not something within the reach of most working class families. 

Like they weren't rich, middle class would possibly be an exaggeration (class lines in the UK being sharp but not as sharp as some would believe), but they were only 'poor' coz they were pouring so much into the F1 career. I mean his dad's family lived in Tewin. 

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2 hours ago, polishgenius said:


I don't want to besmirch how hard Lewis and his dad worked to get him into F1 but even that is slightly overplayed. Yes, his dad had to work three jobs at times, but that speaks to the expense, not a desperately humble backround, since Anthony Hamilton was an IT manager, not a typical working-class job, and one of the things he did to fund Lewis' early career is remorgage his house, also not something within the reach of most working class families. 

Like they weren't rich, middle class would possibly be an exaggeration (class lines in the UK being sharp but not as sharp as some would believe), but they were only 'poor' coz they were pouring so much into the F1 career. I mean his dad's family lived in Tewin. 

Certainly in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of working-class families owned their home, a combination of Thatcher's social housing sell-off (which allowed my grandparents to buy a house for the first time in their lives, in their fifties at the time), the cost of living being much lower than now and mortgages being within the affordability of many relatively low-paid workers, which was all lost by the explosive growth in house prices starting in the mid-1990s and have never really stopped.

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Fair point, so I'll row it back and say calling him middle class would definitely be excessive, but it's still definitely fair to say that Hamilton, financially, had options - well, his dad did- that a lot of working class families didn't. He's not really an insight into a possible road for more working class drivers is what my original point kinda was meant to be.

Also, although it's not what you were doing here, I guess I just tend to resist the 'Hamilton had no money' narrative coz when painted a certain way by some journalists etc it comes with the distinct implication that working class parents who didn't get their kids that kind of lucrative opportunity just weren't trying hard enough. Not super-relevant to this discussion but...


None of this is a knock on Hamilton, just to be clear.


Anyway we've drifted off Ted Lasso a teeny bit.

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6 hours ago, Teng Ai Hui said:

What the fuck did I just watch?  Did Beard have a fever dream or did I?

Also, how did their record jump to 21-6-16?  So, 3 matches left and maybe a promotion playoff.

Independent of the rest of the show and all other context it was… kind of interesting simply for its surreality.  In context you hit the nail on the head.

Does this confirm they had no idea were to take a second season?

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2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

 

Does this confirm they had no ideal were to take a second season?


I just read that what happened is they had the series ordered and written for ten episodes, and then Apple decided they wanted an extra two, so they had to find two bottle stories they could tell without impacting the running threads. So, we got the Christmas episode, which was terrible by any measure, and this, which is weird but a lot more worthwhile.

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1 hour ago, polishgenius said:


I just read that what happened is they had the series ordered and written for ten episodes, and then Apple decided they wanted an extra two, so they had to find two bottle stories they could tell without impacting the running threads. So, we got the Christmas episode, which was terrible by any measure, and this, which is weird but a lot more worthwhile.

This, though I still think the Christmas episode was fine. The writing team very much knows where it’s going.

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I'm pretty late to this show - I only started watching Season 1 a couple weeks ago, and now am almost through Season 2. I think it can be funny and cute, but I also find Ted to be a deeply annoying character. Someone in this thread called him Ned Flanders, and that about sums it up. The show was also always mushy, but without any sort of antagonist (now that Rebecca and Jamie are nice), the 2nd season just goes way overboard, imo. It's kind of like the Good Place in its later seasons - if you're going to do a mushy comedy, I think you still need one of the main characters to have some edge. Then again, my favourite sitcoms are Seinfeld and Arrested Development, so maybe this just isn't meant for me.

Roy Kent is pretty great though.

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4 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I'm pretty late to this show - I only started watching Season 1 a couple weeks ago, and now am almost through Season 2. I think it can be funny and cute, but I also find Ted to be a deeply annoying character. Someone in this thread called him Ned Flanders, and that about sums it up. The show was also always mushy, but without any sort of antagonist (now that Rebecca and Jamie are nice), the 2nd season just goes way overboard, imo. It's kind of like the Good Place in its later seasons - if you're going to do a mushy comedy, I think you still need one of the main characters to have some edge. Then again, my favourite sitcoms are Seinfeld and Arrested Development, so maybe this just isn't meant for me.

Roy Kent is pretty great though.

I tried to get into Arrested Development.  It is so deeply cynical.  It has funny moments but it just didn’t strike home.

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So with little other attractive alternatives I decided to try again with season 2. Episode 5 is definitely an improvement  over the dire Christmas episode but it’s still not close to season 1’s quality.

The whole rom com gimmick raised a few recognition chuckles, but really that is one of the cheapest forms of humour going, so no extra points for that.

That this episode relied heavily on movie references just highlights one of my real bugbears with this season. With no actual jokes on display the writers have fallen back on just pulling out pop culture references, even if they make no sense for the characters involved. Having footballers debate who is the best rom com star might be slightly humourous ( huh huh butch footballer said Meg Ryan!!) but it’s such a tired concept. 
 

It’s just happening so often, and I’m struggling to find any other sources of humour in the show. 
 

So I’ll keep watching but only out of morbid curiosity at this point 

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9 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

So it sounds like they are doing MORE references to movies? Is this their thing now? Ugh.

 

Just this episode, really. Rainbow is the only non-late-addition episode that's been full of reference (tbh even though that episode is great airing it just after the Christmas one that does a similar concept in my opinion not well may not have been the best idea, it's given people the impression the whole season is more like that than it is). 

 

On 9/18/2021 at 9:58 PM, Caligula_K3 said:

if you're going to do a mushy comedy, I think you still need one of the main characters to have some edge.

 

Definitely wanna get to at least episode 8 before you write it off as edgeless. Whether it comes together in the end is yet to be seen but there's definitely a plan here. Hard to say how it steps on from 8 yet coz as I say 9 was a bottle episode which, while not edgeless, doesn't advance the main plot, being a Beard character piece.

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I think as mentioned before, 5 and 9 were self-contained late additions to the series (I'm assuming they also filmed the ending of 8 as part of 9 and inserted it later on), so we should now be clear with the last three episodes until the end of the season, which should be pushing the plot forwards more decisively.

Since I got Apple+ to watch this, I also watched their other big comedy series, Mythic Quest, and whilst Ted Lasso's first season was a lot stronger (MQ takes at least half of the first season to fully spool up and has wobbly moments later on), I think MQ's second season has been much better than its counterpart. In particular, the four semi-standalone, almost-out-of-continuity bottle episodes they've done have been absolutely superb (the one in the first season is a brilliant self-contained short film), whilst Ted Lasso's two have been much weaker.

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Ted Lasso did well at the Emmys. It won Best Comedy, Lead Actor (Jason Sudeikis), Best Supporting Actor (Brett Goldstein) and Best Supporting Actress (Hannah Waddingham). It did lose out on a batch of other awards for writing and directing because multiple episodes were nominated, which split the votes. The supporting actors nearly did as well.

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