While we wait for the next adventures of AFC Richmond, we suggest a few alternatives.
Everybody who has seen Ted Lasso, loves Ted Lasso. Mind you, if you’d told Jason Sudeikis, a veteran of more than 174 episodes of Saturday Night Live (opens in new tab), that when he signed up to do a series of commercials for NBC Sports promoting their new and expensively acquired coverage of the Premier League (opens in new tab), that it would go to become his biggest role to date, he’d likely have laughed at you. The initial commercials put Lasso, a college football coach, who is asked to take charge of Premier League heavyweights, before being unceremoniously dumped before the season started. The commercials were a hit and were shared all over the world, Sudeikis was asked about the character in interviews, and, in 2017, he and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence started working on fleshing the character out into something bigger. Something bigger arrived on Apple TV Plus (opens in new tab) in 2020 when the show’s first season debuted in August of that year. This time, Lasso had been hired to coach the fictional AFC Richmond in an attempt by its owner to spite her ex-husband, a life-long fan of the club. After waves of criticism from the media, the club’s fans and the players, Lasso quickly starts to win people around with his relentless enthusiasm and inability to ever countenance giving up. The show has been a giant success for Apple, it has made stars of Sudeikis’ supporting cast Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Hannah Waddington and Nick Mohammed, and won countless awards. After the reception for the show’s first season, Apple quickly commissioned a second season, and then a third, which looks set to be the show’s final run. Filming on that way is underway now. If you’ve not seen Ted Lasso, you should correct that at the earliest opportunity, it’s clever, funny and so very big-hearted, with a real emotional gut punch thrown just when you’re least expecting it. But, if you’ve seen the first two seasons and you’re waiting for the third, we’re here to help with that. To tide you over to the return of Ted and his rag-tag gang of players, we thought we’d recommend six big-hearted comedies to keep you going until then… One of the finest comedies of the last 20 years, if you’ve not seen Parks and Recreation then you need to make sure that you do. In this show, we find ourselves in Pawnee, a fictional city in Indiana, inside the Parks and Recreation Department where Leslie Knope, a mid-level bureaucrat, is desperately trying to convince her team of apathetic, lazy and distracted staff to help improve the city’s fading public realm in the face of an incompetent local administration.
