Beginnings And Endings

Since I started using AI to make music, earlier in the year, my TV viewing, like my gaming, has taken a nose-dive. I was up to about a couple of hours a day, mostly last thing every night, but now I spend that time on my laptop, burning through Credits on Suno and stitching fragments together into songs in Audacity.

I'm still paying several subscriptions to streaming services all the same, though, so I feel obligated to make at least some use of all of them. We did pause Netflix for three months but I re-started it for Wednesday (And happily caught the finale of Upload around the same time.)

While I was looking through the schedules for more to watch, so as to get my money's-worth, I noticed the missing seasons of couple of shows I had been following a few months ago had miraculously appeared. 

One of them was Roswell: New Mexico, for which Netflix very annoyingly had held the license to Seasons 1 and 2 in the UK but not Seasons 3 and 4, which were exclusive to Sky over here a the time (If I remember right...). That was great but also too late because, when I finished the first two seasons, I didn't want to pay yet another sub so I used a VPN to watch them on Netflix USA.

Even more annoying was Young Sheldon, for which Netflix had the rights to stream six out of seven seasons in both the UK and the US but no rights to the final season for either. That was on some US station or service I forget now. All I do remember about it was that I couldn't watch it, even with a VPN.

Well, that agreement, whatever it was, must be over now because Netflix has the full run available to stream. I was finally able to catch up with the show. I'll tell you what I thought of it later.

Our other streaming service is Amazon Prime but that one pays for itself in shipping alone, particularly since Mrs. Bhagpuss buys at least one thing on Amazon pretty much every day. What with that and the games and music offers included in the bundle, I feel no urge to watch anything on Prime at all if I don't feel like it. 

The problem there is that I also have Apple+ through Prime as an add-on. It was very cheap for three months and I didn't really care if I was watching anything on Apple+ or not but now it's back up to full price it seems like I should at least watch something. Mrs Bhagpuss doesn't currently watch anything on the channel at all so it's up to me to pick up the slack. 

Luckily, there's no shortage of good stuff to choose from. I thought about starting several series about which I'd heard good things - Severance, Slow Horses, Foundation, The Studio - but in the end I decided on Ted Lasso. Main reason: the episodes were shorter. Secondary reason: I like sitcoms.

I have now watched all of Young Sheldon Season 7 and Ted Lasso Season 1. The end of one story, the start of another. Here's what I thought about them both.

Young Sheldon - Season 7

I was quite dubious about the whole concept of Young Sheldon to begin with. I've never been a huge fan of prequels (Is anyone?) and prequels built around main characters as children can come across as a bit desperate. Added to that, this is just one character from an ensemble show, one that relies almost entirely on the particular skills of the specific actor who played him, and it's a character often considered to be difficult and controversial. 

The prospects didn't look good but contrary to expectations it turned out to be a warm, comfortable, enjoyable watch. A lot less spiky and brittle than the show that spawned it, in fact.

Of course, it also had one other, major problem, something common to all long-running shows that revolve around a young child. Children grow up. 

In one respect, that worked in Young Sheldon's favor. Old Sheldon, if we can call him that, is a divisive figure in The Big Bang Theory. A lot of people have some very valid objections to the character in terms of the way it can appear to promote and perpetuate some stereotypically negative views of neuro-diversity. I personally feel the full character arc, taken across the entire run of the show, counters many of those objections, producing a nuanced and distinctly positive image of someone struggling with numerous challenges they find it hard to overcome.

Even if that's true, though, you'd need to have watched the entire 279 episodes to appreciate it. And no-one who thinks Sheldon is an offensive caricature is going to sit through 93 hours of a show that makes their skin crawl just to see if maybe it wasn't quite as bad as they thought it was after all. As the saying goes, that's an awful lot of Shawshank before you get to the Redemption.

I didn't think Young Sheldon had the same level of difficulty. In TBBT, there are five central characters and it's not hard to make an argument that all of them are potentially offensive in the way they're written and performed. Young Sheldon just has... young Sheldon. And he's kinda cute. 

All those mannerisms and affectations that seem so mannered and performative in an adult seem a lot softer and more relatable in a child. Kids, after all, do say and do the darnedest things, don't they? And it is undeniably satisfying, if you've watched a lot of TBBT, to see many of Sheldon's tropes and foibles from that show get their start in some specific event in this one, usually for an understandable and sympathetic reason.

All of that is in the show as a whole, though. What about the final season? 

Well, the most striking thing about it is that Sheldon isn't actually in it all that much. He's in every episode but he's rarely the central character and the main story arcs seldom revolve around him. He's almost a peripheral character at times, chipping in with a few side-stories or popping up to add some extra perspective to someone else's story.

Mostly, it's about his family, all of whom get some significant character development that changes or enhances what we knew about them. For example...

(This bit might get a bit spoilery from here on down...)

Meemaw really starts to show her age as she loses her home, her business and her freedom all in quick succession. Her veneer of invincibility begins to peel away and her indomitable spirit wilts a little. Missy shows a good deal of unexpected maturity and character growth as does Georgie, albeit each in very different ways. Sheldon's mother's religious beliefs start to move her closer to the mania seen in the adult show, while his father... dies.

That was a shock, even though if I'd been counting the passage of time I ought to have expected it. It happens right towards the end of the run, just when everything seems to be going pretty well for him and the family. 

I was not best pleased when it happened, not only because I liked the character as played by Lance Barber but because I had Young Sheldon firmly in my "Send me off to sleep in a good mood." slot and it seemed like it was going to finish with a couple of episodes where all the cast would be in mourning and filled with grief. Not what I want, right before I nod off.

In the end, though, the whole thing was handled very gently, not side-stepping the emotions but not losing the warmth and humor either. It was a particularly telling way to show some of Sheldon's emotional growth or lack of it, too, something I also thought was well-handled.

As a run, I'd call Young Sheldon a success. It lasted seven seasons, which is more than decent for a sitcom. It kept the whole cast together and it was consistently written and well-played throughout by an excellent ensemble cast. It was great to see Annie Potts and Ed Begley Jr. in meaty roles again, too. 

The underlying problem of child actors turning into adult actors was kept to a minimum by the unusual expedient of partially writing the lead character out of his own show. Missy and Georgie both seemed to age at a rate that allowed the audience barely to notice it happening but by Season 7, Iain Armitage, playing Sheldon, looked very odd indeed, like a much older child playing a much younger one.

The same mannerisms that had made him a cute-if-quirky kid turned him into a slightly disturbing adolescent, never changing his expression, keeping his hands stiffly by his sides and always wearing awkwardly formal clothes. That looks funny in an eight-year old but uncomfortable and unsettling in a teenager. It's not surprising they mostly wrote around him towards the end.

The ensemble cast was uniformly excellent. I liked everyone, which is ideal for a sitcom. I especially enjoyed Annie Potts as Meemaw and her double act with Craig T Nelson as her lover, Dale, was always a joy. The entire cast - and it's a big one counting all the regular supporting parts - was on top form throughout and possibly the highest praise I can offer is that, by the end of the final season, I think I liked every one of the characters more than I had at the start.

Actually, the highest praise I can offer is that I'd happily watch the whole run again. Which I almost certainly will.

Ted Lasso - Season 1 

I'd heard a little about this show. I'd heard it was heart-warming, upbeat and positive. I'd heard it was nice. I also knew it was about a sports coach and, of course, that it was an American sitcom. When I was looking for something to replace Young Sheldon, it seemed like another sweet slice of Americana to send me off to sleep smiling.

Yeah. About that...

It's not "nice", is it?  It's not all that sweet either. It's acerbic and sharp and occasionally even a little bitter. Ted Lasso (The character no the show.) is irony personified.

For one thing, he may be American and a sports coach but he's not in America and he's not coaching an American sport. Somehow, in all the things I'd read, I hadn't picked up on the "Sit" in the sitcom, which is that he's in London, coaching at a Premier League football club.

Or, rather, managing one, which I'm not sure they ever actually say. Everyone keeps calling him "Coach" but he's doing the job we usually call "Manager" over here and he has an actual coach standing next to him, who everyone also calls "Coach". 

The show is full of oddnesses like that. I'd say it does 98% of a great job of being as convincing about life in modern Britain as 98% of British sitcoms can manage but the 2% differences are wholly different in each case.

The writing doesn't actually lean that heavily into the one-language-two-cultures comedy you'd expect. There's plenty of that around the margins but it's never the point of the show. Ironically, that makes the moments when cultural infelicities do pop up all the more obvious. 

For example, there's some considerable business in several episodes about American sport not accepting a tie as a valid result. Which is fine. Except that we don't really use the expression "tie" all that much over here.

Ted always uses the word "tie" in Season 1. Every British or British-localized speaker he uses it to uses it back to him, frequently when no-one here would ever use the word in that way. We'd almost always say "draw", which is what we call a sports match where the scores end up tied.  We use tie as a verb routinely but rarely as a noun.  

In fact, just to make it even more confusing, a "tie" as a noun in a sporting comment usually means a fixture or a match. As in "a cup tie". But then, a draw can be a fixture, too, as in "We got Chelsea in the next round - that's a tough draw." 

I can see how it could be confusing but I'm not even that into sports and it's all just second-nature to me because I grew up here. When the word-choices don't ring true, it's distracting. And clearly I'm not the only one who noticed because, in the first episode of Season 2, when ties/draws become a big plot point, both words are used and a context for the different usage is established. It's just a shame they didn't think of that in Season 1.

All of which might seem like nit-picking but it's a real nit-picking kind of show. It's full of little bits of business about cultural differences and expectations and about how sports teams operate, all of which revolve around nuances of language and fine details of procedure or practice.

I found all that quite engaging. And enlightening.

For example, a while back, Wilhelm posted something on TAGN about bottled water and I left a comment in which I referred to drinking carbonated bottled water, to which Wilhelm pointed out that Americans generally wouldn't see much point in drinking fizzy water - they'd just drink soda if they wanted fizz. 

I did not know that. Despite having steeped myself in Americana, second-hand, through comics, books, TV, music and movies since I was a child, I had never come across the idea that sparkling water was un-American. And now here it is as a running gag in Ted Lasso, where he keeps being given glasses of water to drink and he takes a huge swig, expecting it to be plain, then spits it all over himself or someone else because it turns out to be sparkling. Who knew? 

There's plenty like that but the strength of the show isn't so much in the jokes as the characters. Or perhaps I should say the caricatures, which is what they seem like, at least in the first few episodes. It takes a good while before the nuances and subtleties begin to reveal themselves or, I ought to say, are revealed by the writers. 

And by the end of the season, I still wasn't sure just how much depth lay beneath most of the surfaces. The hints at anything more are so brief, so fleeting, it sometimes felt as though I was imagining them. Keeley is a bit older and smarter than she seems, Coach Beard has some quite peculiar-sounding sexual history, Jamie Tartt has an overbearing dad...

Even as I try to tally those glimpses of character, though, I realize how little is really there. Everything is suggestion, misdirection, sleight-of-hand. After ten episodes, how much do we really know about anyone? Not much more than you could write on an index card.

Except, maybe, for Ted. He has some depths and they are, largely, hidden. Not from the audience, who get to see him alone in his apartment at night, but from everyone around him.

To everyone else, he's relentlessly upbeat but it doesn't seem to have gotten him all that far. He coached one successful season of what I think must have been college football and then got head-hunted by a vengeful divorcee in the expectation his skills would not be transferable and he would be a disaster as the "coach" of a top-flight club in the English Premier League, whose prospects she hoped to damage so as to upset her (Unbearable.) ex.

Meanwhile, that very same relentlessly upbeat tendency is revealed as the proximate cause of Ted's own impending divorce. He's so fucking nice his wife can't stand to be around him any more.

Surprised by that swear-word I just threw in, seemingly so unnecessarily? That's the show. It does that All. The. Time. It's another thing I wasn't expecting. When someone tells you a sitcom is really nice and the main character is really nice and "nice" is the word you hear associated with it more than any other, you're probably expecting something along the lines of a live-action Wallace and Grommit. Not a swear-fest. Which is what you get.

It's a really sweary show. Everyone says "fuck" all the time. Except Ted. Who also says it but only when it matters. Unlike over-the-hill superstar Roy Kent, who has a series of running gags revolving around the F-word, which he uses at every opportunity and in front of anyone including, repeatedly and hilariously, his niece and a bunch of her eight-year old pals. The funniest thing about it is his complete unawareness that it's not entirely acceptable behavior. He ends up dropping a bunch of F-bombs in his first post-footballing career gig as a TV pundit, which predictably endears him to the audience, if not the presenters. (Although that's at the start of Season 2 so I shouldn't mention it here...)

I do like me some good, creative swearing, so it's a plus point as far as I'm concerned. And Roy's probably my favorite character, unless that's Keeley.

It's a good show, sweary or not. I'm not quite convinced it's a great show, the way it seems to have been pitched in some of the things I've read about it, but it's funny and the characters are likeable and it has that hard-to-resist sports narrative running in the background all the time, where even though it's all made up, you still want to know whether the team is going to win or not.

Just let's not talk about the actual footballing scenes. Has any show ever got those right? I doubt it. Some of them here have been quite painful to watch, and as I say I'm not even a sports fan.

I am a sitcom fan, though, and this is a good one. I'm on Season 2 now and I notice, looking ahead, that the episodes are longer throughout. I'm guessing that means more plot and deeper characterization rather than more jokes but I'll be happy, either way.