Ted Lasso and Major League

 

Season 1 of Ted Lasso came out in August 2020, and season 2 was released more recently, both on Apple TV.  That streaming service also gives us For All Mankind, the alternate history story, in two seasons, which speculates what might have happened had the Soviets beat us to the Moon in 1969.  In real life, despite having a head start with Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gargarin in 1961, we caught up to them and beat them to the moon, at which point the Sovs then implausibly denied they were even trying to compete with us.  There’s also Foundation, which is based on the Isaac Asimov stories – which I have not read.

Ted Lasso.  This features Jason Sudeikis as the central character.  It seems a fictional Premier League (top tier) soccer team, AFC Richmond, from London, wound up being owned by a vindictive woman, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) out to destroy the team out of spite for her ex-husband, who cheated on her and now has a baby on the way with his 20-something sex kitten.  So she hires Ted Lasso, a college football coach from Kansas City, USA of all places, with absolutely ZERO prior experience in soccer, let alone a Premier League team. 

Lasso appears to be a lightweight, annoyingly optimistic and naïve, with as little clue about London and England as he does about soccer.  He brings his assistant coach (Beard, and he has a beard, Brendan Hunt) along with him.  The local fans are highly skeptical of his chances (WANKER is the universal cheer at the local pub, not meant endearingly) as are the players and the local press.  Lasso also learns, firsthand, how brutal not only the English tabloids can be, but also mainstream journalists as well, e.g. Trent Crimm from the Independent (James Lance).  It seems literally everyone has written him off.

Remarkably, he rises to the challenge, and somehow manages to navigate all these obvious issues, partly with his happy-go-lucky charm but also with a fair amount of strength of character which eventually cuts through the incessant cynicism.  It turns out he has some underlying issues which make his character not only more complex but also more sympathetic.  Season 2 picks up with the team finally turning things around, partly with the help of a therapist.  What’s interesting is that though AFC Richmond itself is fictional, the team is up against real-life Premier League rivals such as Liverpool, Manchester City, Tottenham, West Ham, Aston Villa, etc., all names which soccer fans are sure to recognize. 

I also find the array of characters to be highly entertaining.  Higgins (Jeremy Swift), the owner’s XO, bumped around without a permanent office; Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), the abusive and cynical ex-player who winds up a sports anchor – with NO filter! – and then back on the team as an assistant coach; his GF, Keely (Juno Temple), very cute (!!!); Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster), one of these spoiled, highly talented but egotistical players who left the team earlier with extreme prejudice only to have Man City dump him – and then no one else will take him except his former team, with whom he’s already burned all his bridges and has to crawl back begging for his old job back.  ("Be careful who you piss on, on your way up, as you'll be meeting them on your way down...") That’s just a few…

I’ll spare anyone spoilers or specific details of the plot and simply advise:  you may well find the modest fee for Apple TV to be worth it for this show alone, never mind the aforementioned sci-fi shows which are worthy in their own right as well.

Major League.  My buddy Dave advised me that the “team sabotaged by a vindictive female owner” plot was the premise of this 1989 film about the Cleveland Indians.  I saw it when it came out but I don’t think I’d seen it again before now, when I took another look at it. 

In this case the owner, Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton) is angling to move the Indians from cold, dreary Cleveland to warm, sunny Miami.  The catch is that the team is bound by contract to remain in Cleveland…UNLESS their attendance figures fall below a certain number.   So she deliberately assembles a motley crew of renegades, washouts, and misfits deliberately calculated to result in a last place finish.  The team includes catcher Jake Taylor (Tom Berenger) whose knees sidelined him earlier; the temperamental pitcher Ricky Vaughn (Charlie Sheen); pampered, rich third baseman Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen, aka Arnie Becker from “L.A. Law”), voodoo shaman Cerrano from Cuba (errr.. I thought voodoo was from Haiti, not Cuba, but whatever) (Dennis Haysbert); and flashy Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes).  Rene Russo plays Berenger’s love interest, and Bob Uecker is basically playing himself as the team’s announcer,  Harry Doyle.

I have to marvel at how much I remember from this film despite only having seen it once.  Dorn’s wife catches him slipping away behind a TV commentator at a party with another woman, so she seduces Vaughn at a bar.  When housemate Taylor sees her leaving Vaughn’s bed the next morning, Vaughn says, “honest, I had no idea who she was!”  

Getting back to the basic premise, eventually the team learns of Rachel’s ulterior motive and decides to pull out all the stops and get to the Series for the team’s first title since 1948 – and winds up against the Yankees, of all teams.  I would think that once the team entered playoff contention the attendance would surpass the threshold which would allow it to walk away from the lease with the city.  Certainly once it made the playoffs itself, you could expect the stadium to be mostly full.  Either way, it’s an entertaining story, made more so by watching Sheen’s later work – “Two and a Half Men” – and indulging in the Washington Nationals in recent seasons with my brother. 

Actually, the two wind up as opposites of “Fever Pitch”.  The original featured Colin Firth (with buddy Mark Strong) as die hard Arsenal supporters in London, with the remake featuring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore as Red Sox fans.