The actor, writer and creator, who earned four Emmy nods for his work on Season 1, talked about the unexpected success of the most nominated freshman comedy in history.
“Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV+ series about a clueless Kansas football coach (Jason Sudeikis) hired to be the manager of a struggling London Premier League soccer team — despite (or, rather, because of) his utter lack of soccer knowledge — is in itself an underdog story. The critical reception when the first episodes premiered last summer was tepid, to put it kindly.
“I can state with some confidence that ‘Ted Lasso’ is not the worst television series based on commercials,” The New York Times television critic Mike Hale wrote in his initial assessment.
But then came the celebrities, singing its praises. And Sudeikis’s Golden Globe. And his tie-dye hoodie. And Alex Morgan’s “Ted Lasso” dance.
What happened?
That, said Brendan Hunt, a creator, writer and star of the series, is the million-dollar question.
“Certainly people were probably tired of people using their pulpits for toxicity and negativity,” he ventured in an interview on Tuesday, just a few hours after receiving four nominations for his work on the series. “And maybe people didn’t mind being reminded that we can also be good to each other — and have fun doing it.”
The series’s 20 total nominations broke the record for the most-nominated freshman comedy in Emmys history, topping the 19 nods garnered by the first season of “Glee” in 2010. Among the accolades — the most for any comedy this year — were nominations for best comedy, best lead actor in a comedy (Sudeikis), and several for the show’s supporting cast.
That last category included Hunt, who said he was deep in thought over a bowl of cereal when he notched an entry alongside Brett Goldstein, Jeremy Swift and Nick Mohammed in what is now a four-way “Ted Lasso” race for best supporting actor in a comedy series. (Hannah Waddingham and Juno Temple were nominated in the best supporting actress category.)
In a phone call from his home in Los Angeles, Hunt discussed the show’s surprising success and his favorite “Ted Lasso” reference from the real world of sports. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Twenty is a lot of Emmy nominations. Where were you when you found out “Ted Lasso” had dethroned “Glee”?
It’s a good way to start a day! I was kind of thinking I’d just sleep through the nominations, but of course I have a five-month-old at home who would laugh at such plans. My manager texted me, so I found out the old-fashioned way of FaceTime. It’s all just disorienting and nice.
Like the team on the show, “Ted Lasso” is the classic underdog series. When did you realize it was a show a lot of people were talking about?
When the show came out, there were no Nielsen ratings, and there were no screenings, because of Covid and all. So very quickly Twitter was just swelling up with really nice messages from people. And they indicated not just that people dug the show or thought it was funny, but that there was something else going on.
Why do you think the show resonated with people?
I wish I knew — I’d make a million more of these shows! Well, no, I’d make two to three more of these shows, that’s probably more manageable.
To what extent do you think the show’s popularity was attributable to the pandemic?
I hope the show would have been popular any time. We were writing the show before the pandemic, and we thought it was funny before the pandemic, so maybe that’s not the definitive issue. I wish people had been able to watch the show normally. But the pandemic was there, and if we helped people get through it a little bit, all the better.
Celebrities have been lining up to rave about the show. Who is your favorite celebrity fan?
Barry Jenkins was pretty cool. He just got on Twitter out of nowhere and straight-up said something like, “I hereby call myself leader of the ‘Ted Lasso’ fan club.” I’m like: “Barry Jenkins? Wow, that’s amazing!”
What has been the most surprising thing about the show’s reception?
How much of it there is! We never anticipated this at all. We thought the show would be decent, because we had a pretty good writer’s room, and we had a good time writing it. And once we were shooting it, it was like, “Oh, this cast is pretty good, actually.” But this groundswell, and the fact that people don’t just laugh at it, but it means a lot to them — hoo boy. None of that was foreseen.
“Ted Lasso” references have started appearing in sports culture — Alex Morgan did a Lasso dance on the field not long ago, and N.B.A. coaches have mentioned it in interviews. What’s your favorite example?
The Alex Morgan dance for sure, because that’s really going the extra mile. Someone sent it to me, and I didn’t even recognize it at first, but I was like, [in a high-pitched voice], “Oh my Gooood!” But the Coach Quin Snyder [of the Utah Jazz] thing is great, too, because that wasn’t the preseason press conference; that was before a playoff game. It was a high-pressure moment, but he took time to talk about our little skit. It’s pretty neat to think of.
Have you been surprised that the show is such a hit with professional soccer players?
When we shot the second commercial for it, we worked with [the American goalie] Tim Howard. And when we asked him if he’d seen the first commercial, he just laughed at us. He was like, “Yeah, we watched it; we watched it a lot.” We were like, “What?” I mean, we don’t get soccer right — we know that. This show is written from a place of love for soccer, not a place of intimate knowledge of it. So for so many soccer players to say that they’re digging it, even knowing that we’re getting a lot of basic stuff wrong, means that they’re connected to the spirit of it, which is far more important and really cool to see.
Season 2 is coming out next week. Does this Emmy haul raise the pressure on it?
It is what it is now, so we’re just going to cross our fingers and hope for the best. None of the praise or accolades really change anything for us because by the time the show came out, we already had Season 2 largely structured. We were just putting the finishing touches on scripts. I don’t think it would’ve affected us anyway, but it didn’t have the chance to affect us. The only thing it did was make us breathe an extra sigh of relief to know, “OK, our instincts are correct, we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing.”
The character started with NBC sports promos that you helped create in 2013. What would you have told someone back then who said, “You know, one day this is going to turn into the most Emmy-nominated comedy on TV”?
I’d have been like: “Uh-huh. Yeah. Cool, man. They’re paying us in soccer tickets, so I’m just going to go to this soccer game, and that’s going to be the height of my expectations for this. You continue taking peyote.”
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