From sketch to series

Ted Lasso was the icing on a $US250million deal, writes Kevin Baxter. Now he has his own TV show.

IN 2012, after spending $US250 million ($NZ376 million) for the broadcast rights to the English Premier League, NBC Sports realised it had a problem. Noone was sure the US audience understood enough about English football to justify the investment, so the network needed a cheeky way to let viewers know it was OK to be a little vague on the rules.

Enter Ted Lasso, a gumchewing, softdrawling coach of American football — the tackle kind — mistakenly hired to manage Tottenham Hotspur, one of England's most iconic teams. With Jason Sudeikis playing Ted with just the right combination of arrogance and ignorance, the hilarious fourminute, 41second primer was so successful the character became a cult figure, inspiring social media parodies and earning Sudeikis a second season of short spots on NBC.

The network retired Ted after that, but Sudeikis never gave up on the coach he created, faithfulness was rewarded when Apple TV+ kicked off Ted Lasso, a series Sudeikis helped create, produce and write.

‘‘The feeling at the end of the day of writing this guy or pretending to be this guy, it's nice. He's egoless,’’ Sudeikis said. ‘‘He's Mr Rogers meets John

Wooden.’’

Maybe. But even with that pedigree, taking him from NBC's promotions department to a fullfledged streaming series required travelling through two continents, winning over the right producers and adding both heart and heft to a character that was gloriously lacking in both.

Ted was born around 2001, in the dressing room of a small, ageing theatre in

Amsterdam where Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt, who would become Ted's's trusty assistant coach, were performing with the improvisational comedy troupe Boom Chicago.

Hunt had come to the Netherlands a Chicago Bears fan who despised football and its archaic rules, only to be swept up in the sport's culture in Amsterdam. To cultivate that, Sudeikis bought a PlayStation so he and Hunt could play the football video game

FIFA, named for the sport's governing body, before and after every show.

‘‘The bulk of my soccer knowledge and love comes from playing FIFA,'' said

Sudeikis. At the time, no American had managed a major team in Europe outside of a video game, leading Sudeikis and Hunt to wonder what the transition might look like if an NFL coach gave it a try.

The result was Ted Lasso, who comes to London and is troubled to learn football games can end in ties, there are no playoffs, and balls kicked over the goal posts are not worth three points. When NBC pitched the idea of a short film featuring Ted to its partners at the English Premier League, it was dismissed out of hand.

However Tottenham, the last team the network approached, loved the idea so much it produced a three and ahalf minute video of its own documenting the making of the NBC film — and, in a subtle act of revenge, highlighting Americans' ignorance of the sport.

‘‘The hesitancy that was felt by clubs before we actually shot the first one essentially went away as soon as they saw it,’’ Hunt said.

‘‘That has now worked as a real calling card for us because now the Premier League knows about Ted Lasso.’’

The biggest challenge in taking Ted from a concept to a 10episode series wasn't the reluctance of the English, it was Hollywood.

Sudeikis' partner, actress Olivia Wilde, refused to let him give up on the idea, but nothing really happened until Jason crossed paths with Bill Lawrence.

Lawrence, creator of the successful medical comedy Scrubs, which ran for nine seasons, is the only member of the production team to have won anything in competitive football, capturing a

Connecticut state championship as a goalkeeper when he was 10. His passion for the sport faded soon after that, but Sudeikis convinced him Ted Lasso was worth backing.

‘‘He sold me,’’ Lawrence said. ‘‘The only reason that it took a while was people always thought it was a super funny sketch, but they didn't have the vision Jason had in his head of it being a show with a big heart.’’

Still, turning 281 seconds of ‘‘super funny sketch’’ into 300plus minutes of episodic entertainment was a more difficult transition than going from coaching American football to the European

kind. And it meant starting over.

‘‘The NBC thing is gone,’’ Hunt said. ‘‘It was the footprints that we're walking in, but we had to make it a fuller, different version. For Jason the most important thing with Ted is that he had to be a curious person. It's one thing to be dumb or ignorant or be in over your head. But if you can be the person who knows how much he does not know and be curious about the things you do not know, then that automatically lends itself to being a bighearted, welcoming person who wants to know about every single person you meet.’’

The fishoutofwater conceit that made the original concept work is still there — as are the gags about playoffs, draws, football rules and small cars. But the character has evolved.

‘‘He's a little more fleshed out, less buffoonish,’’ Sudeikis said. ‘‘He understands kicking the ball over the goal isn't three points.’’

And while Sudeikis plays him for laughs, there is a dignity to Ted that allows him to meet pessimism with optimism and despair with hope. That makes him a much better fit for an audience preoccupied not with the idiosyncrasies of football but with a deadly pandemic and uncertainty.

‘‘He's more a white rabbit than a white knight,’’ Sudeikis said. ‘‘He can lead you to

a better place.’’

Ted Lasso is available to stream on Apple TV+.