Maybe you’re finally forced to choose cynicism or schmaltz, and maybe a second season was always doomed to fail. (Maybe, too, the fun in the first season was watching Lasso work his magic as an outsider, met with suspicion and even anger, and now that he’s been embraced, the tension evaporated.) Maybe you can’t blame them maybe the difficulty in endowing your show with those optimistic perspectives while still remaining committed to emotional honesty and packing an emotional punch is so high, so seemingly impossible to achieve, that you can’t keep the act afloat for very long. The root of the problem, as far as I can tell, is that the writers/directors/creators heard the heaps of praise on the specific elements-to repeat a few adjectives-of sincerity, positivity, and wholesomeness, took it to heart, decided to lean into that side of the show, and came out with something heinously sentimental and trite. Scrub as you will, but it’s never going to run again.
It doesn’t matter how much good faith you took in, because it got so bad, so fast, that once this week’s Christmas episode hit, pretending things were still okay was like polishing a ferrari that had just been wrecked on the highway by an 18-wheeler. I would still, in theory, like it to succeed.īut, my God, my God in heaven, Season 2. I was hooked, and these are my bona fides I’m not some Lasso-hater who has been waiting in the dark to ambush the poor show at the right moment. Here’s the review I wrote of Season 1, and here’s something I wrote praising that soccer-as-football scene that, it turns out, many people did not like. This is strong stuff, I understand that, so I want to make it clear that I was on the Lasso Train from the start. And yet here I sit, in 2021, absolutely astounded at the sheer speed with which Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso managed to transform itself from a remarkable comedy that walked the line of sincerity and wholesomeness with acrobatic dexterity, somehow reeling in and capturing even cynics like me, into something so insanely treacly and insipid that, if one were being harsh, one would say had slipped into the bowels of a dark realm called cornball schlock.
It’s a common experience it’s to be expected. It’s the name of the game, and if you’re lucky, with perspective, the descent into mediocrity and worse won’t diminish the parts you loved. Watch enough TV, and you will run across plenty of shows you once enjoyed that stuck around too long, fell into various narrative potholes or simply got lazy, and turned bad.