How Ted Lasso became a phenomenon, from a promo to 61 Emmy nominations
Ted Lasso grew from NBC Sports ads into a pandemic-era hit by remaking its coach and putting people before soccer.
By Deshawn Carter · Sports Writer
3 min read
How Ted Lasso became a phenomenon starts with a deliberate rewrite. The character arrived as a broad fish-out-of-water coach in NBC Sports promotions, then became the kind-hearted, emotionally complicated center of an Apple TV+ comedy that drew viewers during the pandemic and collected 61 Emmy nominations across three seasons, according to CBS News.
How did Ted Lasso become a phenomenon?
The first version was made to sell English Premier League coverage in the United States. NBC Sports hired Jason Sudeikis for a promotional campaign after obtaining the league’s broadcast rights, and Sudeikis brought in longtime collaborators Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, CBS News reported.
The 2013 and 2014 videos put an American football coach with little knowledge of soccer in England. They got attention well before the series: Sports Illustrated reported that the two promos generated more than 20 million combined YouTube views.
That early recognition gave the team a launch point, but the television version had to be more than a joke about a clueless outsider. CBS News reported that Sudeikis, Kelly and Hunt reworked the commercial character from arrogant and incurious into someone humbly curious. Sudeikis told CBS that it was intentional to play a coach who was kind-hearted and resistant to other people’s negativity and sarcasm.
The trio began shaping the series in 2015, producing a pilot and outlines for six to 10 first-season episodes in a week, Sports Illustrated reported. Producer Bill Lawrence later joined the project, after conversations with Sudeikis in 2017, and said he was interested in making Lasso a more rounded character.
Why did the soccer setting work?
The show’s makers did not treat football as the whole point. Hunt said Lawrence’s early instruction in the writers’ room was that the program was a workplace ensemble comedy, not a soccer show. Sudeikis compared the sport’s role in the series to boxing’s role in Rocky, according to CBS News.
That approach made room for stories about divorce, mental-health challenges and self-care. Lawrence told CBS that Lasso’s optimistic public face was designed to sit alongside a person who needed to confront his own problems.
The men’s locker-room setting also gave the writers and cast a place to examine pressures around masculinity. Actors Toheeb Jimoh and Kola Bokinni told CBS that the competitive environment could expose how men perform versions of what they think masculinity should be.
A hit in a difficult moment
Ted Lasso debuted a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. CBS News reported that fans flocked to the series and critical acclaim followed. The timing is part of the context, rather than a measurable explanation on its own, but the show’s warmer and more vulnerable version of its lead clearly differed from the promotional sketch.
The 61 Emmy nominations are the clearest industry measure of the breakout. They do not reduce the show’s success to one ingredient. The documented path is a chain: viral ads introduced the premise, the creators rebuilt the central character, and the series used a soccer workplace to tell broader stories about relationships and emotional health.
This story draws on original reporting from CBS News.