Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way into Our Hearts - Hardcover

Egner, Jeremy

 
9780593476062: Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way into Our Hearts
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593476069 ISBN 13: 9780593476062
Verlag: Dutton, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

From The New York Times's Jeremy Egner, the definitive book on Ted Lasso.

When Ted Lasso first aired in 2020, nobody—including those who had worked on it—knew how a show inspired by an ad, centered around soccer, filled mostly with unknown actors, and led by a wondrously mustachioed “nice guy” would be received. Eleven Emmys and one Peabody Award later, it’s safe to say that the show’s status as a pop-culture phenomenon is secure.

In Believe, entertainment journalist and Ted Lasso fan Jeremy Egner traces the show’s creation and legacy through the words of the people at its center. Drawing on dozens of interviews from key cast, creators, and more, Believe takes readers from the first, silly NBC Premier League commercial to the pitch to Apple executives, then into the show’s writers’ room, through the brilliant international casting, and on to the unforgettable set and locations of the show itself.

Brimming with careful reporting and written to match the show’s heart and humor, Believe tells a story of teamwork, of hidden talent, of a group of friends looking around at the world’s increasingly nasty discourse and deciding that maybe simple decency still has the power to bring us together—a story about what happens when you dare to believe.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeremy Egner is the television editor for The New York Times, overseeing coverage of the medium and the people who make it. He joined The Times in 2008.

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CHAPTER 1

The Birth of Ted

"Everybody who saw it liked it and laughed at it."

The foundational joke of Ted Lasso, the engine of its fish-out-of-water central premise, is that a man who knows nothing about soccer is hired to coach a team that competes at the pinnacle of the sport: England's Premier League.

In the series, the explanation for this patently absurd turn of events is that Rebecca Welton, played by Hannah Waddingham, wants to get revenge upon her vile ex-husband, Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head), by destroying his favorite thing: his beloved Premier League club, AFC Richmond, which she acquired in their divorce.

It is a concept borrowed from the 1989 baseball comedy Major League, in which the viperous widow of the owner of the Cleveland Indians fills the team with losers in order to tank it, so she can move the franchise via an escape clause tied to attendance. (Scheming fictional sports owners take note: the secret self-sabotage ploy never seems to work.)

But the original reason Ted was sent to England was to (1) make Americans feel OK about not knowing anything about soccer, and (2) amuse them into considering watching it anyway. The character was born in 2013 in an ad for NBC Sports, which had just purchased the American broadcast rights to the Premier League. The network's promotional campaign initially primarily targeted America's relatively small but fervent core audience of dedicated soccer fans. But unlike the previous rights holder, Fox Sports, NBC planned to broadcast every game for free-the tagline was "Every match. Every week. Every team."-and needed to expand the audience in order to make its purchase worthwhile.

And unlike the rest of the world, American sports fans would take some convincing to watch soccer. "We weren't just selling NBC Sports; we were selling soccer," said Bill Bergofin, who was the head of marketing for NBC Sports at the time and one of the architects of the Ted Lasso spots.

They decided the best way to do that was to create a comic link between America's favorite sport and the one that captivated fans nearly everywhere else, two abiding obsessions that happened to share one name: football.

John Miller, then chief marketing officer for NBC Sports: The Premier League had been on Fox for a while, and they didn't show all that many games. We were going to show every game, because we had multiple channels in which to do it, and we were going to show them for free. So for a soccer fan to be able to see every Premier League game free-it didn't stay free for long, but at that point it was-was a big selling point.

But 50 percent of all regular soccer viewers were in just five markets. So we can get them, but it became "OK, well how do we grow it beyond those five markets?" Because we knew that if we get the people who are regular fans of the Premier League and who have been watching it on Fox Sports, it's just not going to be as big as we need to make it, considering the rights that we just paid for.

Bill Bergofin, then the newish head of marketing for NBC Sports: I was still sort of proving myself within NBC, so I tried to convince John to bring someone in from the outside. I had been working with Guy Barnett for probably five years at that point, and he had become a dear friend. He's one of the greats, in terms of advertising creativity, and being a Brit who had spent the greater part of his adult life in the US, he was uniquely qualified. And he had always said to me, "If you ever get the Premier League, you have to bring me in."

So one day I brought Guy in and said, "Look, I think we really need someone who authentically has lived this life and is a diehard fan, but also understands American culture equally." And we started having a conversation and halfway through the conversation, John pointed to a campaign for New Era. Someone he knew had said it was one of the best-performing campaigns, based on research, that he had done.

The campaign for the sports cap company featured celebrity fans trading insults about rival teams. Alec Baldwin, a New York Yankees fan, squared off with John Krasinski, a Boston Red Sox diehard. The dueling Chicagoans Nick Offerman and Craig Robinson bickered about the Cubs and White Sox. "Your infield has more holes than a Swiss cheese doughnut," Offerman offered. Robinson: "The last Cub to throw a no-hitter was your pitching machine."

Bill Bergofin: John asked if Guy knew it. And Guy said, "Well, of course: I wrote it."

John Miller: We said, "Well, is there something that we can do that would help explain the game but make a lot of noise? A long-form comedy video?"

Bill Bergofin: We know who we are and who the core fan is. But how do we create that tipping point for soccer in America? And a lot of it was you had to educate people, and we needed to do it in a way that took the piss out of it so that it wasn't intimidating.

Guy Barnett, founder of the Brooklyn Brothers ad agency: We wanted to explain the game in an entertaining manner. Not in a superficial or supercilious manner as it had been done by lots of people, but really from an American perspective: What is this game about?

John Miller: We thought, Let's take the most popular sport in America, which is football, and see if we can make some comparisons to football. Or at least have the idea of somebody with a different American focus look at the game and see if we can help explain it, but do it in a fun way.

Bill Bergofin: So we started thinking, What would be the right way to do it? Who's the right fish out of water? And are they here? An American in England? An English coach in America? You know, which is the right way to go?

John Miller: We originally went after John Oliver, who was then at The Daily Show, and he was sort of intrigued. It would have taken a different tack: a Brit helps explain the game in a fun way. But at that time, Jon Stewart was going to direct a film and so all of a sudden, John Oliver is going to take over The Daily Show all summer long. So he was out. Then we went to Chris Pratt, because we thought that he would be sort of interesting and fun. And he's a guy from Parks and Recreation, an NBC connection. So we asked him but he was in the middle of Jurassic Park and Guardians of the Galaxy and going off on a film career, and wasn't interested.

We briefly toyed with Ricky Gervais and thought, Maybe that's not the best idea. We also talked with Seth Meyers, because he was a real Premier League fan, but he was not quite as big as we wanted then.

Bill Bergofin: So we're all kind of scratching our heads. We had a talent wrangler and they said, "You know, Jason Sudeikis, I'm not sure he's a soccer fan, but he's coming off SNL and I don't believe he has any projects lined up."

Sudeikis wasn't the world's biggest soccer fan, but sports had been central to both his life and his career. Growing up in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, he was a point guard on his high school basketball team and went on to play briefly in community college. He eventually gave up that dream and pursued another: comedy.

A move to Chicago in the late 1990s put him in the orbit of the famed Second City comedy theater, where Sudeikis's famous uncle, George Wendt (best known as "Norm!" in Cheers), got his start in the 1970s. Sudeikis eventually joined the theater, performing improv with future stars and Saturday Night Live colleagues like Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and Horatio Sanz. He went on to perform improv at Boom Chicago, an American-style comedy theater in Amsterdam. There he worked with Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, the future Coach Beard himself, who became close friends, comedy partners, and eventually cocreators of Ted Lasso.

They all had met previously doing comedy in Chicago: Hunt was an Illinois native and theater major who decided early on to...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593476069
ISBN 13 
9780593476062
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Dutton
https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/

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