By Iain Blair

Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso tells the story of a relentlessly optimistic and folksy American college football coach, who — though he’s totally unqualified — is hired to manage an English Premiere League football team (aka soccer). Naturally, comedy ensues as the fish-out-of-water Lasso attempts to get up to speed on the soccer front, while also navigating the differences between two cultures separated by a common language and beverage preference.

Bill Lawrence (Photo Credit: Zack Braff)

Audiences loved the series, created by veteran television writer, producer and director Bill Lawrence and its star Jason Sudeikis, and so did the Golden Globes. The show was recognized for Sudeikis’ performance, and the show itself was nominated in the category of Best TV Series — Musical or Comedy.

I recently talked to Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town, Spin City) about making the show, his love of post and what’s up with all the tea and facial hair.

Do you still enjoy being a showrunner?
I do, and I’ve been doing this a long time. It really helped that Jason is essentially my co-showrunner this time. I’ve always believed in hiring great department heads and empowering them, as it’s an overwhelming job if you’re too much of a control freak and try to do everything. You can be in charge of post, music, final cut, editing, casting, scripts — anything you want — but for me, it’s far better to bring other voices on board and collaborate.

You shot it all in West London, mostly in-studio. Can you talk about what it took to prep and plan, and did the COVID crisis affect it?
COVID didn’t affect us, though it will for Season 2. The stage stuff wasn’t hard, but we had a lot more location work than your usual TV show.

Also entering the sports world, especially for a global streaming platform like Apple, it’s very easy to get the sports wrong. We were dealing with the Premiere League and had to shoot all the football scenes believably and create large stadium crowds believably. And sometimes the actors could play soccer, but some couldn’t, so there was a lot of planning and a lot of work on all that in post.

You had two DPs on Season 1 — David Rom and John Sorapure. How did that work?
We revolved episode blocks as it was challenging to shoot around London, and you have to work so fast because of schedule and budget. Plus, overtime in England is not the same as in the US, so while one DP shot two episodes, the other DP would prep the next two episodes. We shot on the ARRI Mini LF with Tokina Cinema Vista Primes.

Tell us about post. Where did you do it?
All the editing and sound was on the lot at Warners where my company, Doozer Productions, is based. That’s where I’ve posted all my shows. My longtime post producer, Kip Kroeger, came over to London to look at storyboards and show us stuff cut together and to see how it was going. And thanks to the streaming schedule, we could do all the post back here.

What about the DI?
We did the DI at Level 3 Post in Burbank with colorist Mark Wilkins and we had to work hard to match looks with all the different weather we had on location, often within one scene.

Do you like post, and why?
I do, and especially editing. My mentor, the great Gary Goldberg of Family Ties fame, taught me how to edit and how to both upgrade a show in post and find it in post with the correct timing and pattern of cutting. That’s exactly what I did with Scrubs. It was very fast-paced but then it would slow way down for moments of drama and impact, and all that helped give the show its voice.

You had two editors on Season 1— Melissa McCoy and A.J. Catoline. How did they work together, and what were the main editing challenges?
They alternated episodes. After I worked on it with the editors, the director did his cut, then I did the final cut with Jason. The big challenges are kind of the same on every show — setting tone and then the pace, which you find in the edit.

Jason had a real vision for the show’s pace, and it also helped that we are a true half-hour and not prisoner to the standard network show of just 22 minutes. He believes in banter-driven comedy, which still plays with pace, and then we’d slow down for the emotion and drama.

The other big challenge was having to work on the football (soccer) edits, way ahead of cutting the episode, so all the post and VFX teams had ample time to make them look good.

Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you?
I believe all that really enhances the show, and we got lucky with Marcus Mumford, who wrote the theme and was the main composer. Tom Howe backed him up. We didn’t want to overwhelm it with score, but we wanted it to feel fairly cinematic, and those guys just crushed it. Jason was really good with sound, like the ringing in Ted’s ears in the pilot, and we paid a ton of attention to the sound and all the needle drops.

There are a lot of VFX. Who did them and what was entailed?
Barnstorm VFX did all the stadium CG work, and Digital Film Tree did all the previz [as well as dailies and traditional VFX]. The big thing was creating all the Premiere League games with limited time in the stadiums and no crowds, so we had to build every person and then seamlessly slide that into the footage we’d shot on a practice field.

Then we had to deal with the ever-changing London weather, where half an exterior shoot would be in the rain and the other half in full sun.

[Kip Kroeger shares more detail: “One element that allowed us to streamline production and craft the editorial narrative of the football match sequences was the previz. Considering those scenes were filmed at the end of the season’s production schedule, we needed to know how they were going to fit into the cut, and have something to both share with the network for context and narrative purposes, while also providing a road map for production in filming them so they slid right into those stories. We worked with DFT’s previz team to build a virtual stadium and execute those moments of the matches all the way down to the camera angles we would want to cover each beat in. It allowed us to be much more efficient when filming in the freezing rain at night in London in November. It also helped us know what to expect from an editorial perspective. The editors and producers were able to see beforehand what we were trying for and discuss different ideas thanks to the iterative process of the previz.”]

What does Jason bring to the impossibly sunny Ted?
Everything. He’s so creative, and he’s such a great actor, but people forget he’s also a great writer — he wrote for Saturday Night Live, and now he’s head writer on this. He’s the visual voice of the show, and we pick his brains on how he thinks about Ted and how he wants the show to look.

I thought the biggest VFX challenge would be dealing with Jason’s mustache.
(Laughs) That’s 100 percent real, man. He actually grew it, and it’s seriously impressive.

Looking back on the chaos and angst of the past year, do you feel you somehow created the perfect antidote?

Ted was based on a character Jason had created for some NBC promos he’d done six, seven years ago, promoting English football. It was very broad and sketchy, and he hooked me when he told me we’d give it a lot more pathos and heart and emotion and make Ted a more well-rounded real person. But the initial pitch was doing our version of a sports movie, and as we tried to sell it, different streaming sites were saying, “It’s so male,” or, ‘It might not have wide appeal,” and I’d say, “Sports movies aren’t about sports.” My wife’s seen every Rocky film but she’d never watch a boxing match.

Also, Jason and I also felt the world had become so cynical in our culture and politics, and that the obvious route would be to make Ted this seemingly polar opposite and then later reveal what a jerk he really was. But if he turned out to be totally sincere, then you’d have to look at yourself. Look, we love snarky comedy, but given all that, we set out to create a very hopeful, optimistic show with a central character who’s kind and genuine.

What can fans expect next season?
I don’t want to give away too much, but we’ve almost finished writing all the scripts and went back to London to shoot in January.

And now for the most important question of all. Do you drink tea?
(Laughs) My wife gives me constant grief because of that joke, as she’s a real tea enthusiast and I’m your regular American coffee drinker.