active participation Nov. 13, 2024

Are We Talking About the Same Show?

Portrait of Hershal Pandya

By Hershal Pandya, a Vulture staff writer who covers comedy

Photo: Colin Hutton/Apple TV+/Everett Collection

Good art doesn’t spoon-feed its audience. It’s not a warm bath. It resists the urge to offer instant gratification and comforting certainty. It needn’t abide by linearity or reductive critical frameworks. It is visceral, raw, and unwieldy. If this sounds like language from a Whitney fundraiser or film Twitter, it’s not. Rather, it’s the sort of way Jason Sudeikis is talking about Ted Lasso.

According to TVLine, Sudeikis is quoted in an upcoming oral history about his Apple TV+ sitcom titled Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso by Jeremy Egner, in which he responds to some of the criticisms the show received during its third (and possibly final) season. “Much like live theater, the show, especially Season 3, was asking the audience to be an active participant,” he said during a February SAG-AFTRA panel referenced in the book. “Some people want to do that, some people don’t. Some people want to judge — they don’t want to be curious.”

Sudeikis’s definition of active participation and curiosity, it seems, does not include asking questions about such trivial things like the logic of core characters’ arcs or bloated episode lengths. Questions so lacking in curiosity, he believes, are illustrative of a lack of imagination. “I’ll never understand people who will go on talking about something so brazenly that they, in my opinion, clearly don’t understand,” the oral history quotes him saying, according to TVLine. “And God bless ’em for it; it’s not their fault. They don’t have imaginations and they’re not open to the experience of what it’s like to have one.”

Unfortunately, what Sudeikis seems to misunderstand about Ted Lasso season-three discourse is that, much like live theater, it required active participation. Sadly, he’ll never get it, because he’s too busy judging those who did participate for being imaginationless instead of being curious.

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Are We Talking About the Same Show?

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