KANSAS CITY, Kan. — The show is called “Ted Lasso,” but series co-creator, writer and star Jason Sudeikis, who grew up in Overland Park, says there’s a little bit of him in all of the series’ characters.
“It’s based on different things from all of our writers’ lives and a lot from my own,” Sudeikis says in advance of the show’s second season, which begins streaming Friday on Apple TV+. “That’s one of the neat things about working in the ensemble arts is that we’ve got a big old crayon box, and we just try to use each of those crayons as responsibly and intentionally as possible.”
In season one, that included a slew of nods to Sudeikis’ Kansas City roots, including barbecue joint T-shirts and sauce and a shout-out to his elementary school. There’s less of that through the early episodes of season two that were made available to critics (“Nothing quite as overt pops out,” Sudeikis says).
Season two continues the story of American football coach Ted Lasso (Sudeikis) as he and Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) lead a British soccer team with heart and humor.
Executive producer Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs”) says even from the pilot, Sudeikis envisioned “Ted Lasso” as a three-season series, using the original “Star Wars” trilogy as a template.
“The cool thing for this particular show, because we did that, is that we knew every character’s journey — beginning, middle and end — for all three seasons,” Lawrence says. “We’re not gonna suddenly shift gears and add more middle to this three-season story of the team of Richmond and the characters involved.”
Sudeikis compares the show’s second season to “Star Wars” sequel “The Empire Strikes Back” because he says the characters have to face their own issues rather than fight against external forces.
“(Team owner) Rebecca is not having to deal with (ex-husband) Rupert, Ted’s not having to deal with the high-concept comedy conceit of being set up to fail,” Sudeikis says. “Now people are going to find out that maybe the call is coming from inside the house, metaphorically.
“If we remember in ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ which is deeply rooted in Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey,’ it’s literally when Luke studies with this Jedi Master, this little green wise man who giggles a lot for reasons unbeknownst to this Jedi-in-training. (Luke) has to go into this cave and face some demons. And much like the game of soccer, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and a lot of times you tie.”
(Obviously, Sudeikis is a big “Star Wars” fan and even lucked out with a cameo as a Scout Trooper on the Disney+ hit “The Mandalorian” — goofing around in the season one finale scene where Baby Yoda gets punched.)
This season, a sports psychologist, Sharon (Sarah Niles), joins the Richmond soccer club, making Ted immediately uncomfortable. Could she be the Yoda of “Ted Lasso”?
“That seems like a spoiler,” Sudeikis demurs.
Jason Sudeikis' many talents
The formula has worked so far. Not only did the show become a fan favorite — a healing balm during the coronavirus pandemic — but Sudikis and “Ted Lasso” have picked up a slew of honors during this year’s television awards season.
Most recently: 20 Emmy Award nominations, a record for a new comedy series, and five nominations for the 2021 Television Critics Association Awards, the most for any one show.
Sudeikis’ star continues to rise: He’s the cover story of the August issue of GQ magazine, a story that went viral this past week with his frank discussion of his split with longtime partner Olivia Wilde. He spoke with the optimism of his character, drawing on another movie franchise: “I think if you have the opportunity to hit a rock bottom, however you define that, you can become 412 bones or you can land like an Avenger,” he said. “I personally have chosen to land like an Avenger.”
Lawrence praised Sudeikis as the consummate professional. He’s a quick study who quickly adapted to the role of a showrunner, the top person in a TV production who oversees the plotting, writing and direction of the story while also having management responsibility.
“It’s a big, tricky job if you haven’t done it before,” says Lawrence, who learned how to be a showrunner from Gary David Goldberg (“Family Ties”) on “Spin City” and has been doing it ever since. “Even though you hear, ‘Oh, yeah, Jason Sudeikis was a writer on ‘SNL’ before he was even a performer,’ but you don’t know for sure what that means. But what it meant to me was, oh, cool, this is one of those shows that we can get a ton of (stuff) done, because I can run one (writers’) room while he runs the other. Or he can take passes at scripts the way I did when the writers’ drafts were done on ‘Scrubs.’ …
“I’m going, how cool is this that I get to work on something this great that someone can carry that much of the workload? I very quickly went to my dream scenario of having a partner, a co-showrunner that really is a co-showrunner and does as much if not more of the heavy lifting than you do.”
But because the “Ted Lasso” team conceived of the show as a trilogy, season three, likely to premiere next summer, will be the end of “Ted Lasso” in its current form.
Lawrence says while he and Sudeikis are fans of long-running sitcoms, particularly “Cheers,” which starred Sudeikis’ uncle, George Wendt, that wasn’t what they set out to do on “Ted Lasso.” (“Ted Lasso” has characters named Sam — one of the players — and Rebecca in a nod to the Boston-set sitcom.)
“Jason grew up in the same world I did with multi-camera sitcoms,” Lawrence says. “That was an era where you go, ‘Oh, we’re doing this show and it goes on in perpetuity forever and ever and characters only change a little bit.
“What we’re doing is we know this three-season story for this gang. Are there other stories to tell not only for Ted Lasso, but for Roy, for Jamie Tartt, for Keeley, for Rebecca? Yeah, I just don’t think we’ve had time to catch our breath and talk about whether or not we’re doing them.”
A producer at heart, Lawrence says he jokes with Sudeikis that a follow-up series could follow Lasso as he coaches a girls’ team that happens to be a block away from where Sudeikis lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“Jason is a producer, too, but I’m more of a heartless, how-can-we-keep-this-thing-going-without-corrupting-what’s-great-about-it (producer),” Lawrence says. “And I’m like, ‘You’re right, we’re doing the ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, but Jason, ‘Star Wars’ did more (stuff), man. I’m watching ‘The Mandalorian’ right now with my kids and loving it!’”
Anyone up for a sequel series, “Ted Lasso: The Coach Awakens”?
Hidden Kansas City
Though season two doesn’t have the obvious Kansas City references that season one did, one hometown inspiration permeates all the episodes: Sudeikis’ father, Dan.
“He’s a very positive guy,” says Sudeikis, who once told The Star his dad also helped inspire his eager-to-please imitation of Joe Biden on “SNL.”
“He hated bad guys. Like, when watching movies, he’d be very vocal about it. But in my everyday life, he wasn’t judgmental. When he did have a feeling about someone, he was very modest in his declaration of it. It wasn’t like, ‘That guy’s a jerk.’ It was just, ‘I don’t know about that guy.’ He meets people where they’re at.
“He’s loquacious. Whenever anybody says to me, ‘I talked to your dad the other day,’ I go, ‘Oh, come on, man, you know that’s not the case. You listened to my dad.’”
Like Ted Lasso, Sudeikis says his father “rocked a mustache, like a lot of Kansas City dads did back in the ’80s,” and he remembers when his father shaved his mustache.
“I remember how odd that felt, too, because I’d only known him with the mustache,” he says, “which is why I’m very respectful and responsible as a father now to my little girl, Daisy, and let her help me shave the mustache so she knew who the heck I was when I walked out of the bathroom.”
Some of the season one hometown references only partially reflect reality, Sudeikis, a Shawnee Mission West High School grad, admits. The bully Ted mentioned from Brookridge Elementary, where he went to school through fourth grade before transferring to Holy Cross Catholic School, was not inspired by a bully he encountered in real life.
But the funky dance Ted did in news footage of Wichita State University in the first episode? That was similar to a dance Sudeikis did on “Saturday Night Live” in the “What Up with That?” sketches with Kenan Thompson. Sudeikis credits his dancer/choreographer sister Kristin Sudeikis, who alongside sister Lindsay, performed with Overland Park’s Miller Marley School of Dance & Voice.
(Sudeikis drew acclaim and alarm when he wore a hoodie sweatshirt from his sister’s New York dance studio during his Golden Globes acceptance speech in February.)
“We just talked about this recently, because she had told a friend that she’s the one that taught me how to do The Running Man, which is a specific hip-hop dance move from the ’90s, and that I asked her to teach me how to do that ‘cause I think I saw it in a TLC video,” Sudeikis says. “She hasn’t skewed towards telling tall tales so she’s probably right about that and I forgot about that element of it.”
Before “SNL” he did the dance with teammates on an AAU basketball team where he was one of the few white kids.
“Being like a class clown felt very much like Jim Carrey on ‘In Living Color,’” Sudeikis says. “Getting to grow up around those fellows and becoming friends with them and being embraced by their families, getting to know them as a middle class white kid from Overland Park, which was predominantly white, was life-changing. And being rooted in the culture of hip-hop as I was at that time, when it wasn’t as prevalent as it is in society now, especially in the Midwest, was life-changing.
“So that’s where that came from. Doing that hip-hop dancing has always been something that I just had a little bit of a knack for and luckily I grew up with a heck of an instructor in my own home.”
Season two includes 12 episodes, with one dropping each Friday.
———
