Declan Lowney directed perhaps my favorite episode in both seasons of AppleTV’s Ted Lasso.
“Carol of the Bells” features no football (soccer, of course, to American ears). Instead, it dedicates an episode to an entirely character-driven plot centering around Christmas in the UK. Ted (Jason Sudeikis) faces his first Christmas following the divorce but is saved from loneliness by Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) who takes him on a journey of good will toward men. Higgins (Jeremy Swift) follows through on his annual tradition of opening his home to the footballers who don’t have close family and finds his house full of his AFC Richmond family. And then there’s Keeley (Juno Temple) and Roy’s (Brett Goldstein) “sexy Christmas” which becomes anything but when Roy’s niece Phoebe (Elodie Blomfield) comes down with epically bad halitosis.
All in all, it’s a fantastic episode of genuinely heartfelt Christmas cheer with a pinch of darker humor on the side. That’s exactly how I like my Ted Lasso. Credit the writing team and director Declan Lowney with nailing it so perfect, even though the concept of an “American Christmas” was completely foreign to him.
“For the Christmas episode, culturally, it’s so full of things that mean so much to [Americans] but are slightly alien in the UK,” Lowney laughs. “So it was a real education. I learned a lot about American Christmas. The leg lamp was the big one for me. As an iconic item, it’s so American that it didn’t land with us at all.”
But why a Christmas episode?
Ted Lasso‘s football season actually runs over the Christmas holiday. In the British premiership of the Champions League, teams play for around three months before taking a break. Then, they play on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas in the UK. So, the timing for season two provided the right opportunity for the Christmas episode to air in the middle of the season. Additionally, after AppleTV decided to extend Ted Lasso‘s second season to 12 episodes, the team wrote “Carol of the Bells” as a bit of a “bottle” episode, an episode that could be inserted without interfering with the previously written episodes before and after.
But, honestly, with all of the intense drama happening throughout the season, we all need a bit of a break, right?
Take, for example, “Goodbye Earl,” which features nothing short of fan-favorite Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernández) accidentally killing team mascot Earl with an errant penalty kick. It’s a dark way to start a new season, one that Lowney questioned but ultimately deferred to Sudeikis’s guidance.
“My very first note was I don’t think we can kill a dog. I mean, the Brits love a dog. The Americans love a dog. Everybody loves dogs, so to kill one… And Jason just said, ‘No, this is what we got to do. I will say things about it that will make it okay.’ Then, he made that beautiful speech suddenly about growing up being scared of his neighbor’s dog and how eventually, when his neighbor died, they looked after the dog. It’s a beautiful speech and some beautiful reflection on it, but he knew we could get away with it. He knew we could carry that off. We were all anxious as hell, but that’s part of the part of his genius, isn’t it?”
Or what about the gradual evolution of Nate (Nick Mohammed) from good guy to Ted’s nemesis?
Nate slowly becoming more and more aggressive and angry throughout the second season. It’s a stark contrast to the seemingly too-nice Nate we loved from season one. But we find out Nate holds darkness within him, and by the end of the season, he finds himself coaching the opposing team. Lowney credits Mohammed and the extraordinary writing in bringing it all off as well as they do.
“He’s such a such a likable character, but it’s really in the writing. Nick also plays it beautifully because it’s hard not to like the guy and to see this guy just being torn apart. We had no idea it was going to get that dark. So I credit Nick with his own ability to let the character slide into an unlikable illness. But it’s also so well written. Plus, the gradual graying of the hair, which is beautiful. When you look back at this show, you see it starts quite early on. It’s just a hint, and every episode just gets a little bit darker and grayer and grayer and grayer, which was wonderful.”
There’s also the Lowney-directed finale, which features one of the most difficult moments of the second season. And that says a lot considering what the creative team put the characters through.
As the season closes, Roy surprises Keeley with a romantic vacation to a tropical island, and she refuses it. Not out of a change in her feelings for him but out of a focus on her career having just started her own public relations firm. It’s difficult to watch the scene without a massive sense of sadness and regret at the missed connections between Keeley and Roy. After all, these are two characters who have fallen in love over the course of the series. We want the very best for them.
Directing the scene, though, proved challenging for Lowney as it required him to recognize the actors didn’t initially have it right.
“We started to shoot that scene on a Friday evening, and we were running out of time. We got a few takes of the master done, but I had to say to the guys, ‘Look, you know what. We’re not going to get it. You guys are feeling the pressure. We’re rushing it.’ We were fortunate enough to be able to come back and pick that up on a Monday morning. It was such a big scene, and we know we’d rehearsed it and blocked it. But then Jason came in, and we spent another 45 minutes with the actors running it again and again and again. It was such an important scene for them, so we were blessed to have had the chance to go again because I know what we’d shot on that Friday wouldn’t have had the same effect. We were rushing, and sometimes when you’re rushing, it doesn’t help. That scene needed time.”
Ted Lasso streams exclusively on AppleTV+.
