In the exclusive Apple TV+ upcoming comedy series, Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis plays title character, a small-time college football coach from Kansas hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, despite having no experience coaching soccer. Watch Ted Lasso starting August 14th on Apple TV+.
Ted Lasso, “the new Apple TV+ comedy starring Jason Sudeikis as an American hired to coach a UK soccer team is frequently laugh-out-loud funny,” Kristen Baldwin writes for Entertainment Weekly.
Kristen Baldwin for Entertainment Weekly:
Ted Lasso has no right to be this funny. It’s got a one-joke premise, built around a character created for NBC Sports back in 2013. But the new Apple TV+ comedy — starring Jason Sudeikis as a soccer neophyte hired to coach a football club in the U.K. — is a wonderfully amusing, surprisingly thoughtful sports sitcom that is, of course, not really about sports at all.
Once a gum-snapping buffoon hyping NBC Sports’ coverage of the Premier League, today’s Ted Lasso — co-created by Sudeikis and Bill Lawrence (Scrubs) — is a warm-hearted optimist whose sunny demeanor masks a shrewd understanding of human nature. The first episode ends on an emotional note: Ted calls his family back in the States, and we’re given a wealth of backstory — a man desperate to save his marriage, a wife who needs space — through one side of a quietly tense conversation.
There’s nothing groundbreaking about the way Ted Lasso’s story beats play out, but the show — a mix of workplace antics, sentimental sports inspo, and soapy romance — is undeniably winning… Grade: A–
MacDailyNews Take: Sounds like another winner for Apple TV+! We’ll check out Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ ASAP (likely tonight).
Overall this show has received meh reviews, saying the plot is thin, a single issue, and the laughs are far between. This review seems to be an outlier.
Apple does have a lot of good to great shows and movies, but this is not one of them.
I must say, if the trailer is an indicator, “meh” agrees with me.