Earlier last year, when I started working with a sports team, I was advised to watch the award-winning TV comedy series ‘Ted Lasso’. It’s about an American college basketball coach being brought in to manage an English Premiership football (=soccer!) club, & what happens when his culture of kindness and support meets the prevailing toxic masculinity.
I really enjoyed both the humour & the psychology of it and was enthusing to my friend Barbara Kossakowska about it at the last WorldCon. She went home, watched it with her teenage sons and loved it too, so suggested it might be interesting to have a conversation with other people from this community who had seen it. Kind of like a book club, but for a TV show instead.
Of course, people might want to comment just in a thread starting here, but we also thought it would be nice to have an online discussion, so we’ve set up a Zoom meeting for Thursday 8th Feb, 7pm East European Standard Time / 5pm GMT / 9am PST (link below).
Some considerations:
- There are 3 seasons, and a LOT happens in that time. So we thought we’d focus on season 1 to give folk new to it a chance to watch through. If there’s an appetite for discussing seasons 2 and 3 -where a lot of really interesting psychological stuff is going on - we can arrange extra meeting(s) later.
- By nature of discussion, we can’t avoid spoilers, but we’ll try to minimise references to seasons 2 and 3. That will be hard though given that character development is at the heart of the story. If like me you’re very spoiler-avoidant, we’d rather you enjoyed the show even if you miss out on this conversation!
- In most countries Ted Lasso is on a subscription channel (Apple TV in the UK) – but you can often get a short free trial and binge-watch for nothing, as I did.
- The conversation will be in English, though the show has been dubbed or subtitled in many languages now
- If you haven’t seen it, there’s a LOT of swearing and references to sex – make your choice accordingly. It doesn’t (in my opinion) require any knowledge of or interest in football/soccer: it’s very much about people, not sport.
You can find link to zoom meeting at this link:
https://contextualscience.org/post/7388/calling_fans_of_ted_lasso
To access this page you must be logged in as a current ACBS member
Also, if you’re interested in our Zoom chat, please follow this link on 8th Feb, or if there are any comments you want to make on the Listserve (link above), Barbara & I would love to hear them.
Peace & Love
Barbara Kossakowska and Ray Owen