#what do you MEAN ted lasso is about an american football coach being hired to coach a british soccer team???

[to-be-a-dreamer]

One of my favorite things is when my friends talk about a show or movie or whatever and I have absolutely no clue what the basic premise is until I randomly decide to look it up a solid five months into listening to the besties info dump because I have never once been right about guessing what a show is about.

[veryace-ficrecs]

Trent/Ted Lasso Fic Recs

This list will include all ratings and tags, so read at your own discretion! :)  

Part 2 here

if the years are all gone by marcaskane (commanderdameron) - Rated T

Nearly two decades before Rebecca Welton hires Ted Lasso as AFC Richmond's new manager, Trent Crimm spends a semester abroad in the midwestern United States. Everything unfolds a little bit differently from there. 

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered by mardia - Rated E

Ted Lasso: Schrodinger's Witch.

Or, the one where AFC Richmond are leading the Premier League table, and Trent Crimm and the rest of the British press are slowly losing their minds as a result.

 i don't joke about crushing balls by orphan_account - Rated T

The sight is so bizarre, so out of place that for a minute, Roy’s not sure what he’s looking at. Trent (Crimm, the Independent) looks just as shocked as Roy feels. He’s wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, stupid hair ridiculously mussed, and he’s holding a mug of steaming coffee. 

turn and face the strange by rockinhamburger - Rated M

Trent is writing a book, so he's in the room, generally, whilst [AFC Richmond's magical season] fucking happens. 

The Hair and the Whole Vibe by TheWitchsCat - Not Rated

Ted notices Trent Crimm's hair and it's all downhill from there. An exploration of their relationship as it moves from casual to not. Romance and pining and fluff and soft smut for these sweet boys. 

'cause all i want to do is by punk_rock_yuppie - Rated T

Trent didn’t even pause to say good morning, which has become an indelible part of their morning routine (if you ask Ted) since he joined Richmond under the guise of writing a tell-all book.

Clearly, something is very wrong

orange marmalade by arrowxsun - Rated T

or: Trent Crimm comes home to find Ted Lasso waiting for him

“Sorry I’m late mum, traffic was hell and—oh”

Ted Lasso was right in front of him, wearing the apron Trent’s mum got him for Christmas. Trent couldn’t tear his eyes away.

“You’re not my mum” he said.

Wow. That was. Wow. He was a writer, a pretty renowned one for fuck’s sake, couldn’t he come up with something better?

Today wasn’t really Trent Crimm’s day.

Ted Lasso smiling at him like that sure wasn’t helping.

Pen Names and Pining by I_wouldnt_be_one_of_them - Rated M

Trent is a fan of cosy mystery novels. His favorite author is Dora Lariat, a Midwestern American who has recently moved to London and writes themes ranging from baking to football. For some reason Ted Lasso seems very interested by this fact. 

semaphore by trentcrimminallybeautiful (biDEMONium) - Rated T

Four bracelets and thirteen mugs later, Colin might have finally gotten the hint. Because it was directly pointed out by a crowd of himbos, but you know, still! We got there! Right?! Right?! 

PRE-ORDER NOW by spqr - Rated M

“I can’t send this to the publisher,” his agent announces, before Trent can even say hello. “Are you serious, Trent? If this is some sort of joke, I don’t get it—”

“It’s not a joke,” he says levelly, pouring himself a second scotch. “I’m being professional, that’s all. If I wrote a book about my mother I’d have to disclose she was my mother.”

 “Interestingly, the identity of your mother would not fetch quite so many headlines as you being in hopeless gay love with a Premier League manager—”

“No need for the ‘gay’ part,” Trent tells her. “Just ‘hopeless love’ will do, thanks.”

Lies, Damned Lies, and Lies to Journalists by gutterandthestars - Rated T

"It’s bad," says Rebecca, "because Trent Crimm is a very good journalist and knows you just bullshitted him right to his face. Which means..."

“He doesn’t believe I had food poisoning?”

“That’s highly likely,” agrees Rebecca. “And that means….”

“Means you’re fucked,” says Roy, appearing in the doorway. “Because now he’s not writing a story that reads ‘Richmond Coach Shits Himself’, he’s investigating a story he assumes is so embarrassing it’s worth your while to try and cover it up by pretending you shit yourself. And since that is already pretty fucking embarrassing, he’s thinks he’s onto something big.”

===

A little exploration of how this could have panned out, and why. With eventual kissing!

Season 2 Episode 9 comes on on Friday - I'm clutching my emotions tightly.

A day in the life by GrantaireandHisBottle - Rated T

‘I saw you with a man bun once, it really suits ya. Your hair in general is very nice but the man bun is twelve out of ten. Just saying!’

Trent blinks. ‘Thank you?’

‘You’re welcome,’ the golden retriever personification in Lasso nods and walks back to his own desk. Trent casts a glance at Beard’s empty chair, almost hoping to see some silent explanation of what the hell this was about.

Drawn Sunflowers by ItsClydeBitches - Rated T

This just in, his mind whispered, tone both exacerbated and snide. Local ex-journalist enamored with middle-aged man writing in a journal. Can his life get any more pathetic? Tune in at 11:00 to find out!

Fuck, but he shouldn’t have drank last night. Coming out to Colin had been bad enough. Pairing that with alcohol, mere hours before he’d spend the day in an enclosed space with Ted Lasso, was stupidity, plain and simple.

Still, nothing to do but shoulder ahead. So Trent cleared his throat, wincing at how rough his voice was.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Boxes by BrilliantlyHorrid - Rated T

“Excuse me, Coach Lasso, could I have a word?” Trent asked, tamping down the butterflies in his belly as Ted Lasso gave him his full attention.

Ted put his thumb and pointer finger under his chin for a moment thoughtfully before snapping his fingers and pointing at Trent.

“Archipelago."

Takes place after 3x07

***

Colin and Trent come out to the team. It goes well but things get weird.

off the handle by trentcrimminallybeautiful (biDEMONium) - Rated T   

Ted lets himself be angry, kisses the man of his dreams, accidentally makes said man of his dreams cry, acquires a boyfriend, and smashes some shit with Trent Crimm in a parking lot at 3 am. Not in that order. No one ask where Coach Beard got those mugs.

(The man of his dreams, the acquired boyfriend, and Trent Crimm all happen to be the same person. This is a surprise to no one but Ted and Trent Crimm himself.)

Tasteful Treasures by speccygeekgrrl - Rated G

Trent hoards the myriad facts he's learned about Ted safely in his mind, where no one can see just how deep his fascination runs. Those facts spawn theories, including one that Trent puts to the test: how much of Ted's hatred of tea is because no one's bothered to dress it up to his taste? 

 i'll lend it to you if you treat it tenderly by premortem - Rated T

“I knew,” Trent began cautiously, “that after the… incident, the one I stitched together on that godforsaken flash drive, that the sign had to have been carefully repaired and hung back up very deliberately to keep anyone from finding out what had happened. I knew that it worked for months, which probably required someone keeping an eye on it to make sure one half wasn’t slipping. I knew that someone had to have already known the sign was torn in order to put it back up, and I knew that you didn’t react with as much shock or hurt as I’d expected when we showed you the tapes.”

Ted’s eyes refused to meet his. They were focused on a spot of sauce on the floor, which he was scraping at with the toe of his sneaker as if that could fix the blemish. It was nothing short of painful to watch Ted fold into himself like this. But Trent had committed almost all the way to this confrontation; at this point, he had no choice but to drop the other shoe and get it over with.

“And I, um. I saw the security footage of you spending hours to make sure it seemed perfect,” he finished with a shuddered exhale.  “Would you like to comment?”

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret by laiqualaurelote - Rated T

“Ted,” he says, mouth dry.

“Trent,” says Ted.

“Is this a date?” says Trent stupidly.

“Trent Crimm, bringing that heat.” Ted still hasn’t withdrawn his hand.

They’re standing in the street outside Ted’s flat where any tosser in Richmond could gawk at them. Trent hasn’t blanked so hard since his first press conference at Man United, where Alex Ferguson insulted his hair. His mouth, trained by years of journalistic habit, says on autopilot: “Follow-up question.”

In 48 hours, Trent Crimm lands a scoop, implodes his career and makes some drastic life decisions. And then there's the aftermath. And Ted, of course.

Winning Over Journalists by PrincessAmonRae - Rated G

"I violated journalistic integrity."

"Not why you resigned, I know that part, I meant why did you violate journalistic integrity?" Trent is briefly flummoxed and muses on the fact that this has turned into a true role reversal. "You're a good journalist Trent and you wouldn't have tossed that away for nothing. Not just outta respect."

"Well fuck." Trent reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose before resigning himself to the embarrassment he is about to endure. "I had hoped your stubborn American politeness would have allowed us to dance around this issue."

All the Time in the World by one_true_houselight - Rated T

Ted has a heart attack, and Trent is the only one there.

[finalgirlkateausten]

Trick Plays

The Ted Lasso discord got ahold of this gif and decided the team needed to do it. This is for you guys. Writing crack for this fandom is the best.

Summary: Just... just look at the gif. That's the summary.

Isaac has played for Richmond for a few seasons, and until Ted Lasso, it's seemed like a stagnant, inertia-bound club. Several seasons in a row of going nowhere fast.

And then Ted comes around, and they get relegated by a brutal loss, and yet somehow, the team feels tighter, more alive than it has in years.

The biggest change, the one that makes him proud to be the captain of this team, is the energy. The locker room had once been musty and sullen, all of them changing and heading out to the pitch with barely a word to each other. But now?

It's raucous and lively, music blaring from somewhere and balls and kits flying through the air. Today most of the team is crowding around Dani, who's laughing and grinning (as usual) as he shows them something on his phone.

"What're you lookin' at?" Isaac asks, tugging his shirt over his head and joining the group.

"This is my sister's team," Dani explains, tilting the phone. "Many of them come from gymnastics backgrounds. They have been rehearsing this celebration for weeks, and they finally won a game they could use it in."

Isaac watches the screen, where two girls with long ponytails are helping a third into a handstand, and as their teammates surround them, applauding, a fourth player takes a running start and does a flip through the spread legs of the handstander.

He chuckles. "We could do that."

The group breaks into laughter... and then they pause and look around, considering.

"New flexibility and balance drill today," Isaac crows. "I'll start in the middle. Rojas, you can jump!"

---

Rebecca has an incredible amount of business to attend to. Very important business. Business that does not include joining Keeley at the window overlooking the pitch every time she says, "Rebecca, look at the crazy shit they're doing down there."

"I hired an American football coach," she reminds her, scribbling her signature for the umpteenth time that day. "Crazy is right up his alley."

"I'm not even sure Ted's on the pitch yet," Keeley argues. "Seriously, look-- oh my god, Isaac is doing a headstand."

There's really no type of business that could keep her from looking up at that.

"What..." she moves slowly over to the window, catching sight of her team captain being held upside down by Zoreaux and Montlaur. "...oh, what the fuck is that."

"I have no idea," Keeley says, "but I am so putting it on our Instagram."

As they watch, Dani takes a running leap, dives into a front tuck... and makes it too low, his boot catching Isaac in what must be a very uncomfortable place to take a hit.

"Yeah," Keeley says again, "I'm going to film this."

Rebecca blinks at the dogpile on the pitch (and she must be spending too much time with Ted, because she realizes the accidental pun with the team's mascot and laughs to herself) and slowly shakes her head.

"You do that. I'm staying up here."

---

Ted finishes his weekly planning with Beard and Nate and enters the pitch to find his players contorted like acrobats in the penalty box.

"Quit putting Isaac in the middle, you idiots," Roy is yelling. "Richard's dropped him three times. Colin, you get on your head, and I'll hold you up."

Richard steps away with his hands raised in defeat, and Ted notices Keeley on the pitch, holding up her phone. "Alright, this one's for the reels!"

"Ooh, are we going fishing?" Ted actually has been meaning to look up what sort of fish he can catch in British waters-- this country is an island, after all.

"What?" She gives him a weird look. "No, Ted, Instagram reels-- it's how they copied TikTok."

"I do not know what those words mean, and somehow I don't think it's because they're British," he says with a shrug. "Hey, boys, what's goin' on?"

They're too caught up in whatever this is to hear him, so he ends up just watching as Dani takes a flying leap, straight through Colin's legs, and tucks into a front roll as he hits the ground. The rest of the team erupts in cheers.

"We're practicing a new celebration move, Coach," Sam explains, finally noticing him. "Dani's sister and her gymnast teammates invented it."

"Well, I'm no gymnast," Ted admits, "but I sure would love to be a part of this!"

"Alright, bring him in," Roy calls. "I don't want to stand here and hold Colin's leg anymore than I have to."

They do it again, and again, it's a successful move. The team is as loud as if they'd actually scored in a match.

"That's what I'm talking about!" Keeley crows. "This is so going to go viral!"

---

If Rebecca had been flabbergasted by the odd circus act going on during training, it's nothing to how she feels when they repeat it during a game. Although, to be fair, the shock of scoring a point in the twenty-third minute is a factor, too.

"My cousins and I pulled a trick like that one year," Higgins says, from her right. "Only, I dropped Katherine halfway through, and she broke her collarbone."

Rebecca looks at the cheering hoarde of young men in red and blue, thinking about the thin line they walk between milking penalties for drama and actually injuring themselves worryingly often. "Don't even joke about that."

But they win their game, which shouldn't be surprising after their hard work over the summer, and yet somehow, it is.

She can see how that's worth a ridiculous celebration.

[sleepykittypaws]

Ted Lasso: Carol of the Bells

Original Air Date: August 13, 2021 (Apple TV+) Where to Watch?: It’s an Apple TV+ original series, so should be available on the streaming service in perpetuity

Ted Lasso, the series, is one of the brightest entertainment lights to come along in a relatively dark time. Premiering mid-pandemic, the show, based on a series of not-all-that-well-known NBC soccer coverage promos, stars Jason Sudeikis as an American college football coach hired to coach British Premier League soccer (I, of course, mean, football) team, AFC Richmond.

The show, which has become something of a phenomena as it enters its second season with a record 20 Emmy nominations, has been hailed for its niceness and general likability. It's funny, sharp and, yes, sweet, without being saccharine. Bad stuff happens on, and to, Ted Lasso, just like in real life, but the characters don't let the worst parts of their lives define them.

Ted Lasso’s trick is that it manages to be both grounded and an escape from reality, into a world that's a little bit kinder and more gentle than the one we all actually live in, in 2020 and 2021.

So, there's probably no better program to offer up a Christmas special, even in August, despite the fact that I'm usually a stickler about keeping holiday content special by confining it to the season. I mean, sure I start "the season" no later than November 1, but, still, I do enjoy waiting to savor my Christmas TV, so it takes something pretty special to get me in the spirit mid-summer.

“Carol of the Bells,” the fourth episode of Ted Lasso’s second season, takes place, like most UK series Christmas specials, both within and somewhat outside the timeline of the rest of the series, and could easily be watched, and enjoyed, as a stand alone. There is barely a passing mentioning of what felt like a cliffhanger ending to episode three, when the team protested their top sponsor, Dubai Air, in solidarity with Nigerian player Sam Obisanya. But in “Carol of the Bells,” the timeline of the show has jumped ahead significantly, putting behind us the team's streak of draw matches, which had been another  main focus of the season to date, via one line of exposition and a pan to a whiteboard in Coach Lasso's office. 

One of the things I love about this show is that they aren't afraid to resolve a plot line mid-season. No need to draw it out for drama, or to have beloved characters backtrack, constantly recreating the same situations. I think the moment I really feel in love with Ted Lasso is when the owner-seeks-to-destroy-team-as-revenge-on-her-ex plot that launched the series was resolved, not via a dramatic reveal, but a quiet office conversation with team owner Rebecca asking, and receiving, forgiveness, from Ted, who understood her instinct to lash out, and refused to hold those worst impulses against her, knowing he had his own not-quite-pure reasons for accepting the job in the first place. 

For me, that moment was when Ted Lasso went from amusing, to awesome. So, it's no surprise that the Ted-Rebecca relationship continues to bloom at Christmas, where Hannah Waddington's character absolutely sees through Ted's all-good exterior, knowing just how lonely the first Christmas post-divorce can be.

When we saw Ted drinking, alone in his apartment, and watching It's a Wonderful Life, I feared we might be in for one of those dream Christmas movie redux's with Ted learning how important his existence really is, but of course I should have known better. A huge part of Ted Lasso's charm is that show usually zigs, when viewers expect it to zag: Not giving the team the tie to keep them from being relegated, the undramatic reveal of Rebecca's evil plan to Ted, Keeley and Roy's rock solid relationship.

Instead, the show continues to demonstrate it really does have the best of intentions with Rebecca and Ted going on a Christmas Day giving spree, that feels both absolutely perfect for the pair, and helps support the very real Poverty Alleviation Charities.

Meanwhile, Roy and Keeley's Sexy Christmas is interrupted by the last minute arrival of Roy's adorable niece, Phoebe, who has received a not-very-nice gift from a boy in her class. Roy and Keeley's banter is on full display as they attempt to both revenge and reconcile the source of Phoebe's distress.

Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy and is also a writer on the show, steals almost every scene he's in, even at Christmas, and the onscreen chemistry he has with Juno Temple's Keeley is off the charts. That child actor Elodie Blomfield more than holds her own with these two is a real testament to her own, budding abilities.

The ending of Roy, Keeley and Phoebe's Christmas adventure—teased early on with the reveal of the teasing boy's name as Bernard (and if you don't get that reference Google "Richard Curtis-Bernard Jenkin") is so perfect, I absolutely did tear up. 

Oh and, shout out to guest star Claire Skinner, who knows a thing or two about classic UK Christmas specials with her own from her days on Outnumbered, another of my UK faves. Gutted we didn't get to see Dr. Rogers' husband, who I kept hoping would be Skinner's real-life partner, and Outnumbered co-parent, Hugh Dennis. Really, Dennis' lack was the only real mis-step in this entire episode for me.

Meanwhile, Higgins, played so well by Jeremy Swift (the casting in Ted Lasso is across-the-board perfection), is hosting his annual Christmas open house for Richmond team members without family in town, expecting the usual one or two players to pop in. Instead, with Swift's real-life wife Mary Roscoe at his side, almost the entire team turns up ready to celebrate with the Higgins clan. 

It's only at the very end that “Carol of Bells” goes traditional Christmas special, putting most of its main characters outside Casa Higgins for an episode-ending musical number that, I'm just gonna admit, while cheesy as heck, brought even more tears to my eyes, despite it still being August, and would have made me a blubbering mess in December—when I will definitely be watching this again.

From the opening scene reveal of the team's Secret Santa exchange, to the closing moments that put Waddington back on the mic, which fans have been demanding since her karaoke outing in season one, for an extra dose of Christmas cheer, “Carol of the Bells,” was, to me, perfect. 

I'm not exactly sure why Apple TV+ didn't save this for a one-off November or December drop but, as I said on Twitter, it's very possible, maybe even likely, that I saw my favorite Christmas content of 2021 on August 13th. Ted Lasso: Carol of the Bells is going to be very, very hard to top.

Final Judgement: 4 Paws Enthusiastically Up for this instant Christmas classic

[agentnico]

Ted Lasso - Season 1 (2020) Review

I don’t watch football. Yet I watched this show. Does it makes sense? No, but neither does 2020!

Plot: Small-time American football coach Ted Lasso is hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, despite having no experience coaching soccer.

Here I am once again taking advantage of my 1-year free Apple TV+ subscription thanks to my very dear to my heart iPhone 11 that I got this year for my birthday and its great, truly amazing, bet you don’t have one, but I do, so I laugh in your face selfishly and make you hate me..... So Apple TV+, a fairly new streaming service that still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix, Amazon Prime, or even Disney+. So far from the Apple TV+ content I’ve only watched Mystic Quest: Raven’s Banquet from the producers of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that has its enjoyment value, but now I’ve found Ted Lasso, which is easily superior on so many merits! Here we find a show with such a simple fish-out-of-water premise, that is uplifted by the fact that it is such a feel-good wholesome comedy that is so welcome in the dark unprecedented times we live in!

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, what makes a show excel? Any ideas? Any takers? You there, eighths seat in the third row with your hand up so high up I’m afraid its going to rip off and fly into the sky like a rocket, what you got? Huh? What was that? Ah, good try, no, its not the narrative, though that is a very good attempt! 5 points to Gryffindor! Anyone else? Anyone know what is the main key to a show’s success? Hey, what was that? The soundtrack? Ah, you’re sweet! But no. The answer is - characters. When you have a TV show, what do you do most? You spend time with these characters. You get to know them. You imagine yourself in their shoes. You need these people to sympathise with, and if you don't care about any of them, then you obviously would not care for the show as a whole, and at that point is where the writers would lose you. In the case of Ted Lasso, this show hits the goal (no pun intended!.....who am I kidding, totally intended!!) when it comes to the characters. You actually fall in love (not sexually, calm down!) with every single main member of the cast, as they are all so likeable and good in these roles.

Jason Sudeikis reprises his character of Ted Lasso, which he originally portrayed years ago in a series of promos for NBC Sports’ coverage of the Premiere League, and by the way those skits are hilarious and you should check them out on the Tube of You when you get the chance! The character works due to his overall positive attitude, and being the square peg in a round hole by coaching an English soccer team having only the knowledge of American football, and yet as the show progresses you realise you may not actually need that knowledge to be a great coach. I mean, maybe in reality that message isn’t 100% true, but its very endearing to see it here. Sudeikis brings so much light, charm and innocent charisma to the role, yet there are also surprisingly deeper levels to his character that are unravelled as the show progresses, and as such Lasso is very interesting to watch. The rest of the cast all excel too. Hannah Waddingham plays the owner of the club, who at first is pitched (get it?) as the antagonist, however, again, due to the nature of the series there are not really any straight up villains. Everyone has a reason to making bad decisions. For instance, the team’s most successful player Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) is presented as egotistical and only caring about himself and pushing everyone else down in process, yet again, you then find out about problems he had since childhood revolving around bad parenting, and again all the puzzle pieces are put in place. We also have Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) coming off as a straight faced no-crap-taker captain of the team, but, again, surprise surprise, he turns out to have a heart of gold. Honestly, the only real prick is Anthony Stewart Head who plays, well, a prick who interestingly enough is also called Rupert (assuming a minor Easter Egg for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

The show at the end of the day is about building team spirit, and how one does not need to win or lose to prove themselves. There will be moments where you are up and when you’re down, but as long as you work together you will achieve *insert Borat voice* great success!! All in all, Ted Lasso is a great show that shows a lot of promise, and heck, you don’t even need to be a football fan to enjoy it - exhibit A is writing this review right now!

Overall score: 8/10

[thepurpleandgold]

Please tell me about Ted Lasso?? I have no idea what it is but I am intrigued by your posts

you have no idea how happy this ask just made me haha! it’s soooooo good! I’ll try sum it up without blabbing on and also spoiling it but basically Ted is an American Football coach who comes to the UK to coach a premier league team but he’s hired for a different reason and takes the job for a reason kind of thing. It’s soooo heartwarming and has so much deeper meaning than just Football (soccer)! it’s beautiful, hysterical but made me cry too lol!! Anyway, idk if that helps at all but it’s just AMAZING. Changed my life, not even being dramatic lmao! I hope you enjoy if you do chose to watch it!!! & please message me what you think if you do!!!!

[lokirupaul]

Lokiru Paul : Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

Jason Sudeikis Is Having One Hell of a Year

He got famous playing a certain kind of funny guy on SNL, but when Jason Sudeikis invented Ted Lasso, the sensitive soccer coach with the earnest mustache, the actor found a different gear—and a surprise hit. Now, ahead of the show’s second season, Sudeikis discusses his wild ride of a year and how he’s learning to pay closer attention to what the universe is telling him.

BY ZACH BARON, GQ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HILL & AUBREY

July 13, 2021

Shirt, $188, and tie (worn at waist), $125, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore. Watch, $10,200, by Cartier.

On the day that he wrapped shooting on the second season of Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis sat in his trailer in West London and drank a beer and exhaled a little, and then he went to the pitch they film on for the show—Nelson Road Stadium, the characters call it—for one last game of football with his cast and crew. There's this thing called the crossbar challenge, which figures briefly in a midseason Ted Lasso episode: You kick a ball and try to hit not the goal but the crossbar above the goal, which is only four or five inches from top to bottom. And so Sudeikis arrived and, because he can't help himself, started trying to hit the crossbar.



Jason Sudeikis covers the August 2021 issue of GQ. To get a copy, subscribe to GQ.

 Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode. Sneakers, his own. Socks, stylist’s own. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

Confidence is a funny thing. Sudeikis has been riffing on it, in one way or another, for his whole professional life—particularly the comedy of unearned confidence, which he is well suited, physically, to convey. Sudeikis is acutely aware of “the vessel that my soul is currently, you know, occupying”—six feet one, good hair, strong jaw. He's a former college point guard. On Saturday Night Live, where most of us saw him for the first time, he had a specialty in playing jocular blowhards and loud, self-impressed white men, a specialty he took to Hollywood, in films like Horrible Bosses and Sleeping With Other People. He became so adept at playing those types of characters, Sudeikis said, that at some point he realized he'd have to make an effort to do something different. “It's up to me to not just play an a-hole in every movie,” he said. In conversation he is digressive, occasionally melancholy, prone to long anecdotes and sometimes even actual parables—closer, in other words, to Ted Lasso, the gentle, philosophical football coach he co-created, than any of the preening jerks he used to be known for. But he can definitely kick a soccer ball pretty good.

So he's up there trying to hit the crossbar, and he's got a crowd of actors and crew members gathering around him now, betting on whether he can hit it. And he's getting the ball in the air, mostly, but not quite on the four-to-five-inch strip of metal he needs to hit, and the stakes are escalating (“I bet he can get it in three.” “I bet he can get it in five”), and after he misses the first five tries, Toheeb Jimoh, the actor who plays Sam Obisanya on the show, says, “I think he can get it in 10.” Then Sudeikis proceeds to miss the next four attempts. But, he told me later, “there was no part of me that was like, ‘I'm not gonna hit one of these. I'm not not gonna hit one of these.’ ”

Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won't happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time. “It's a very interesting space to live in, where you're living in the questions and the universe is slipping you answers,” Sudeikis said. “And are you—are any of us—open enough, able enough, curious enough to hear them when they arrive?” This sounds oblique, I guess, but I can attest, after spending some time talking to Sudeikis, that everything is a little oblique for him right now. He had the same pandemic year we all had, and in the middle of that, he had Ted Lasso turn into a massive, unexpected hit, and in the middle of that, his split from his partner and the mother of his two children, Olivia Wilde, became public in a way that from a great distance seemed not entirely dissimilar to something that happens to the character he plays on the show that everyone was suddenly watching. “Personal stuff, professional stuff, I mean, it's all…that Venn diagram for me is very”—here he held up two hands to form one circle—“you know?”

Shirt, $195, by Sid Mashburn. T-shirt, $195, by Ralph Lauren. Vintage pants from The Vintage Showroom. Belt, $2,500, by The Row. His own sneakers by Nike x Tom Sachs. Socks, $18 for three pairs, by Nike. Pendant necklaces, $2,100 (tag), and $3,000 (bar), by Tiffany & Co. Jacket (on bench), $498, by Todd Snyder.

Anyway, Sudeikis hit the crossbar on the 10th try. “It's a tremendous sound,” he said of that moment when the ball connects with the frame of the goal. He'd done what he knew he would do. Everyone on the pitch was cheering like they'd won something. It was, for lack of a better way of describing it, a very Ted Lasso moment—a small victory, a crooked poster in a locker room that says Believe. “There's a great Michael J. Fox quote,” Sudeikis told me later, trying to explain the particular brand of wary optimism that he carries around with him, and that he ended up making a show about: “ ‘Don't assume the worst thing's going to happen, because on the off chance it does, you'll have lived through it twice.’ So…why not do the inverse?”

Watch Now:

10 Things Jason Sudeikis Can’t Live Without

Ted Lasso. Man—what an unlikely story. The character was initially dreamed up to serve a very different purpose. Sudeikis first played him in 2013, in a promo for NBC, which had recently acquired the television rights to the Premier League and was trying to inspire American interest in English football. The promo was the length and shape of an SNL sketch and featured a straightforward conceit: A hayseed football (our football) coach is hired as the football (their football) coach of a beloved English club, to teach a game he neither knows nor understands in a place he neither knows nor understands. The joke was simple and boiled down to the central fact that Ted Lasso was an amiable buffoon in short shorts.

But Sudeikis tries to listen to the universe, even in unlikely circumstances, and for whatever reason the character stuck around in his head. So, in time, Sudeikis developed and pitched a series with the same setup—Ted, in England, far from his family, a stranger in a strange land learning a strange game—that Apple eventually bought. But when we next saw Ted Lasso, he had changed. He wasn't loud or obnoxious anymore; he was simply…human. He was a man in the midst of a divorce who missed his son in America. The new version of Ted Lasso was still funny, but now in an earned kind of way, where the jokes he told and the jokes made at his expense spoke to the quality of the man. He had become an encourager, someone who thrills to the talents and dreams of others. He was still ignorant at times, but now he was curious too.

In fact, this is close to something Ted says, by way of Walt Whitman, in one of the first season's most memorable episodes: Be curious, not judgmental. I will confess I get a little emotional every time I watch the scene in which he says this, which uses a game of darts in a pub as an excuse to both stage a philosophical discussion about how to treat other people and to re-create the climactic moment of every sports movie you've ever seen. It's a somewhat strange experience, being moved to tears by a guy with a bushy cartoon mustache and an arsenal of capital-J jokes (“You beating yourself up is like Woody Allen playing the clarinet: I don't want to hear it”), talking about humanity and how we all might get better at it. But that's kind of what the experience of watching the show is. It's about something that almost nothing is about, which is: decency.

In the pilot episode, someone asks Ted if he believes in ghosts, and he says he does, “But more importantly, I think they need to believe in themselves.” That folksy, relentless positivity defines the character and is perhaps one of the reasons Ted Lasso resonated with so many people over the past year. It was late summer, it was fall, it was in the teeth of widespread quarantine and stay-at-home orders. People were inside watching stuff. Here was a guy who confronted hardship, who suffered heartbreak, who couldn't go home. And who, somehow, found his way through all that. Someone not unlike Sudeikis himself.

“If you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Sudeikis likes to say, in homage to his background in competitive sports, that there's no defense in the arts. “The only things you're competing against, I believe, are apathy, cynicism, and ego,” he said. This is a philosophy of Sudeikis's that predates Ted Lasso by many years, though you wouldn't necessarily have known it until recently. He grew up outside Kansas City, in Overland Park, Kansas, a “full jock with thespian tendencies,” as he once described himself. His uncle is George Wendt, who played Norm on Cheers. “He made finding a career in the arts, in acting or whatever, seem plausible,” Sudeikis said. But mostly he was drawn to the camaraderie of athletics. When Sudeikis first tried his hand at professional improv, in the mid-'90s, it was through something called ComedySportz, a national chain with a fake competition angle, teams in sports uniforms, and a referee. Brendan Hunt, who co-created and costars on Ted Lasso, initially met Sudeikis in Chicago, he told me. Sudeikis had traveled the eight hours up from Kansas City to do a show: “Suddenly there's a beat-up Volvo station wagon, like an '83, and this is '97, I think, and these two guys get out, all bleary-eyed, and wearily change into their baseball pants. And one of them was Jason.”

Sudeikis had gone to community college on a basketball scholarship but failed to keep up his grades, and he eventually left school to pursue comedy. For a while, he said, his sincere aspiration was to become a member of the Blue Man Group. He got close. “They flew me out to New York,” he said. “That was August of 2001, right before 9/11. And I got to see myself bald and blue.” (In the end, he wasn't a good enough drummer.) By that time, he was living in Las Vegas with his then partner, Kay Cannon, doing sketch comedy at the newly formed Second City chapter there. “Ego,” Sudeikis told me about this time, “that gets beaten out of you, doing eight shows a week.”

Eventually he was invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. “I didn't want to work on SNL,” Sudeikis said—he'd convinced himself that there were purer and less corporate paths to take. “At a certain point in your comedy journey, you have to look at it as like McDonald's,” he said. “You have to be like: ‘No. Never.’ ” Then he got the call. “It was like having a crush on the prettiest girl at school and being like, ‘She seems like a jerk.’ And it's like, ‘Oh, really? 'Cause she said she liked you.’ ‘She what?!’ ”

Suit, $4,860, by Tom Ford. Vintage t-shirt from The Vintage Showroom. Suspenders, stylist’s own. Shoes, $1,535, by John Lobb.

Sudeikis auditioned, of course, and was hired, in 2003—but as a writer: “It was like winning a gold medal in the thing you've never even trained for. You just happen to be good at the triple jump, and you really love the long jump.” He wrote for a couple of seasons, but he was unhappy—Cannon was still in Las Vegas, and Sudeikis missed performing. Finally he went to Lorne Michaels, to ask for a job as a member of the cast. “He had the best line. I go, ‘I had to give up two things I love the most to take this writing job: performing and living with my wife.’ And on a dime, he just goes, ‘Well, if you had to choose one…’ ”

At Saturday Night Live, Sudeikis often channeled the same level of cheerful optimism and forthright morality that he'd later bring to Ted Lasso, but audiences didn't necessarily notice it at the time. One of Sudeikis's most famous and beloved early sketches on SNL as a performer is 2005's “Two A-holes Buying a Christmas Tree”—Kristen Wiig and Sudeikis, chewing gum, oblivious to their surroundings, terrorizing Jack Black at a Christmas tree stand. It's a joke about a very familiar form of contemporary rudeness; it's also a riff on a certain kind of man who speaks for the woman next to him, whether she wants him to or not. And people laughed and moved on to the next bit, but to this day Sudeikis can tell you about all the ideas that were running through his head when he created the sketch with Wiig. “That scene was all about my belief that we were losing touch with manners,” he told me. “And yet it's also about love, because he loves her, and that's why he interprets everything for her—she never talks directly to the person.” But, he said, sighing, “once you start explaining a joke or something like that, it ceases to be funny.”

Sudeikis brought this type of attention and care to the movies he began acting in too, like the workplace comedy Horrible Bosses, even if it was lost on most of those who watched them. “That movie, Horrible Bosses, is riddled with optimism,” he said. “The rhythms of that movie, of what Jason Bateman and Charlie Day and I are doing, are deeply rooted in Ted Lasso too. But people don't want those answers. They want to hear the three of us cut up and joke around.”

So that's what Sudeikis did. He got used to a certain gap between his intention and how it was understood. During his time at SNL, his marriage fell apart. “You're going through something emotionally and personally, or even professionally if that's affecting you personally, and then you're dressed up like George Bush and you're live on television for eight minutes. You feel like a crazy person. You feel absolutely crazy. You're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, ‘Who am I? What is this? Holy hell.’ ”

For a time he became a tabloid fixture. He remembers “navigating my first sort of public relationship, with January Jones, which was like learning by fire. What is the term? Trial by fire.” In a 2010 GQ article, when confronted with a question about rumors that he was dating Jennifer Aniston, he sarcastically responded that she should be so lucky. “And obviously I'm fucking joking, you know?” Sudeikis said. But back then, he treated interviews like improv—Yes, and—and that could create misunderstandings. Asked once on a podcast about what people tended to get wrong about him, Sudeikis responded, “That I was in a fraternity—or maybe that I would be.”

To that point, Hunt told me, “He's much less the assumed fraternity guy than you'd think.” But Hunt said he also understood where the impression came from: “I don't know where he learned it necessarily, whether it was from his parents, or his basketball coaches, but he exudes an easygoing confidence. And it's easy to hang with a guy like that. But some people are also like, ‘Fuck that guy,’ intrinsically.”

Shirt, $188, and ties (worn at waist), $125 each, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore. Shoes, $782, by Alden. Socks, $15, by Smart Turnout. Watch, $10,200, by Cartier.

When he won the Golden Globe, Sudeikis gave a dazed speech while wearing a hoodie, sparking glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” he said.

Shortly after Sudeikis and Wilde got together, near the end of his SNL run (he left the show in 2013), Wilde made a joke during a monologue that she read at a cabaret club about the two of them having sex “like Kenyan marathon runners,” and Sudeikis spent years answering questions about the joke. “The frustrating thing about that is that Olivia said that in a performance setting,” Sudeikis said. “It wasn't like she just was saying it glibly in an interview.” He described the experience of growing into celebrity, and confronting other people's misperceptions of him, as a disorienting one. “You're just being tossed into the situation and then trying to figure it out,” he said. The picture of him that was circulating wasn't exactly the one that he had of himself. But he didn't fight it, either. “You come to be thoughtful about it,” he said. “But also try to stay open to it. I don't ever want to be cynical.”

So he tried to stay open. But it wasn't until Ted Lasso that people really saw the side of him that comported with the way he saw himself. Last year, as it became clear that the show was a hit, he found himself answering, over and over, some version of the same question. The question would vary in its specifics, but the gist of it was always: How much do you and this character actually have in common? Sudeikis told me that over time, in response to people wondering about his exact relationship to Ted, he developed a few different evasive explanations. Ted, Sudeikis would say, was a little like Jason Sudeikis, but after two pints on an empty stomach. He was Sudeikis hanging on the side of a buddy's boat. He was Sudeikis, but on mushrooms. Sometimes, in more honest moments, he would say that Ted is the best version of himself. This, after all, is how art works: If it was just you, then it wouldn't really need to be art in the first place. And so Sudeikis learned to separate himself from Ted, to fudge the distance between art and artist.

Except, he said, after a while, every time he tried to wave off Ted, fellow castmates or old friends of his would correct him to say: “No.” They'd say: “No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.” It's not you on mushrooms, it's not you hanging off a boat, it's just…you. One of Sudeikis's friends, Marcus Mumford, who composed the music for the show, told me, “He is quite like Ted in lots of ways. He has a sort of burning optimism, but also a vulnerability, about him that I really admire.”

Hearing people say this, over and over again, Sudeikis said, “brought me to a very emotional space where, you know, a healthy dose of self-love was allowed to expand through my being and made me…” He trailed off for a moment. “When they're like, ‘No, that is you. That is you. That's not the best version of you.’ That's a very lovely thing to hear. I wish it on everybody who gets the opportunity to be or do anything in life and have someone have the chance to say, ‘Hey, that's you. That's you.’ ”

And if he's being honest, that's the way he feels about it too. “It's the closest thing I have to a tattoo,” Sudeikis said about Ted Lasso. “It's the most personal thing I've ever made.”

Sweater, $398, and shirt, $95, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Pants, $255, by Aimé Leon Dore.

On the first Saturday in June, Sudeikis flew with his children, Otis and Daisy, from London to New York, where he owns a house in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn is home,” he told me simply. While filming the first season of Ted Lasso, he'd had the house renovated—there was black mold to get rid of and other changes to make. “So Olivia and the kids had to rent a lovely apartment in Brooklyn Heights. But it's not home. It's someone else's home.” Saturday was the first time Sudeikis and his children had set foot in their own place in two years. “The kids darted in,” he said. “Last time Daisy was in that house, she slept in a crib. So now she has a new big bed. It was hilarious. I walked up there after like 15 minutes and both rooms were a mess.”

He and Wilde, he said, no longer share the house. They split up, according to Sudeikis, “in November 2020.” The end of their relationship was chronicled in a painful, public way in the tabloids after photos of Wilde holding hands with Harry Styles surfaced in January, setting off a flurry of conflicting timelines and explanations. Sudeikis said that even he didn't have total clarity about the end of the relationship just yet. “I'll have a better understanding of why in a year,” he said, “and an even better one in two, and an even greater one in five, and it'll go from being, you know, a book of my life to becoming a chapter to a paragraph to a line to a word to a doodle.” Right now he was just trying to figure out what he was supposed to take away, about himself, from what had happened. “That's an experience that you either learn from or make excuses about,” he said. “You take some responsibility for it, hold yourself accountable for what you do, but then also endeavor to learn something beyond the obvious from it.”

In the first season of Ted Lasso, the comic premise of the show is revealed to be a tragic one: Ted is in England, far from home, doing something he doesn't know how to do and probably shouldn't be doing at all, in order to give his failing marriage space to survive. When the character's wife and son visit, in the show's fifth episode, his wife tells him, “Every day I wake up hoping that I'll feel the way I felt in the beginning. But maybe that's just what marriage is, right?” It's a wrenching moment that also gives new meaning to the show: Ted Lasso's heart is big, but it can also be broken as violently and as easily as anyone else's. By the end of the season, Lasso is divorced and renegotiating his relationships with his now ex-wife and son.

The first season of Ted Lasso had already been written—had already aired—by the time Sudeikis found himself living some aspects of it in real life. “And yet one has nothing to do with the other,” Sudeikis told me. “That's the crazy thing. Everything that happened in season one was based on everything that happened prior to season one. Like, a lot of it three years prior. You know what I mean? The story's bigger than that, I hope. And anything I've gone through, other people have gone through. That's one of the nice things, right? So it's humbling in that way.”

And in fact, the seeds of Ted's heartbreak, Sudeikis said, went all the way back to a dinner he had with Wilde around 2015, during which she first encouraged him to explore whether Ted Lasso could be more than just a bit on NBC. “It was there, the night at dinner, when Olivia was like, ‘You should do it as a show,’ ” he said. They got to talking about it. Sudeikis asked why Ted Lasso would move in the first place, to coach a team he had no real reason to coach: “ ‘Okay, but why would he take this job? Why would a guy at this age take this job to leave? Maybe he's having marital strife. Maybe things aren't good back home, so he needs space.’ And I just riffed it at dinner in 2015 or whenever, late 2014. But it had to be that way. That's what the show is about.”

I said to Sudeikis that I thought that while it was common for artists to put a lot of their lives into their art, it was less common that they end up living aspects of the art in their lives, after the fact.

“I wonder if that's true,” he replied. “I mean, isn't that just a little bit of what Oprah was telling us for years and years? You know, manifestation? Power of thought? That's The Secret in reverse, you know?”

But…if we're being honest, is that a thing you wanted to manifest?

“No. No. But, again, it isn't that. It wasn't that. And again, that's just me knowing the details of it. Like, that's just me knowing where it comes from, where any of it comes from.”

But he acknowledged it had been a hard year. Not necessarily a bad one, but a hard one. “I think it was really neat,” he said. “I think if you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger. I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”

Is that easier said than done? To land like an Avenger?

“I don't know. It's just how I landed. It doesn't mean when you blast back up you're not going to run into a bunch of shit and have to, you know, fight things to get back to the heights that you were at, but I'd take that over 412 bones anytime.”

He paused, then continued: “But there is power in creating 412 bones! Because we all know that a bone, up to a certain age, when it heals, it heals stronger. So, I mean, it's not to knock anybody that doesn't land like an Avenger. Because there's strength in that too.”

Shirt, $228, by Todd Snyder. Shorts, $480, by Bode. Watch, $6,300, by Cartier.

In February, Sudeikis attended the Golden Globes, which were being held remotely on Zoom. He had his misgivings about the event—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the awards, had been in the news for a series of unflattering revelations about its organization, and also the show was taking place in the middle of the night in London. Tom Ford had sent over a suit for Sudeikis to wear, and he tried it on, in his flat in Notting Hill, but he felt ridiculous, there in the middle of the night, and so changed out of it and into a tie-dyed hoodie made by his sister's clothing company. “I wore that hoodie because I didn't wanna fucking wear the fucking top half of a Tom Ford suit,” he said. “I love Tom Ford suits. But it felt weird as shit.”

“With kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’… All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it!”

The rest of this story you know: Sudeikis ended up winning best actor for Ted Lasso and gave a dazed acceptance speech while wearing the hoodie, and this in turn sparked glee and speculation about his mental and physical states. For the record, “I was neither high nor heartbroken,” Sudeikis said. It was just late at night and he didn't want to wear a suit. “So yeah, off it came and it was like, ‘This is how I feel. I believe in moving forward.’ ”

Lately, Sudeikis told me, he had been trying to pay more attention to how he actually felt about any given thing, to all the various signs and omens that present themselves to a person during the course of living their life. Even in his past, he said, there were moments that were obvious in retrospect, in terms of what the universe was trying to tell him, messages he missed entirely at the time. In Vegas, where he was living with Cannon before Saturday Night Live, he developed alopecia and his hair stopped growing, and he didn't know why. And then, at the end of his 30s, “during the nine months before Otis was born and the nine months after he was born,” Sudeikis developed extremely painful sciatica. “I went and got an MRI and was like, ‘Oh, yeah, the jelly doughnut in my L4, L5, is squirting out and touching a nerve.’ ” But why? When he had his second child, this didn't happen at all. So: why?

“I mean, since last November,” Sudeikis said, “the joke that feels more like a parable to me is a guy is sitting at home watching TV and the news breaks in to say flash flood warning. About an hour later he goes outside on his porch and he sees that the whole street is flooded.” You've probably heard the rest of this joke before: While the guy is praying to God for some kind of help, a truck, a boat, and a chopper come by, offering aid, which the guy turns down. God'll provide, he says. Sudeikis finished the joke: “Two hours after that, he's in heaven. He's dead. He says, ‘God, what's up, man? You didn't help me.’ God goes, ‘What do you mean, man? I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a speedboat, I sent you a helicopter.’ ” So, Sudeikis said, “you can't tell me that hair falling out of my head wasn't—I don't know if it was the speedboat or the pickup truck or the helicopter, but yeah, man, it all comes home to roost. What you resist persists.”

He went on. “That's why I had sciatica,” he said. “That's the speedboat. That was like: ‘Hey, you gotta take a look at your stuff.’ ”

And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious—to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered. “I don't know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don't put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it. That's the other half. ‘I'm bad with names.’ ‘I'm always late.’ Oh! Well, knowing is half the battle. All right, so win the fucking battle by doing something about it! Get better at names. Show up five minutes early, make it a point to do it. So, I'm still learning these things. But hopefully I've got plenty of time to do something about it.”

Sudeikis smiled a little wearily: “I mean, at the end of that joke, the guy still got to go to heaven, you know?”

Zach Baron is GQ's senior staff writer.

A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2021 issue with the title "Jason Sudeikis Paints His Masterpiece."

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Photographs by Hill & Aubrey

Styled by Michael Darlington

Grooming by Nicky Austin

Tailoring by Nafisa Tosh

Set design by Hella Keck

Produced by Ragi Dholakia Productions

[mattkeepsrambling]

2020 Year In Review

What a supremely dull year. I cannot believe how little happened this year. I got into this whole mask-wearing craze that many people seem to have gotten into (except for those who are REALLY against it.) I'm so happy that all the schools decided that teaching in the building was pointless and could just as easily be done online. Things are so much easier now. The election went off without a hitch or any controversy whatsoever, and I am glad that the outgoing President was gracious and we got another peaceful transition of power. I saw so many movies this year. I stopped going to the theater, though. It was just too dark, the screen was too big and the seats too comfortable. I love being at home and being surrounded by all those distractions. I don't know how 2021 could top 2020.

Best of 2020.

In all seriousness, this year was the worst. Once the world shut down in March, I decided to make the most of it and started cataloging my media consumption (minus video games). It is something I am going to keep doing. I stopped collecting movie tickets a few years ago, and this seems like the next step. I have really enjoyed seeing all that I have consumed. The final tally is 308 movies, 58 television shows/specials, 29 audiobooks, and 43 books/graphic novels since March 18, 2020. As December went on, I had to make sure that I was finished with books, tv shows, and audiobooks before Jan. 1-you will see why when I share my spreadsheet for 2021. Here are the best that I read/watched/listened to this year with all that media. And not all of these things are new for 2020 (most are, though).

Best Movie: Host

A lot of the movies I watched this year were horror movies. You can say that I have been trying to make up for lost time. I subscribed to Shudder recently. It is a streaming service that specializes in horror and thriller movies. I subscribed to the service initially for "Host."

This movie was made during the pandemic, over a Zoom meeting. It is about five friends who do a seance and the spirit they contact. The fact that it is Zoom figures heavily into the movie; it is 57 minutes long, about the length of the free Zoom meeting.

This movie is terrific and damn scary. I have watched very few movies that have genuinely scared me. I have realized what it is that makes a good horror movie: tension. It is all over this movie. This movie uses the general concept of the Zoom meeting so well to build up tension. It doesn't have the benefit of a huge budget and the best cameras. The scenes take place on a computer screen in average rooms. That elevates sudden sounds, slight movements and makes use of darkness.

Honorable Mentions: "Soul," "Promising Young Women," "It Follows," "Hereditary," "Midsommor," "Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always."

Best TV Show: Ted Lasso

Whenever I talk to other people about AppleTV+, I always mention two things. One is that at $5 a month, you don't even notice the cost. The other is that "Ted Lasso" is worth the price of a subscription.

As I have previously mentioned, the show is about an American football coach being hired to coach English football. This show is based on a one-joke series commercial for NBC Sports. Ted Lasso knows nothing about coaching football.

The commercials boil down to "look how this guy doesn't know anything about England." This should not work as a show. Years ago, ABC aired a TV show based on the Geico commercials' cavemen, and it was terrible. I should know; I watched the pilot and reviewed it for the Buffalo State Record.

"Ted Lasso" works because it is more than the commercials. Yes, they do have a lot of "fish out of water" humor, and you laugh at Ted as he navigates a new sport in a new country, but it is more than that. "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawernce is one of the people behind this show, and it shows. This show can be hilarious and then take a somber turn in no time. "Scrubs" is well known for that.

The other thing that "Ted Lasso" has going for it is boundless optimism. It is baked into the character of Ted Lasso. When the show starts, the fans hate him, the players hate him, and management tries to sabotage him at every turn. Yet, he remains committed to his job and making this team successful. He and his wife go through one of the most amicable divorces ever put on screen. It can be a little much at times, but then that divorce happens. We see Lasso, played amazingly by Jason Sudikus, lose that relentlessly positive exterior.

Those cracks show, and he becomes a much more fleshed out and complicated character. The show has been renewed for two more seasons already, and Lawernce recently said that the creative team had planned three seasons. I love this show, but I think that only three seasons will be a good thing. It means that we will get fully fleshed out arcs, and there is only a certain amount of story that the creators have to tell.

Honorable Mentions: "Fleabag Season 2," "The Clone Wars Season 7," "Harley Quinn Season 2," A Teacher," "Doom Patrol Season 2," "The Flight Attendant Season 1," "The Mandalorian Season 2."

Best Audiobook: Sapiens

This book, published in 2011, has been on my to-read list for a while. Years ago, a friend of mine told me I would like it. In its most basic synopsis, "Sapiens" is a look at how humans evolved. It looks at how we developed societies, religions, governments, and other things that made us the dominant species on the planet.

This book is fascinating. It looks at various social constructs that humanity developed and how that shapes who we have become. Most of the time, I can multitask while listening to audiobooks. I will do the dishes, replay video games, write, lesson plan, clean, or do laundry when an audiobook is playing. This is one I had to give my full attention. There were so many tidbits of information that are just riveting. I was always blown away by what I heard. Despite the topic's denseness (it is 15 hours and 17 minutes long), the audiobook was easy to listen to. It is one that I will be revisiting in the future.

Honorable Mentions: "Ahsoka," "The Graveyard Book," "Crazy is my Superpower."

Best Book: Harleen

I have been a fan of "Batman The Animated Series" forever. One of the most famous things to come out of the series that debuted in 1992 was Harley Quinn character. She started as a sidekick of The Joker. Fans loved her so much that she was given a more prominent role and one of the best backstories of anyone in Batman's rogue's gallery.

Last year DC, under their Black Label brand, released "Harleen," which presented how she went from Dr. Harleen Quinzell, the brilliant psychologist, to Harley Quinn, psychotic on-again/off-again paramour of The Joker. DC Black Label is used for a more mature mini-series, and this is a story that benefits from the freedom allowed. 

The basic plot is that Dr. Quinzell gets a job at Arkham Asylum to study the criminals there for her research into their minds and develop a possible cure. Through her interviews with The Joker, she starts to develop feelings for him. The telling focuses on her background and ends with her fully committing to Joker and a life of crime.

The art by Stjepan Sejic (who also wrote it) is gorgeous. On my second read-through, I took more time to appreciate the art. I bought the issues as they came out on Comixology and read them on my iPad and loved the story and how Sejic chose to tell it. I read them on the way to and from work. With only about 10 minutes on the train, the story was my focus. When I bought the hardcover collected edition, I took my time. It is a beautiful book, and I am glad to have it in my collection.

Honorable Mentions: "One Day," "The Amber Spyglass," "High Hopes," "The Deepest Well," I Wish My Teacher Knew," "Horrorstor."

**Authors Note: I wrote most of the above before I watched "Soul" on Christmas. I have a lot to say about it, and it might have taken the top spot from "Host" (I don't think I could have picked two more different movies to take that top spot). I will have a full review out after at least one more viewing.**

These are the links for my 202 Watch List and my 2021 Spreadsheet.

Media Consumed 2020

Media Consumed 2021

If you have been following my ramblings for the last few years, you know that I don't make New Year's resolutions. I heard the idea of picking a word and working toward that word all year.

This year that word is positivity.

It is really easy to dwell on negative thoughts. In the society we live in now, there is an emphasis put on negativity. It is everywhere, and I hate it. Stop reading right now and think about the best and worst thing that has happened to you. If you are like me, the worst thing comes to mind first. Even though my job is the best thing to happen to me, and it happened in the last two years, my firing from the JCC in September of 2015 hits harder and comes faster. It took me years to get over that and years more to let go of the anger I felt.

There are many reasons why negative thoughts come easier, and I have linked to a few articles I like on the topic below. This year particularly, I have been more prone to rumination on past pain and failures. 2021 is the year I actively try to change that. When I feel a negative thought coming on, I will stop and change my line of thinking.

One concrete example I can give involves my former place of employment. I live very close to the JCC. I walk by it all the time, and I can effortlessly start down the negativity rabbit hole. I am not doing that anymore. I will redirect to the good things that happened there. I am doing that with other places I have negative associations with as well. I want to focus on the positive, think positive thoughts, take positive actions, do things for myself and others that help perpetuate the positive.

I want to weed out negativity in my life whenever I can. Even something as simple as doing the dishes every night before bed (which I started six months ago) is a step in the positive direction. I know this is going to be tough. I despise teaching virtually, and it is what I will be doing for the rest of this school year. But, as much as I hate it, I need to focus on the good moments and less on the bad ones. I will have to stop calling everyone I see outside without a mask a "maskhole" in my head and assuming they are a right-wing MAGA hat-wearing idiot (as I said, it's going to be hard). There is too much negativity in the world right now, and I don't want to contribute to that.

Why Do Negative Thoughts Come to Mind

Is Dwelling on Negative Thoughts Hurting You?

Why Do We Dwell on The Past?

Why Do We Keep Dwelling on Our Mistakes?

The past few years, I have tried to have my word of the year relate to my writing. This year it was a little harder. It was not as straight forward as it has in the past. The choice of positivity was made because there have been so many awful things happening this year that I felt I needed to change my mindset. In regards to my writing, I am keeping it simple: Write something every single day. This heart doc I know motivated me to make this a goal.

I want to write more and find out where "Escape" will end up. I have an idea notebook I will bring with me to jot down inspiration whenever it hits. I am blocking out time every day to write, either something I will post here or just something for me.

Thanks for sticking with me 2,000 words. I hope you all had a great holiday season, and I wish you well in 2021.