Ted Talk

Yes! That Ted! But Coach Lasso from your favorite fictional football club wasn't always warm and fuzzy, which I know first-hand because he stepped into an NBA arena (of sorts) before the hit TV show

With the third and potentially (but hopefully not) final season of Ted Lasso well underway, three episodes into Season 3, I have settled into a rather rigid routine.

New episodes drop every week late Tuesday ... or very early Wednesday depending on how you look at the clock when it strikes midnight. I like to watch them pretty much immediately, right after TNT's NBA coverage ends for the evening.

Regular readers who know of my longstanding England obsessions had surely already presumed that I'm a Ted Lasso devotee. A show about an American coach who takes over a Premier League team and is forced to immediately adopt an unfamiliar London lifestyle? Yes sir, Steve Kerr.

Yet there's an NBA-adjacent layer to the Lasso Phenomenon that had me hooked from the jump to follow the title character's evolution. Ted, you see, wasn't always the folksy, endearing, aw-shucks Midwesterner who had the capacity to forgive his new boss Rebecca mere seconds after hearing her reveal all the diabolical ways she tried to sabotage the team in their first season working together. In truth, Jason Sudeikis' Ted Lasso started out as an edgy and occasionally mean trash-talker whose persona was eventually (and sagely) tweaked into the cuddly coach we've known since the hit series debuted in August 2020.