Ted Lasso Review

The first season is a small miracle of tonal control. A one note advertising sketch becomes a workplace comedy about a man whose relentless decency is both a strategy and a symptom, and Jason Sudeikis plays the cost of it without ever letting the character break. The second season is better still, because it takes the premise seriously enough to introduce a therapist and let the show's own thesis be interrogated rather than restated. Hannah Waddingham and Brett Goldstein both find far more than the writing initially offered them, and Nick Mohammed's arc is the sharpest structural idea in the whole series.

Then it loses discipline. Episodes bloat well past an hour, subplots multiply for characters who cannot support them, and the third season resolves things by announcement rather than by scene. It also looks ordinary, shot flat and bright like a good network comedy, which the football sequences do not help. Worth watching for two seasons of unusually generous writing, and worth being honest about the drift after that.