Jason Sudeikis to revive football coach character from NBC Sports ads for Apple TV+ show
It’s always a great idea when a character invented for a TV commercial makes the transition into, you know, real media, but it doesn’t happen nearly often enough (it’s been over a year since we all enjoyed the hijinks of Uncle Drew!). Luckily, Apple TV+ is so hungry for that sweet content that it’s getting in on the “TV character but now it’s a regular character” business with Ted Lasso, a comedy series based on a series of NBC Sports ads that Jason Sudeikis made in 2013. The basic premise of the videos was that Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso was an American football coach who gets a job managing an English football club (the former being the one where you carry the ball with your hands and the latter being the one where you kick the ball with your foot). Naturally, he’s bad at it, and the humor comes from Ted Lasso’s complete inability to recognize the differences between American football and everywhere-else football.
The TV show version will presumably follow the same premise, and Sudeikis will be making it with Scrubs’ Bill Lawrence. Also, it has a straight-to-series order, so hopefully Sudeikis can wring a whole season of hilarity out of a guy with a mustache who can’t tell the difference between the bad football with the concussions and the bad football with the rampant corruption (actually, they’re both probably corrupt and you can probably get a concussion doing both, so maybe they’re on to something here).