Ted Lasso is guilty of a modern sitcom bait-and-switch — The A.V. Club

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Ted Lasso was always going back to London. You can argue with it logically (oh, so all of a sudden his son and ex-wife are into living abroad?), you can argue with it existentially (why did Ted Lasso, and Ted Lasso , even need to come back in the first place?), but you can’t deny its inevitability. We know he’s not going to turn down the offer to head up AFC Richmond’s new women’s team, because that’s what every piece of promo and press about the show’s fourth season indicates. There’s no fourth season, let alone a show, if he turns down the offer to head up AFC Richmond’s new women’s team. So what the hell is the show’s first episode in three years doing spending 45 minutes pretending like Ted Lasso is going to turn down the offer to head up AFC Richmond’s new women’s team?

Falling into one of the most galling narrative traps of the past two decades of televised comedy, that’s what. Twenty years ago this fall, the third season of the American Office opened with a noticeable change in the sales department of Dunder Mifflin Scranton: The camera panned from Dwight Schrute cutting his nails to reveal temp Ryan Howard occupying the desk of Jim Halpert. Or, as it was quickly revealed, former temp Ryan Howard occupying the former desk of Jim Halpert. NBC’s adaptation of the pioneering British mockumentary had made good on its season-two cliffhanger, following up the long-awaited kiss between Jim and his work crush, Pam Beesly, by shipping the office cut-up off to Stamford, CT, where he could torment a different paper-pushing dweeb and make goo-goo eyes at another comely coworker.

Putting 140ish miles between Jim and Pam and establishing a whole new troupe of supporting players was a bold move on The Office ’s part. Bolder still was the midseason merger that took Jim and a handful of his Stamford colleagues to Scranton, shaking up the relationship dynamics in the show’s main setting and giving itself a new source of romantic tension with the love triangle between Jim, Pam, and Jim’s teammate-turned-girlfriend, Karen Filipelli. Even if it felt like Jim couldn’t stay in Stamford forever, even if it felt like Karen was doomed to be flattened by the runaway train of a star-crossed, fan-favorite will-they/won’t-they, the arc still had stakes, intrigue, and enough juice to drive 25 episodes. Sure, the show had more or less returned to its status quo by the end of the third season, but it had managed to connect that status quo to an ongoing story like few other sitcoms before it. And then it went and blew up that status quo all over again, to be picked up and reconfigured the following September.

The gambit paid off. Watching the Ted Lasso premiere, I kind of wished it hadn’t: Jim’s move to Stamford feels like the first in a series of modern sitcom cliffhangers that promised to redefine their entire shows—for a little while, at least. As with any trend, the returns diminished over time. Parks And Recreation , for instance, got some decent mileage out of isolating Tom Haverford in the bubble of Entertainment720 in its third season. But when the show sent Ben Wyatt to Washington, D.C. at the beginning of its fifth season, it felt less like the show putting its answer to Jim and Pam to the test and more like removing a critical part of its comedic engine for five episodes.

Shows created or co-created by Office alumnus Michael Schur really love going to this well. (I could’ve sworn I once heard or read or was directly told by Schur why this is, but if that interview quote exists, I can’t seem to find it now.) It happened at the end of each of Brooklyn Nine-Nine ’s first five seasons: Someone from the precinct gets promoted or demoted or taken out in some form, only to return shortly after in the new season. (Detective Jake Peralta starts the fourth season in witness protection and ends it by being sent to prison!) That The Good Place ’s cosmic scale and fungible timeline gave Schur and his fellow writers the license to hit the reset button at the end of every season finale—with the first season’s replicating the jaw-dropping impact of Jim and Pam’s first kiss—might be the height of that show’s creative ingenuity.

Any once-novel storytelling device is going to lose some of its luster and expose some of its limitations through repetition. But I think the fatal flaws of this one are built into the mechanism. First of all, it’s incompatible with a genre that thrives on familiarity and onscreen chemistry, one that keeps us coming back episode after episode because we like watching this group of people in this setting interacting in this way. You can only tinker with the makeup of a sitcom so much before the things that work about it stop working; even a more grounded comedy like Girls had to put a time limit on Hannah Horvath’s stint in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before calling her back to New York. And as much as that capriciousness suited the character, it also shows how insincere this type of plotting can feel.

And I think that’s where the Ted Lasso premiere really got under my skin. It can be fun to watch a show back itself out of a corner—how is Brooklyn Nine-Nine going to get Jake and Rosa out of prison? How will What We Do In The Shadows reunite its vampires after they scatter to the winds?—but “Home” doesn’t embrace that spirit. On top of having a foregone conclusion, it fails to invest any real drama or comedy in its central dilemma. In its place are bland platitudes and free promotion for Kansas City tourism. (At least the confusion between Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO is cute, in a vaudevillian, “Who’s on first?” kind of way.) I don’t think The Office ever made it seem like Jim wouldn’t return to Scranton, but it certainly made hay out of getting him back there. The fourth season of Ted Lasso begins with a similar destination in mind, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t give the journey much thought.

Ted Lasso is guilty of a modern sitcom bait-and-switch — The A.V. Club | AIPROPX