A Too Short Lasso
30 minute ‘Ted Lasso’ is the best. A week between is the worst.
So, Ted Lasso, the sort of goofier little sibling to Major League which airs as a show on Apple TV+ is surprisingly pretty good.¹ Well, that may be a bit generous.² It’s seemingly knowingly corny, but in an oddly welcome way. Still, it’s decidedly watchable — especially in our current reality of pandemics and poisonous air.
Actually, it’s one fatal flaw has nothing to do with the show at all, but rather with how it’s presented. Which is: 30-minute chunks, once a week.
Now, don’t get me wrong, in our era of prestige television where the state of the art form is dominated by hour-long dramas, this 30-minute side of french fries is a most welcomed change of pace. But the week-long intervals one must wait to watch another is obscene. This is utterly snackable content that is being dished out like the Stanford marshmallow experiment. It’s cruel.
And I think it’s dumb. I know I’ve argued in the past that shows like Stranger Things may actually benefit from a week-long build-up, going against the Netflix grain, but Ted Lasso is in a different camp. A weekly watercooler chat about the latest episode isn’t the key here. Ted Lasso is a binge show stuck in a cable show’s body.
The problem is that Ted Lasso’s lightweight also leaves it fleeting. The strength is the weakness.
So my advice to Apple would be the opposite of my advice to Netflix: release the full season of Ted Lasso all at once. Let people binge-mode it in a marathon, talk about it online as a whole and wholesome escape from our current reality, let it grow, and let the anticipation build for season two.
Part of me wonders if this isn’t as simple as the idea that 30-minute shows should be released binge-style, while hour-long shows should be weekly in cadence (at least once they’re established as hits). Obviously, there would be exceptions, but 30 minutes feels like too short a time to ask people to wait a week each time. I realize this wasn’t true 30 years ago, but the world has changed. Netflix changed it, and Apple should learn from it.
¹ For those who haven’t seen Major League — first, see it. Second, it’s the story of a woman who takes over a sports team (in this case, baseball — incidentally, my hometown Cleveland Indians, so I have a very real soft spot for the movie, but it’s honestly good) from her husband and aims to run it into the ground… But again, the tone is completely different here.
² Though, I don’t know. Ted Lasso’s first season isn’t done yet and the first season of The Morning Show — also an Apple TV+ show, of course — grew on me like wildfire (which is a decidedly bad metaphor to use right now, sadly).
