This week:
- Ted Lasso is back.
- There’s a new, messy Ryan Murphy series.
- I’ll never look at fried chicken the same way again.
- The movie trailer I can’t stop thinking about.
- A lil’ blind item guessing game.
Ted Lasso Is a Strange Time Capsule
It’s so corny when you think about it now. But in the prime bleakness of the pandemic, the darkest time of my adulthood, there was something radical about such a simple thing: a handwritten sign that said “BELIEVE” in the TV show Ted Lasso.
The success of the Apple TV series was such an of-its-time phenomenon that, by the third season of its original run just a few years later, the show’s pureness and optimism weren’t just exhausted; they were points of ridicule.
So the arrival of a fourth season, in a time when society is careening high-speed down the mountain where the endpoint is extreme cynicism, would seemingly be doomed. We’ve all moved on. We don’t have a Ted Lasso era in us anymore.
To me, that’s what makes this new season of the show so interesting.
The vibes, for lack of a better word, of Ted Lasso are so out of place and out of step with where we are right now. It’s that strangeness that makes the new episodes of the show actually fascinating to watch.
It’s just seconds into the premiere, now streaming on Apple TV, that a parody of a Gen Z girl tells Ted Lasso, “Hell yeah, you do you, king,” and he responds, saying, “Thanks, m’lady,” and then mimes a tipping of his hat to her.
There’s a part of you that instinctually rolls your eyes so dramatically that they pop out and start skipping across the floor. But the cringe-inducing moment is also somewhat nostalgic. You also want to smile and see what this ridiculous man is going to do next.
That’s the precarious dance that Ted Lasso struggles to pull off in this new season.
The people who are going to watch have obviously seen the first three seasons of the show, which wrapped in 2023. So the gravity of the Ted Lasso characters weighs down every scene.
We know that gee-golly niceness and Foghorn Leghorn folksiness is a facade, barely masking how (relatably!) broken and bruised he is as a person. So every good deed he does in the premiere, every sweet interaction, and, god forbid, heavy conversation he has with a person in his life comes with a sense of dread. Is this just an innocuous, friendly interaction, or is the howdy-doody house of cards about to come crumbling down?
The new season of Ted Lasso admirably tries to return to the genuineness and hopefulness of the series when it premiered. But I think we’re incapable now of watching it that way.
The premise is that after several years of living in Kansas City, Missouri, to be with his son and ex-wife, Ted (Jason Sudeikis) is now a cashier at a grocery store and worlds away from the professional coaching life he once had. Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), Keely (Juno Temple), and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) are launching a women’s soccer team in Richmond and travel to Kansas City to check out the local club and stadium—a guise to see Ted and offer him the job as head coach.
That’s the biggest leap the show takes. The series ended with Ted realizing that the healthiest thing to do for his mental health and his family is to move back home and be a present father to his child. So for him to convince himself that taking this job in England again is a positive step requires a ret-con of what was essentially the most dramatically important plot line of the original series. And the show basically asks the audience to go along with it; “sure, why not?”
It means a solid opportunity to revisit the (mostly) incredibly fun supporting staff of the show. When Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) shows up, you’re tempted to clap with glee; when Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) resurfaces, weirder than ever, the groan you’ll let out is untameable.
Mostly, you’re just gliding on the joy of seeing Waddingham back as Rebecca. She’s one of the best characters from a TV show in the last 10 years. Truthfully, it doesn’t make sense that a spinoff wasn’t just created around her, instead of trying to hamfist a Ted Lasso whose relevance has vanished into a series reboot that can’t really justify bringing him back.
The thing is, at the elemental level, the show is still operating at the same quality it did during the original run. The writing is sharp. The Ted Lasso-isms are genuinely amusing. The emotional moments are earned. But as a whole, it all seems antiquated.
We needed a Ted Lasso when the show first premiered. That’s why it was such a success. Now, it’s not that we don’t need him; I don’t think we even want him.
Bless This Mess
No one wants to make a mess anymore. Who knew you were a bunch of clean freaks?
The Shards is a mess. A hot mess, which I mean quite literally: the cast of actors playing these horny, rich teenagers are so attractive that simply watching the show on mute as the camera titillatingly pans up and down their bodies 400 times an episode would be rewarding in its own right. But turning up the volume to follow how they navigate the burden of being so hot and so rich while a serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles unleashes another level of pleasure.
The series, from creator Ryan Murphy, is based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis, chronicling a group of rich kids whose cosplay as grown-ups is interrupted when their ringleader, Brett, played by the gloriously named Igby Rigney, struggles with his connection to classmates who are disappearing and, more broadly, his sexuality. The series is an amusement park of thematic metaphors.
Would I call it good? Not while maintaining my respectability. Would I say it’s watchable? I couldn’t get through my press screeners fast enough. I would watch 400 episodes of this show.
What I love about a Ryan Murphy series, especially one like The Shards, is how flagrant they are. There’s nothing timid about them.
At a time when the industry tiptoes around creative ideas to ensure they adhere to some algorithmic determination of what people will watch, Murphy is still out there taking big swings. I find that even when a show under his umbrella is abjectly terrible, like All’s Fair, for example, they are more enjoyable to watch than 90 percent of what’s on TV. When you watch The Shards, you have big, tangible reactions, because it’s being made by someone who is still trying to do big, tangible things.
All of that, plus Cindy Crawford’s nepo baby daughter, Kaia Gerber, co-stars, and, playing an ’80s teenager, looks so much like her mother that your head will start spinning for days.
The Best Food Scene of the Year
The new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is just about as extra as you would expect from a film with that title. It is the concept of “doing so much” as an actual movie. It’s like a grad student decided to write a thesis paper that incorporated every single term and concept he heard mentioned in class.
Because there’s so much going on, amplified to such an extreme volume, there are moments that really, effectively hit. My favorite one is a scene where the characters played by Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson eat a bucket of KFC fried chicken, shot as one of the most sensual and erotic movie sequences you’ve ever seen.
A lot of critics I know are obsessed with this movie, while others feel like the juggling of too many balls at once ultimately didn’t work. But I promise you, this fried chicken scene is worth the price of admission alone. Plus, the two women have a conversation about gummy candies with a seriousness as if the candy were a religion that I felt very seen by.
Suddenly I’m So Into Baskets
I think I need an intervention, because I was so incredibly turned on by this trailer for the movie Wicker, in which Olivia Colman plays an old maid who asks a basket-maker to weave her a husband and then has apparently mind-blowing sex with the wicker creation, played by Alexander Skarsgard. Help.
A Blind Item
There is a movie in theaters right now that I saw at the Sundance Film Festival and thought was one of the worst films I’ve seen in a while, but everyone is raving about it. I can’t figure out if I have bad taste or if everyone is just…wrong.
More From The Daily Beast’s Obsessed
I interviewed the most viral host on the internet, Recess Therapy creator Julian Shapiro-Barnum. He’s a blast to talk to. Watch here.
The new movie Tony shows us what Anthony Bourdain was like before he was the god we think of him as now. Read more.
The night that Andy Cohen made over a dozen Real Housewives cry. Read more.
What to Watch This Week
The Last House: Sometimes, you just want a cheesy thriller to pass the time with. (Now on Netflix)
Tony: A biopic that refreshingly resists every genre impulse that makes me hate biopics so much. (Now in theaters)
The Shards: Let’s celebrate the return of camp and very attractive people to TV, OK? (Now on FX and Hulu)
What to Skip This Week
One Night Only: I don’t know what’s more surprising, that someone had the thought “let’s do The Purge, but with sex,” or that someone made it. (Now in theaters)
Alley Cats: A new low in Ricky Gervais’ post-The Office career. (Now on Netflix)
