Five Minutes to Four Seasons
How an NBC Sports Promotion Became Ted Lasso
My wife and I are big fans of Ted Lasso. We recently rewatched the entire third season in anticipation of Season 4.
Unlike a lot of people watching right now, we haven't started the new season. We prefer to wait until every episode drops so we can watch at our own pace instead of waiting a week between episodes.
So, while plenty of people are talking about where Ted Lasso is going, I’ve been looking in the opposite direction, asking:
Where did Ted Lasso come from?
I knew the basic story. The show’s credits even acknowledge it.
Jason Sudeikis originally played Ted in a series of promotional videos NBC Sports created when it acquired the U.S. television rights to the English Premier League. What I didn't appreciate was how much of the series’ DNA was already there, or how much work it took to turn a funny promotional character into one capable of carrying a television series.
For storytellers, that journey is worth exploring because Ted Lasso didn't begin as a television show. It began as an advertisement.
Selling Americans on English Football
In 2013, NBC Sports faced an interesting marketing challenge. It had acquired the U.S. media rights to the Premier League and needed to introduce the world's most popular soccer league to a much larger American television audience.
The network needed people to understand what it had purchased and why they should care.
The advertising agency The Brooklyn Brothers developed several concepts, including a wonderfully simple one: What if an American football coach who knew almost nothing about soccer was hired to coach a Premier League team?
NBC brought the idea to Jason Sudeikis, and he liked it.
By then, Sudeikis had spent years developing the skills that would make it work. He had come through improvisational comedy, including time at Boom Chicago in Amsterdam and Second City, before joining Saturday Night Live as a writer in 2003. He became a featured player two years later and eventually spent nearly a decade on the show.
When he signed on, Sudeikis brought in two longtime collaborators, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly.
Hunt brought something else to the table: a genuine knowledge of soccer.
He had lived in Amsterdam and become obsessed with the sport. When the two performed together there, Hunt helped teach him the game, sometimes by playing FIFA and explaining soccer through sports Sudeikis already understood.
That experience became part of the comic premise.
Ted wasn't stupid. He understood sports and coaching. He simply didn't understand this sport or the culture surrounding it. So put that character in England and let him try to figure it out.
That's a premise, and it was a very good one.
Meet the Original Ted Lasso
NBC Sports introduced Ted in 2013 as the newly appointed head coach of Tottenham Hotspur.
The centerpiece of the campaign was a roughly five-minute digital film called An American Coach in London.
If you love Ted Lasso and haven't watched it, you should.
Watch: “An American Coach in London” — NBC Sports
https://youtu.be/6KeG_i8CWE8?si=garOH6HtnKqCu41e
https://youtu.be/iRqypM7jb5Y?si=80x5ArcuDKp_rjUg
Ted is immediately recognizable. The mustache is there. The Kansas accent is there. Coach Beard is there. So are the cultural misunderstandings that would eventually become part of the television series. But this isn't quite the Ted we came to know.
The original character is broader and more arrogant. He confidently misunderstands the game and seems remarkably unconcerned about how little he knows.
That was intentional. The character existed to generate laughs while helping NBC explain English soccer to Americans.
- How many halves are there?
- What's a draw?
- Why can't the game end in a tie and then be decided somehow?
- What's the difference between the Premier League and all these other leagues?
Ted's ignorance gives the audience permission to be ignorant. We learn about English football by watching him misunderstand it.
It worked.
The campaign generated millions of views, and NBC brought Ted back the following year. This time, he had been fired by Tottenham and returned to America, where he was trying to put his newly acquired soccer expertise to work.
The character had survived his original assignment. But he was still a promotional character. The question was whether there was something more there.
A Good Premise Isn't Necessarily a Story
This is where the development of Ted Lasso becomes particularly interesting to me.
A funny premise can carry five minutes. It might even carry another five, but that doesn't mean it can carry hours of television over several seasons.
Around 2015, Sudeikis began thinking seriously about whether Ted could become something bigger. His then-partner Olivia Wilde reportedly encouraged him to reconsider the character and explore whether there might be a television show there.
That forced a completely different set of questions.
- Why would an American football coach leave the United States and move to England to coach a sport he doesn't understand?
- Why would he leave his family?
- What does he want?
- What is he running toward?
- Or perhaps more importantly, what is he running away from?
Those aren't questions you need to answer to make a five-minute commercial funny. They are exactly the kinds of questions you need to answer to create a character we will follow for years.
The original promotion had established what was funny about Ted Lasso. Now Sudeikis and his collaborators needed to discover who Ted Lasso was.
That's the moment a premise begins becoming a story, and it's the part of this journey I find most interesting.
Keep What Works. Change What Doesn't.
One of the smartest decisions the creators made was recognizing that they didn't need to remain completely faithful to the original character.
They kept the things that worked.
Ted remained an American football coach from Kansas. He still knew very little about soccer. He still had his unusual way of speaking. Coach Beard remained beside him. The culture clash still generated plenty of comedy.
But something fundamental changed. The television Ted isn't simply oblivious. He's curious. His optimism isn't merely a joke. It becomes a philosophy. His kindness isn't weakness. It becomes part of how he leads. Gradually we discover that the relentless positivity we see on the surface exists alongside pain, anxiety, fear and a marriage that is falling apart.
Suddenly, Ted contains contradictions. Contradictions give storytellers somewhere to go, and they give actors something to play. Sudeikis also put pieces of himself into the reimagined character, including his background in basketball.
Sudeikis played point guard growing up in Kansas and has spoken about the influence of his high school basketball coach, Donnie Campbell, as well as coaches such as John Wooden, Roy Williams, Bill Self and Steve Kerr.
What interested Sudeikis wasn't simply how those coaches taught a sport. It was how they developed people. That focus becomes central to Ted’s character and drive. He arrives at AFC Richmond knowing far less about soccer than almost everyone around him.
But soccer isn't really his expertise. People are.
A Character Becomes a World
There was still another leap to make. Even a wonderful protagonist doesn't necessarily create a sustainable television series. Ted needed people around him.
Veteran television producer Bill Lawrence joined Sudeikis, Hunt and Kelly in developing the series, and together they began building something much larger than the original NBC premise.
They built Richmond. Rebecca isn't simply Ted's boss. Roy isn't simply the aging star. Jamie isn't simply the arrogant young player. Keeley isn't simply Jamie's girlfriend. Nate isn't simply the equipment manager. Higgins isn't simply the awkward executive.
As we spend time with them, each becomes more complicated than the role initially assigned to them. They have wants, wounds, relationships and arcs of their own.
Eventually, we don't need Ted to be in every scene. That's when you know you've built a world.
The show may be called Ted Lasso, but some of its most memorable moments have very little to do with Ted.
We care about Roy and Keeley. We care about Rebecca finding her way forward. We watch Jamie slowly become someone different from the young man we first met. We watch Nate change in ways that are sometimes painful to watch.
Even Coach Beard, who began beside Ted in that five-minute NBC promotion, eventually gets his own story. The premise expanded because the characters expanded. And the characters expanded because the creators kept asking deeper questions.
Don't Confuse the First Form with the Final Possibility
There is a storytelling lesson in all this that goes well beyond Ted Lasso.
We naturally tend to define creative ideas by the form in which we first encounter them. A book is a book. A podcast is a podcast. A magazine article is an article. A documentary is a documentary. A commercial is certainly a commercial.
Except sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes there is a character hiding inside it. Sometimes that character contains a larger story. Sometimes that story reveals a world of rich characters we care about.
That doesn't mean every successful sketch should become a television series or every interesting character deserves a spinoff. Expanding something simply because you can is very different from discovering that something has the depth to support expansion.
That's what makes the evolution of Ted Lasso so instructive. Sudeikis and his collaborators didn't simply take five minutes of material and stretch it. They developed it. They asked questions the original assignment didn't require them to answer. They changed the character when change was necessary. They introduced vulnerability where there had been caricature. They surrounded Ted with characters capable of carrying stories of their own.
Most importantly, they found the story hiding underneath the premise.
Five Minutes to Four Seasons
There is something wonderfully improbable about watching that original NBC Sports video today. Ted Lasso was created to help NBC promote Premier League soccer to American viewers. That's it. Nobody needed to know whether Ted's marriage was struggling.
Nobody needed Rebecca Welton. Nobody needed Roy Kent, Keeley Jones, Jamie Tartt or Nate Shelley. Nobody needed to understand what Ted believed about leadership, why he was relentlessly optimistic or what happened when that optimism wasn't enough.
Those stories weren't necessary for the commercial. They were possibilities waiting to be discovered.
More than a decade later, Ted Lasso has become one of the most acclaimed television comedies of its era, and Season 4 expands the world again, bringing Ted back to Richmond to coach the club’s new women’s team. My wife and I will find out where that story goes soon enough.
For now, I'm fascinated by where it started.
Five minutes. One funny character. One simple premise. An American football coach goes to England to coach soccer.
That was enough. Not enough to make four seasons of television, but enough to start asking questions.
Sometimes, that's all a storyteller needs.
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About Ron Watermon
Ron Watermon is a creator, builder, media entrepreneur, filmmaker, and the founder of STORYSMART. He writes about professional storytelling, media entrepreneurship, filmmaking, and the business of turning stories into valuable assets.
Ron is the author of STORYSMART Storytelling for ALL and is currently building STORYSMART STUDIOS, an independent media company dedicated to developing, producing, and owning profitable, enduring original media properties.
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