This month I'm looking at writing techniques in sitcoms. This week, Ted Lasso!
Halfway through its first season, TED LASSO introduces a new player, Danny Rojas, who has apparently been injured up to this point.
Immediately he steals the show with his nonstop enthusiasm and constant refrain that "Football is life", which somehow only get more wonderful the more times he says it.
About halfway through the episode he's injured again, and for a moment it seems like he was just a guest star for the episode.But no, he's here for the duration.
First seasons are always a time of experiment and discovery, so introducing a character like this halfway through the season is not completely unheard of. But it's pretty unusual.
For me the bigger trick is making a character like that gel with everything else going on, to make him feel right away like a fun new part of this world rather than something out of nowhere. How do they do that?
A couple things stand out: First, Danny is a perfect foil for Jaime. Jaime is self-centered, sour, and kind of dreadfully serious. Danny shows up and he's the opposite--he's playful, he's friendly, he's generous. His presence married to his talent immediately challenges Jaime's way of proceeding.
Danny is also more or less the epitome of the Ted Lasso School of Life. He puts positive energy out into the world and believes that good things will happen, and they do. And much like Ted, success for Danny doesn't seem to be a function of winning so much as playing. His motto isn't Winning is Life, but Football is Life.
And at the same time, he's not a Lasso clone. Instead he fills a classic sports story role the squad doesn't have yet--"the new kid".
So even as he seems to show up out of the blue, the character slides right in because the writers conceived of him in conversation with the broader story and themes of the show. Also, he's a hell of a lot of fun, which never hurts.
The next time you can't stand a character on a show, it's worth stepping back to consider whether part of the problem is that question of whether they've been designed to fit.
Weird LOST flex (and weirder still the second in two days!): In the third season the show introduced Nikki and Paolo, two of the rest of the survivors of Flight 815. To my mind it was a great idea; I spent the whole show hoping we'd get to meet more of the survivors, even if just as minor characters. But people HATED them. HATED them.
And the complaints seemed to settle around three things: They were not likable. Their backstory was yet another criminal/con job story. And their lives never seemed to really intersect with anybody else's.
Each of those complaints is really about fit. They felt like both a repeat beat and a dangling plot thread. And so they couldn't stay. Those kids ain't right.
