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What’s behind Ted Lasso’s woke turn?
The third series of the hit show has gone in a strange direction
An unusual phenomenon to watch from the vantage point of “over-educated, probably pretentious coastal type” was The Big Bang Theory.
Premiering at the height of the mainstreaming of “geekdom”, the show was chock-full of lazy innuendos and empty stereotypes — it seemed congenitally incapable of trusting its audience. One of the more egregious examples was the character Sheldon Cooper, who, in the pilot episode, is a pedantic (and frustratingly inflexible) STEM guy. But by the premiere of Season 2, he was cartoonishly autistic, bordering on childlike.
It wasn’t just that Sheldon Cooper had been “Flanderized”, a term used to describe the process in which a character becomes increasingly exaggerated and one-dimensional over time. Yet, for some reason, the audience loved it: The Big Bang Theory remains among the most popular sitcoms of all time and, in the US at least, one can probably still find a graphic t-shirt that reads “Bazinga” at the local shopping centre.
Something similar seems to be happening with AppleTV+’s Ted Lasso, which has recently taken an unsettling “woke shift”. Viewers don’t appear disturbed because of the content itself; rather, they’re alarmed by what feels like an abrupt advertising campaign for DEI programmes. On a Reddit thread, commenter after commenter posts about how it feels like the writers are “shoehorning in societal issues”, and how “every 2 minutes, it’s woke crap.”
Having watched the show, I’m inclined to agree: Ted Lasso has gone from feel-good, even nauseatingly wholesome, to a comedy at great pains to tick diversity boxes. In series three alone, not one, not two, but three gay characters have been introduced. And then there’s the dialogue: racist Facebook users, late-stage capitalism, the refugee crisis, and admonitions about “boring white people” all appear. Amazingly, there were no quips about neoliberalism.
One might expect the show to be suffering a viewership crash as a result but, according to Forbes, the numbers for Ted Lasso are better than ever. “Still a smash”, they write, as other outlets report that its premiere set records.
It’s no The Big Bang Theory, that’s for sure, but that’s because fewer people are tuning into television shows, and fewer still are loyal to AppleTV+, which itself is no Netflix or Hulu. But why are people still watching, even though the writing has gone downhill?
Unfortunately, the truth is that the cornier, the more accessible, the more immediately relatable, the better for modern audiences. The same way viewers liked The Big Bang Theory until the bitter end, people are still watching Ted Lasso despite it losing “some of its magic”. Similarly, though Marvel films continue to get worse, they are still pulling in large audiences because people love content that hits them over the head with what it is; that doesn’t make them think. More than that, it reflects what they think the world around them is all about.
And right now, to the everyman, it would appear to be ham-fisted depictions of wokeness, as bitter a pill as that might be to swallow for some of us.
It’s the parasitical woke entertainment industry’s standard operating procedure. Commission a show which has no political messaging or subtext, wait to see if the show becomes popular, then if it does, fill it with progressive messaging. The fans then have a choice. Abandon the show they love or stick with it and have to tolerate the woke messaging in it. If people continue to watch, they claim this validates that their ideology is popular, if the show fails, they blame it on bigoted audiences and start looking for the next host to infect.
Why must you be such a hateful Inclusophobe. If incremental infiltration of existing structures promotes a sustainable, inclusive world that dismantles patriarchal systems of comedic supremacy than I suggest you get on board the Liberation Express, Jack!
That is exactly what I said in Germany in 1933
I’m sorry but Inclusophobe was a quality joke! Lol
Impressive and in only 4 lines! You’d get a hit BBC Radio slot out of that. 🙂
I should stick to ITV3
This is the trajectory of late-stage mass entertainment sitcoms. As predicted by Gramsci in his little known essay on Laurel and Hardy.
Or buy a successful franchise and infect it (Lucasfilm).
What makes it so boring is that it’s become al-too-horribly predictable with its check-boxing. I think the reason why some of us are still watching it, is that we’ve invested time in the first two seasons, and are hoping it gets somewhat better. Also, the length of each episode has gone from 30 minutes to almost an hour, which means the storylines tend to dribble on when they are no longer interesting to us.
Apple TV has a few gems, but much of it is utter garbage. It’s not quite for adults – no sex or real horror, but also (with the exception of the programs aimed at toddlers) not really for children or family viewing (too much swearing). When watching Apple TV programs I feel like the majority of programs have been created by Chat GPT and that the characters are mere algorithms, programmed to to play a predestined part. Almost every family is cut from the same boring stereotype (dumb dad, smart wife, obnoxious teen daughter), not to mention the wise black woman trope who acts as a spirit guide for the main characters, but is often on the receiving end of racism, or the super-emotionally intelligent gay gay who operates on a far higher plane than the heteronormative oiks bumbling around him.
It looks like this kind of stuff is going to feature in almost every major Hollywood film too in the near future: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/oscars-inclusion-rules-sparking-debate-1235343128/
Such a blessing that series like Cheers were created long before this excruciating nonsense.
My favourite comedy at the moment is Brassic, because it’s still so wrong, like the early seasons of Shameless (U.K. not USA version).
It saddens me when comedies forget that they’re supposed to entertain not educate
Educate? I think the term is moralize, or perhaps pontificate. Just imagine the shrills and hyperbole if the show went the other way and Ted started going to church on Sunday?
True but educate starts with an E, like entertain which rolled off the tong and I and also suspect it has been justified on set as “using their platform to educate”.
Has anyone actually filmed any of the audience watching? The real laughs may well be when the ‘educating’ starts.
Ted Lasso has got bad this season, I’ll stick it out to the end as I think it is going to be the final season but probably won’t bother watching any 4th season if it comes out. 1st season was brilliant tv.
The one good episode this season (taking place in Amsterdam) was nearly devoid of DEI preaching — then it all went back to gaslighting us the next two episodes. We keep watching in hopes of more treasures like Higgins playing the blues, but it’s really just a tease.
Artistically the 21st century has been a great disappointment so far. On every level.
No joke. Walk into just about any art gallery…very sad indeed. That said, music has been diverse & prolific and some gems can be found.
dang u r so right.i said that its just like the 60s with none of the good stuff
I worried for the show when I saw the cast being wheeled out by the Biden administration – to row in behind whatever their latest virtue signaling campaign is. Shows being destroyed by political grandstanding is an all too predictable script these days.
That, for me, was the Kiss of Death. I’m stringing along to the end of Ted Lasso primarily because I enjoyed the first and second seasons. But, indeed, gangrene has set in.
We enjoyed the first two seasons of Ted Lasso and resubscribed to Apple TV solely to watch the third season, but when the second gay plotline was revealed, we pulled the plug. One reason it felt like woke indoctrination was that it didn’t fit with the character we had grown to know for 2.5 seasons, who had never shown any hint of being gay–quite the opposite. We cancelled our subscription that evening. What a shame they ruined a series that had such broad appeal!
I loved the first season. Started getting a bit suspicious in the second, but still loved it. This season is annoying. What bothers me most, is the incessant use of the F word. What is going on with that? Also the multiple gay plot lines are overkill. One is fine. It’s too bad because the show started out with such promise. Sad.
This trajectory most tragic, to me, was Brockmire. One of funniest seasons of TV I’ve ever watched and the second season was such a bummer.
Comedies that prove themselves funny and successful, seems like they specifically are a target to those most-known as the group of people that cannot take a joke.
I thought the Big Bang Theory did a pretty good job of not patronizing their audience.
If you want to be patronized or educated in Critical Consciousness just watch an episode or two of Lorre’s sitcom Bob Hearts Abishola. It’s quite possibly the least funny show I’ve ever seen.
None of the Big Bang Theory stars were gay or black or both and the token female they chose was a dumb blonde from Nebraska. The plot lines, while silly and all too reliant on the improbable behaviours of an autistic genius, were never political, and the dialogue was never used to ram home some unrelated point about the sodding climate. Its enduring popularity seems pretty obvious to me (i.e. fast paced sitcom gaggery).
Yeah, Comedy that takes itself too seriously isn’t comedy.
This Era is going to be parodied endlessly in 50 years.
Yep, Ted has certainly gone downhill. Very little football related stuff in it now for a start! Not nearly as many smart comments that I had to listen to two or three times to get. All a bit predictable and increasingly dull.
The best of Ted was in the original adverts for NBC’s Premier League coverage.
But it’s about football (sort of) so I’ll keep watching.
I wasn’t impressed with the series writing from the get-go, ie not worth watching. So I can’t imagine it getting any worse.
I sat through the first two episodes of Season One and bailed.
It’s annoyingly woke. But it’s still funny. (So far.) And are there straw men? Doesn’t every character struggle through hard things?
That combination is rare.
never heard of him.. who cares?zzzzzzzzz
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