I love Coach Beard (played by Brendan Hunt, who is also one of the show’s writer-creators) as much as anyone. “Beard After Hours,” by contrast, is frankly bizarre. The first stand-alone addition was Episode 4, “Carol of the Bells,” the cheery Christmas tale that doubled as an extended riff on “Love Actually.”ĭespite my status as a pre-eminent hater of “Love Actually,” I thought that episode worked pretty well: The many references (Elton John’s Christmas party!) were delightfully meta, and while the episode was a bit saccharine, its overall tone was mostly in keeping with “Ted Lasso” in general. Apple had initially placed an order for 10 episodes for Season 2 but then upped the request to 12 after the season’s arc had already been planned. The plot is, by design, a narrative parenthetical that takes place when everyone else is sensibly asleep.Īnd, as the writer John Brown Spiers proposes for The Gist, that’s just what the writers of “ Ted Lasso” apparently wanted. The film is about a man who spends an entire night wanting nothing more than to get back home - to uptown Manhattan, from SoHo, where he is trapped - but whose goal remains elusive for 90-odd minutes. Now, if you wanted to film a stand-alone episode with virtually no connection to what came before or after, “After Hours” is a fairly intuitive choice for inspiration. This week’s bottle episode is titled “Beard After Hours.” Its name is a reference to Martin Scorsese’s 1985 black comedy “ After Hours,” starring Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette.

At the very least, there are more of us getting run over, narratively speaking. Just last episode, it seemed a little cruel to me that the showrunners required Sarah Niles (who plays Sharon Fieldstone) to learn to ride a bike for her part and then had her hit by a car.īut this seems crueler. Just a few book ended moments of Ted and Roy and Nate. No Rebecca, no Sam, no Keeley, no Higgins. And Nate was still on a psychological journey to the dark side that seems likely to soon turn him into the English Premier League’s Kylo Ren.Īnd this week? No reference whatsoever to any of those story lines. In that same episode, the mismatched lovers Rebecca and Sam apparently hooked up, a development that will presumably have significant consequences. Sharon Fieldstone have significant work to do - probably on her mental health as well as his.

So … we waited through eight episodes for the revelation last week that finally gave this season a clear arc: Ted’s father committed suicide when he was 16, and he has definitely not figured out how to deal with it.

And now for something completely different.

Adobe acrobat version 9.0 key