By Eric Valentine
Editor’s Note: Before I begin this issue’s 4th Estate column about a great piece of satire currently on TV, I need to address my mediocre bit of satire from the Sept. 22 issue. In it, I wrote about the reasons men—specifically, socially conservative men and/or men who are just plain anti-abortion—should OPPOSE the new abortion laws in Texas and soon-to-be proposed (and likely adopted) in other red states. Apparently, since the reasons were not satire, the overriding point (that if you can’t see how unfair these laws are to women who don’t want to be pregnant, at least see how they are also unfair to literally anyone who has anything to do with women who don’t want to be pregnant) did not play as satire for some.
I know this because someone I’ve known for seven years suddenly—I assume—thinks me a misogynist.
“That article makes me anti-male. (vomit emoji here) I *thought* you were a good writer!” she wrote—I hope satirically because she just got married to a male—before giving me the death penalty on at least one form of social media.
I wrote back because I really did care and I assured her it was satire. But before hitting “send,” it occurred to me I may be assuming she was pro-choice. So I told her if she was anti-abortion, then she should please consider that I am for the financial incentivizing of both adoption and vasectomies since I take no pleasure in the idea of destroying what can *potentially* become human life with protected rights.
Crickets. Ghosted. Oh well, I tried. And that brings me to Ted Lasso.
The photo accompanied with this current column is from a recent Facebook post of mine. Some folks assumed I was being satirical. But I was being true. Ted Lasso—a hit, and now Emmy-winning—show available on AppleTV, really does bring me to tears (the good kind) in nearly every single episode in its first two seasons on TV.
I’ll spare you too much background storyline, but in a nutshell (I could hear Ted using that phrase), Jason Sudeikis revives a character (Ted Lasso) he played in a skit from “Saturday Night Live”—that sometimes-funny, sometimes-not-funny show that makes a lot of assumptions about flyover country (the red states) that’s sometimes spot on and sometimes not. Ted is an American football coach from Kansas with … Here’s what I told my friends on Facebook who assumed otherwise:
“Yup. I think it’s a pretty good show. A bit sappy, but well played. A bit ‘could never happen in real pro sports’ but provides enough context to suspend disbelief. It has three-dimensional characters with story arcs. And it walks the line between American obnoxiousness and New World consciousness just right …
“Ted’s Americanism is set up to make us expect the played-out joke, but there’s an intellect behind it beyond some privileged Americana good will and moreover an obstacle he has to overcome outside of the soccer universe. The cultural differences they show are not THE joke, they are the setup to the moral of the story. His character walks the line between simplistic naivete and simple focus on what matters most. He is the ultimate psychologist-coach who can make rivals and underdogs get along and excel, while being totally incapable of keeping his own family and love life healthy and whole. Not everything can be award-worthy, Sorkinesque, groundbreaking creativity. Nor so should it be.”
Meanwhile, Ted Lasso did get rewarded with rewards, does resemble some aspects of Aaron Sorkin dialogue chops, and is groundbreaking because … You get the idea, I assume.