Apple TV Plus, the iPhone maker’s Netflix-like streaming service, added a new comedy series over the weekend. Ted Lasso, starring Jason Sudeikis, is a show about a small-town football coach who’s given the opportunity to coach a professional soccer team in England.
About three weeks after the terror attacks of September 11,2001, a quirky sitcom about life inside a hospital starring Zach Braff made its debut on NBC. Scrubs, created by Bill Lawrence, couldn’t have come at a better time. TV guys like Lawrence will try to convince you — like he insisted to me, during a recent interview about his newest show Ted Lasso, which just debuted on Apple TV+ — that especially during a time of collective trauma, something as pedestrian as a sitcom can pull off the too easily dismissed magic trick of making people smile again. And that if you as a creator, writer, and showrunner can balance a ribald sense of humor with some sort of heartfelt message about the inherent decency of everyday people — that’s the stuff that fame, fortune, and everlasting TV glory are made of. Okay, minus the fortune and the glory. When you meet him, Lawrence is a little like a real-life (albeit middle-aged) version of Braff’s Scrubs character, surgeon John “JD” Dorian — he’s earnest, wise-cracking, and irrepressibly hopeful, qualities that, not coincidentally, have also pervaded all of the TV projects he’s worked on in his career. Besides Scrubs, Lawrence also co-created Cougar Town and Spin City, he was an executive producer for ABC’s Whiskey Cavalier which got canceled last year, and he’s been a writer for shows like The Nanny and Boy Meets World. I caught up with Lawrence to chat about Ted Lasso, which represents his first foray into the world of streaming thanks to the fact that the series’ first three episodes debuted Friday on Apple TV+. The show’s central premise involves Lasso, a small-time college football coach from Kansas (played by Jason Sudeikis) who’s given the opportunity to coach a professional soccer team in England. The show was born out of a series of hilarious Ted Lasso sketches, with Sudeikis playing this character during NBC Sports’ Premier League coverage. The version of the character in the show is hopeful, earnest, and the kind of optimist with a perpetual grin plastered on his face — even when one of the players laments that he’s now being coached by “Ronald (expletive) McDonald.
