May 30th, 2023
I’m posting this absolute thirst trap to talk about my two favorite shows right now which, like this photo, are about soccer and not about soccer at all.
Yellowjackets and Ted Lasso couldn’t be more different on paper, but they share more than their European football connection; they compliment one another, and deal with the deepest human ideas, like community, faith, trauma, healing, therapy, and self-improvement.
Both are also dealing with bizarre online backlash for their latest seasons, the recently-concluded second season for Yellowjackets, and the third (and final) season of Ted Lasso.
To quickly address the backlash: as a culture, we have a massive critiquing problem. For one, we often do it before a story is completely told, which doesn’t make any sense; two, most people don’t actually know how to give valid, constructive, or even coherent criticism.
“This sucks” is bad criticism; “This sucks, but here are some specific reasons why I personally feel like this sucks” is better. If the specific reasons are your own expectations — like “Well, this is the way I would have done it” or “They should have done it this way” — then that, too, is bad criticism.
Every story told belongs to the storyteller; if you disagree with how they told it, then you should tell your own, the story that you want to tell.
Back to the programs.
I used to get so sick of people telling me to watch Ted Lasso. In fact, I was excited to watch the first episode just so I could say that it wasn’t THAT good and move on with my life.
Except it is THAT good, and now I’m the one telling everyone to watch Ted Lasso. It’s sick.
It’s a sports show that barely features sports at all; in fact, it subverts everything you think you know about how sports shows are supposed to operate, and that’s one of its (many) joys. It’s funny, yes, but I come back to it again and again to cry, to spend as much time with these fully-realized characters as I can, and to be reminded, over and over, that we are all valuable, we are loved, and we can get better, whatever that looks like for us.
Yellowjackets is not that.
Yellowjackets is brutal and violent and crazy in the truest sense of the word, about a team of teenage female soccer players who crash land in the wilderness, and the adult survivors of that experience over twenty years later.
In the first scene, you understand that murder and cannibalism are on the table, and you have to make the decision to stop or go on.
Somehow, though, the same themes from Ted emerge here (and I know this because I’ve often been watching them back-to-back). Surviving and then transcending trauma is the focal point here, and watching an episode is like being in the room during group therapy, because it has the same effect: people are telling you what they’ve done, and sometimes it’s subjectively worse than what you’ve done, but here they are, trying to get better, and if they can do it, then you can, too.
If there was ever a feel-good show about cannibalism, then it’s this one right here.
I write this days after the season finale of Yellowjackets and on the eve of the series finale of Ted Lasso for several reasons: they have a lot to offer, they were well worth my time, and they give me a lot to think (and feel and talk) about.
Not the least of which being what friend I would eat first if I had to.
Football is life.
The Den 