BarcelonaCompanion, think positive, see the glass half full. They are canonical features of Ted Lasso, the successful Apple TV series, which a few weeks ago has released its second season. The experiences of this endearing coach, who goes from being a football coach at a university in the United States to working on a football team in the English First Division, have been a phenomenon around the world. The series has worked to the point of being the star fiction of the Cupertino platform, even above The morning show –His big bet–, have a second season secured before the first premiere and break all records for Emmy nominations in the comedy section: he’s surpassed nineteen Glee in 2010 and has added one more to its box office.
The triumph of the series played by Jason Sudeikis shows that there is ample ground to exploit in the saturated world of episodic fiction: sports. As much as the premise of Ted Lasso is unlikely – that a coach with no experience in the elite or in the sport in particular will lead a Premier League team – it is interesting to see how he addresses classic issues of the genre: the selfish star, the past veteran vaults, costume roles, the entry of a new trainer. These are elements that have worked in this Apple product and we have seen in countless movies but, transferred to the serial format, are a rarity. There are a few examples, but they are rather anecdotal, like the Norwegian one Home ground, on women’s soccer, or Forward, series broadcast by TVE in the 1990s and inspired by Gary Lineker’s life at Barça. Xavier Salvatella, who has not only taken part in a professional outfit as an athlete, Egara, but has also been Espanyol’s communications director for eight years, believes that the main problem is saturation: “We are in a society in which sport is almost ubiquitous, and I think that influences a lot when it comes to not starting fiction productions.We take the latest most notorious examples: Barçagate, Messi’s unexpected farewell, the human stories of the champions Olympics or politics among professional football organizations. These are stories that we live as citizens twenty-four hours a day. ” For Salvatella, the lack of references responds to the fact that we already have enough sport in reality to look for it in fiction: “You like sport more or less, the over-information on these topics is clear”.
The reality is that it is surprising that the number of sports-focused series is so meager, in relation to their importance on the social scale and compared to other professions that do star in series, such as doctors, lawyers or journalists. Fictions like Friday night lights, the parody Eastbound and down or Catalan Those of hockey they have had sport as a backdrop, as a landscape to tell lives and relationships, but they have not made it the center of gravity or the main theme. This contrasts with the success of the genre in cinema, which has released extraordinary films in which, although personal relationships carried great weight, the sporting context was indispensable. Whether on the court or in offices, titles like A bad play (Spike Lee, 1998), Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996) i Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011), the latter based on a true story, provided new insights and narratives and delved into the social background, but always from sport as a basis. Sports filmography is extraordinary and contrasts with the television vacuum: Rocky, Jo, Tonya, Hoosiers Hey Karate kid. Athe latter, of course, with its own series.
Continuing with the reasons for the low proliferation of the genre, Marc Molina, co-head of Can’t Play Kanter, an indispensable podcast on the NBA and which also delves into the audiovisual world and the American reality, believes that sport itself already it is “a source of drama and conflict that we have learned to experience with its norms and context.” In this sense, Molina thinks that series and films amplify elements that may seem external to this reality: “That’s why the documentary works so much. Because we believe that it only tries to photograph the sport, and not so much to build a new narrative around it. “.
reality overcomes fiction
Leaving fiction aside, the world of documentary is undoubtedly the great king of the genre. To the planetary success of productions like Red Army i Free solo are joined by the most recent of The last dance i Sunderland til I die, which have shown how episodic non-fiction can also reach the general public. These are products that firmly reaffirm the cliché: sport goes far beyond its own game. “There are countless stories related to professional sports that make you fall off your ass,” explains Manel Peña, the other leg of Can’t Play Kanter. He details some of the humanly “fascinating” only in the NBA: “Michael Jordan’s father, killed while sleeping in his car; Giannis [Antetokounmpo] and his brothers selling souvenirs on the Acropolis of Athens; complex personalities like those of Ron Artest, Lamar Odom or David Stern himself … “A collection of narratives that surpass the imagination of any screenwriter.
Will be Ted Lasso the great series of sports? Time will tell if his triumph encourages him to make new productions. For Xavier Salvatella, it is necessary to bet on minority sports, as in the case of Those of hockey: “We are and have sport in mansalva, so maybe we need to think about fictions that do not come to tell us what, more or less, we already know or guess about football and the Bolt or Pelphs of every moment.” For his part, Marc Molina sees it as essential that the new series have a balance between “the tension of sport and what happens outside, adding the political, social and business aspects”.
While we wait for other sports series, non-fiction does not stop offering good products. Manel Peña remembers June 17th 1994 i Quantum Hoops, the one-season follow-up of the basketball team of the California Institute of Technology, a center more oriented to academic performance than sports and which has not won a game in 21 years: “It’s one of the definitive songs in the figure of the antihero, ”he recalls. The third big leg of sport – fictional or not – on television is theanime. Here the collection is wide, rich and of quality: Champions, Two out of series (popularly known as Juana and Sergio), Black belt i Slam dunk are some of the best examples.
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