By Rahul Desai

As much as I love Schitt’s Creek, I’m convinced that its six-year-long overnight fame is a byproduct of cultural serendipity. The Rose family and the obscure little town have unfussily existed on our screens since 2015. But the series found profound resonance – just like its fictional characters did – as emotional refuge in a period of uncertainty and isolation. If not for the COVID-19 pandemic, a shell-shocked audience might never have recognised, and celebrated, the unfiltered warmth of the life-positive comedy. We suddenly saw everything we sought – and all we lacked – in the idiosyncratic kindness of the series. The darkness of the new normal merely amplified its muted halo. This ‘much-needed-ness’ of Schitt’s Creek does not diminish its status one bit. In fact, being an accidental child of crisis only cements its legacy as something that transcends the subjectivity of art. It will forever be known as not a sitcom but a moment: the philanthropic ink on a misanthropic page of modern history.

Like many grieving fans desperate to fill a Creek-sized void in their hearts, I also turned to the next brand of lump-in-throat sweetness. The baton-passing is uncanny: The first season of Ted Lasso coincided with the final season of Schitt’s Creek. It felt like a natural progression. The opening episodes promised to offer exactly what I was looking for. The recipe – one that triggers buzzwords like therapeutic and cathartic – was ripe for digestion: An offbeat and out-of-depth protagonist, transatlantic humour, a colourful cast and a winning premise. It’s so easy to like that it almost seemed unfair. Every person was a character and every situation, a cog in the wheel of wholesome feel-goodness. Ted Lasso instantly felt like a spiritual cousin of The Office, where the affable incompetence of a corporate boss is replaced by the affable hyper-optimism of a football coach.

Lasso himself appears to be the quintessential simpleton-turned-star: a Michael Scott with more life experience, but also the hero of yet another fundamentally sound, right-time-right-place television show in a world aching to remember the shape of smiling. The formula is so foolproof that you’d be dismissed as a cynic for questioning it: A foreign coach is hired, everyone expects him to fail, but he slowly wins over the land by being nice. There’s an uncomplicated nostalgia about these episodes that seduces the viewer into believing that being uplifted is the sole aim of being entertained. But this is only an entry point. Slowly but steadily, the restorativeness of Ted Lasso morphs into something more evolved. Midway through the first season, Ted Lasso begins to suggest that simplicity is only its cloak. The dagger cuts far deeper. Season 2 goes on to revel in a nakedness seldom associated with its benevolent genre.

The narrative anatomy of a sitcom discourages an audience from asking why characters are the way they are. It is designed to keep the viewer from thinking of them as functional humans – the gravity of being is edited out, and characters become a sum total of dysfunctional levity. The conflicts, too, unfurl with the inevitability of a punchline: people quarrel but never fight, characters yell but never scream. Tension occurs to service the pleasure of being diffused. In short, there are no strings attached to what we see. Personalities automatically exist – reduced to adjectives like vain, eccentric, upbeat, laidback – to attract us from a distance and to be mined for laughs. Everybody loves Raymond because he’s goofy and awkward; nobody is supposed to locate the source of his goofiness and awkwardness. But Ted Lasso’s goofiness is gradually revealed to be a mortal consequence, not an artistic purpose. A complex reaction, not a cosmetic action. His humanity comes at a cost. Most of all, the show shatters two cardinal rules of sitcom storytelling: Lasso’s conflict is internal, and he shows us his private space. It’s grave. It’s psychological. And it’s eerily empty.

Coach Lasso’s panic attacks become a recurring motif in the happy-go-lucky series. But they aren’t played for giggles. The tonal shifts are deliberately jarring. They happen at the most inopportune moments – during a victory party, in the middle of a crucial game, before a funeral – as if to disrupt the social toxicity of sitcom language, break the fourth wall and urge the viewer to acknowledge the duality of feel-goodness. The levity of his being is charming precisely because the gravity of his unbeing is intact. When he enters the church during club boss Rebecca’s eulogy to her father, it’s all the more poignant because he hasn’t just shown up; he’s shown up against overwhelming odds. He’s there despite another meltdown. Despite being haunted by memories of his own father. We aren’t supposed to sense the fragility of a joyous protagonist, yet Ted Lasso relentlessly reveals the price of healing others. Seemingly simple saviours are people too, it implies, with mental health issues and unresolved trauma. His acute nobility then adopts the grammar of an escape mechanism: it’s the reason he rarely blinks when disbelieving colleagues wonder why there’s no agenda behind his motivational niceness. Several scenes show Lasso being cheerfully chatty in response to mean jibes, baffling his perpetrators, who then end up glaring at him in anticipation of a response that never comes.

It soon becomes clear, though, that perhaps he just likes speaking because it drowns out the silence of his screams. Watching Jason Sudeikis’ Lasso struggle to accept therapy made me imagine the real-life tragedy of world-healing comics like Robin Williams. These were the severed parts we never saw, the secrets we were never meant to even suspect. But Lasso’s sessions with Dr Sharon Fieldstone conveys the erased side of public performance and sitcom sensibilities. For once, the multi-camera setup obsessed with unidimensional characters matures into a single-camera setup interested in multidimensional faces. That Lasso has no romantic interest (yet) – in spite of the writing repeatedly teasing us with contenders – only reaffirms the show’s disarmingly candid sketch of a freshly heartbroken man. Nobody else can fix him, because he is handed the responsibility of fixing himself.

All of this makes the Ted Lasso experience unique: It’s like enjoying a puppet show and cringing at the tautness of the strings pulling them at once. It’s like laughing at a joke and at once empathising with the circumstances that led to the joke. In The Office terminology, it’s the equivalent of the mockumentary crew following Steve Carell’s Michael Scott back to the crippling loneliness of his condo after a day of “work” at Dunder Mifflin. It’s where the illusion dissipates. I always imagined the regional manager suffering every night before showing up to play the fool at the Scranton branch the next morning. I imagine him sitting alone, eating microwave dinners and counting down the minutes till he can meet his employees – and only friends – again. Ted Lasso confirms these fears, in turn forcing us to confront the shape-shifting soul of a low-stakes sitcom. The treatment brings to mind Kevin Can F**k Himself, a recent series that turns this duality into its central gimmick. It stars Annie Murphy (better known as Alexis from Schitt’s Creek) navigating contrasting perspectives. When she’s not a stereotypical sitcom device – a wife in an Everybody-Loves-Raymond-ish house, saddled with a man-child husband, a multi-cam setup and canned laughter – she’s a woman frustrated by her reductive identity outside of this space. The human begins where the character ends; the sitcom look relapses into grim reality the second she walks out the door.

But the genius of Ted Lasso is that it all happens in the same breath, without the slightest change in angle or aesthetic. It’s the same person – a leader, mentor, colleague, friend – overcome by anxiety bang in between what might have otherwise been canned laughter tracks. As a result, the serious moments don’t feel like brief breathers from the comedy. It’s the comedic stretches that feel like long breathers in what is essentially an edgy coming-of-age drama. The dramatic arcs – Rebecca and Sam’s unlikely romance, Keeley and Roy’s relationship, Coach Beard’s existentialism, and particularly, Coach Nate’s bitter resentment – belong to themselves, not surfacing as bolts from the blue but as self-sustaining portraits of human individualism. Nate’s outburst, like the others, is an organic extension of Lasso’s own imbalance of moods – a reminder that no fictional character can thrive without feeling the pressure of repairing the audience. In meme-speak: we don’t deserve them at their funniest if we can’t love them at their direst. It’s true that if not for the pandemic, perhaps we might have seen different patterns in the cracks of Ted Lasso. And it’s also true that the show is considered a comforting embrace rather than a sharp punch, especially in light of this planet’s prolonged suffering.

But if Schitt’s Creek was a place of emotional refuge for a world coming to terms with the vagaries of solitude, Ted Lasso is a time of reckoning for a people relearning the fullness of living. We suddenly see everything we avoided – and all we lacked – in the idiosyncratic affections of the series. Being a fortuitous child of crisis merely cements its legacy as something that transcends the objectivity of survival. We don’t need to flee anymore so much as emerge, so who better to manifest this than a protagonist whose feet keep reaching for the rug under ours? Ted Lasso is certainly not a sitcom. But it’s also not a moment – it’s a cue card that the moment is finally passing. And all that’s left is the dignity to smile without discarding the courage to weep. All that remains is the inclination to let philanthropic ink dry on the misanthropic pages of personal well-being. After the unplanned pitstop of Schitt’s Creek, Ted Lasso offers a roadmap of the future. Most importantly, it embodies the cinema of transition. It’s a remedial nudge that, in an era straddling today and tomorrow, not even escapism can equip its tenants with the audacity to escape from themselves.