The resulting sand is a mushy mixture of sand and water that can no longer support any weight and can trap you.ĭebt can feel like it works the same way. Quicksand is basically just ordinary sand that has been so saturated with water that the friction between sand particles is reduced. Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at the Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990.Does your debt make you feel like you’re trapped in quicksand?ĭoes being in debt feel like being stuck in quicksand… pulling you down further and further? And it points right back to the song we heard every week in the opening credits - the key, in the end, to unlocking the whole show. That’s ultimately the answer to getting unstuck. “I just had to try,” Rebecca tells Ted at one point in the finale. ![]() Effort can make you vulnerable, but effort matters. Feelings get you stuck, but feelings also set you free. ![]() In the United States in 2023, that’s still a harder message to sell than it should be. “The best we can do,” Higgins says, “is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can.” And more to the point, maybe you get unstuck by bringing a piece of yourself to everyone else. Because if the show had a message for the stuck among us, it was this: Maybe, just maybe, rank sentimentality can get you unstuck. The only true villain - Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head) - was a mustache-twirler with a goatee (the mustache was, of course, already taken) and mostly a foil, a scheming island alone in a sea of sentimentality. Nuanced antiheroes were not this show’s jam, and never did dark doings define the day. Plot lines were dropped or overly compressed. Those who say “Ted Lasso” was treacly and wandered a bit during the third season make legitimate points. ![]() Turns out that varied points of view can produce better results. That suggests - no, proposes overtly - that going it alone, “American-style,” isn’t always plausible and that, as the poet John Donne put it so many centuries ago, “No man is an island entire of itself every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” The bringing together of so many different people from so many places - an international soccer team - provided the ideal canvas for the show’s thesis. At the time, Sudeikis said this: “We shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help ourselves.” The other elephant in the “Ted Lasso” room - one directly related to stuckness - is also something that invoked the British-American divide so often played for laughs on the show.Ī few weeks back, the “Lasso” cast visited the White House to talk about mental health. Now, almost three years later, aren’t we navigating through an entire generation coming of age amid an isolating pandemic and deep political fissures? Aren’t there millions of folks across the republic locked in tiny, individual struggles to avoid getting stuck or - possibly even more daunting - trying to avoid staying that way?ĪMERICANS LEARN FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE POND “Ted Lasso” debuted right in the middle of it, on Aug. The COVID-19 pandemic was, for a time, stuckness incarnate. Arguably the only main character not stuck was Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift), jazz virtuoso and dedicated family man - and the only character to understand all along that right here, right now was the place he wanted to be. ![]() Rebecca was drowning in the scars of a partner’s psychological abuse. Sam was stuck by expectations familial and national. Nate was being derailed by feelings of inadequacy and Colin by a fear of judgment. Keeley was paralyzed by uncertainty, Roy by anger, Jamie by trauma and ego, Trent by expectations. This batch of humans was, viewed from a bit of a distance, an entire citadel of stuckness - albeit in varied ways. “Ted Lasso” distilled this theme to the Nth degree without resorting to supernatural activity.
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