Ted Lasso Leads a New Era of Sincere TV

The Sincerity Era

I am, of course, using a broad brush, the only size available to anyone painting cultural trends. Take several steps back, and you can see the pattern; step closer, and you will find plenty of exceptions. The “Sopranos” era also had the heartfelt “The West Wing” and “Friday Night Lights.”

You can also see some interesting cases in the series that fall between the two eras. “Girls,” which began in 2012 and ended in 2017, is arguably a series made in the spirit of the first period that often ran afoul of the expectations of the second one.

Lena Dunham had a nuanced view of Hannah Horvath, the budding-writer protagonist she created and played on the show. Hannah was packed with ambitions and flaws; she was smart and off-putting, righteous and self-centered, struggling and privileged, sinned against and sinning.

But because “Girls” was also marketed as a generational watershed — underlined by Horvath’s hunger to be “a voice of a generation,” a transparently comic line whose irony got lost in quotation — it was often treated as a kind of sincere cultural ambassador for millennials. And when its characters failed to be role models, it went through backlash after backlash focused on their “likability,” something the show’s satire could not be less interested in. (Compare “Broad City,” a great but very different female-friendship Brooklyn-com that premiered a couple years later, which saw its central duo’s stoner-slacker recklessness as straightforwardly liberating.)

“Schitt’s Creek,” last year’s Emmy winner for best comedy, took the opposite journey. It began as a tart, “Arrested Development”–style sitcom about a wealthy family forced to earn their own livings in a small town. But it came into its own — and found a devoted audience — when it shifted into a warm, earnest mode, in which the rich fishes-out-of-water embraced their community, finding purpose and love.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/arts/television/ted-lasso-the-office.html