This month I'm looking at writing techniques in four different sitcoms. This week, Ted Lasso!
In the spring I did a post on the WGA-nominated pilot of TED LASSO. It's an excellent pilot to look at, and an interesting one, too. We learn who Ted Lasso is through the choices he makes, as you would hope. But those choices are not the big, dramatic or risky kinds of things you might find in other pilots. Nor do the yield a series of complications that force other choices and push the character farther.
Ted keeps getting obstacles thrown in his path, and he responds to them all in exactly the same way -- with positivity and acceptance. Really, until very late in the season the main conflicts of the series happen not to Ted but to other people -- to the players he challenges to change or step up, and to his boss Rebecca, who is regularly confronted by her atrocious, humiliating ex-husband and the struggle between her desire to punish him by ruining the team and the reality that Ted is a great guy who only makes the players and the club better.
In a strange way, though it's clearly Ted's show, for most of the season he's mainly the show's antagonist, his positivity and maturity an obstacle and challenge to everyone else's plans.
(Weird aside: If you ever wondered, how do you a modern day take on Jesus or some other saintly figure without it being nonsense, I think this is it.
Weirder still, I think you could probably also use it as an example of how to do a show about the devil.)
Ted is accompanied to Britain by his coaching partner, Coach Beard. And his character is equally interesting. In many sitcoms your main character has a buddy or buddies who they can both play off of and talk to, and Coach Beard certainly fits that bill. He's the guy who knows what Ted needs before he says it. He's the guy who does the research not just on soccer but on British lingo so that Ted can learn how to navigate that world. At important moments later in the season he's the guy who can call Ted on his blindspots and in that way draws Ted into deeper personal territory.
Part of what makes him worth paying attention to is the way his buddy roles are crafted in such a way as to add laughs. So for instance he's the hand that comes out of nowhere to stop Ted from crossing the street after he's looked the wrong way. "Gotta look right, Coach." Or Ted is listing ridiculous insults his son makes when he's angry and forgetting one he turns to Coach Beard, who immediately comes out with "Pee Pee Fingers." Or when Ted and Roy keep going back and forth over who the new captain should be, Beard's silent reactions keep getting bigger and bigger, until it suddenly ends with this:
It's like he just saw a perfect game.
In each of those cases, his activity is mostly supporting the story of the protagonist and adding to the broader comedy of it all, in the vein of a great sidekick.
But the writers and co-creator/actor Brendan Hunt give Beard all these incredibly specific details. He is almost entirely silent in the series -- which is in and of itself just a huge gift to the show. Silent characters hold our attention and also provide a great vehicle for background comedy. His reactions to things at times are just priceless.
At the same time, Coach will occasionally scream a response in a crazily strangled voice. He carries on what seems to be a torrid romance via chess matches. And he makes out of nowhere hard rock references, but then his karaoke choice is this:
Each new data point is hilarious in and of itself, and the pieces all together don't exactly add up. The longer I watch LASSO the more baffled I am by Coach Beard, and that is exactly what makes him so wonderful. Even as he's Ted's rock, he's also the joke that you never see coming, a utility infielder that the writers can use any time they need to punch things up or queer the pitch. He is the mustard on the ball.
Or to put it another way (because I have no business making sports metaphors): he's the gap that viewers get to fill in for themselves. So many great stories ask you to do some of the work, to put some of the elements together yourself. And even as that can be challenging at times, it's also really satisfying. It's a chance for us to participate in the building of the story.
(Random reference: most people who watched LOST say the worst episode was the one where you learned the backstory on Jack's tattoo. There's plenty of good reasons to feel that way, but I think the fundamental error was the writers thinking they needed to explain it at all. That tattoo was a constant contradiction with Jack's uptight character. It was something that did not compute. And it made him much more interesting -- it was an invitation for us to dig in and fascinate over it for ourselves.)
It's a great balancing act that the writers and Hunt have created in Beard. He's so kooky he could be just the punchline. But first and foremost he's Ted's support and truth teller; some would argue in fact that his "winning matters" harangue is one of the show's greatest moments. And so he's never just the punchline or the sidekick; instead those two roles he plays end up leavening one another, making him seem both funnier and more heartfelt.
