"Ted Lasso" Characters, Ranked

The Cheese Fry is extremely late to the "Ted Lasso" party.  Only recently did we finally finish the third season.  No big deal, right?  It's only been about three years since that final episode first aired on Apple TV.   But season four is coming this summer - we'll watch that one a little sooner.

"Ted Lasso" is a national treasure.  Put simply, it's one of the best television shows, full stop.  You just don't see this kind of high quality sustained for that many seasons.  We haven't watched everything that's out there, but the only other show we've watched in its entirety that was this good for that long, so perfectly cast and written and directed, was FX's "The Americans." 

Beyond just admiring the show's elite level of execution, it's the upbeat, feel good vibe of "Ted Lasso."   This is a show with heart.  These characters are good, decent people working through everyday challenges.  Just think about how so rare that is in a television landscape chock full of cynical premises (criminals run amok, housewives run amok), missed opportunities (so many shows start strong only to fizzle), repetitive premises (we love post-apocalyptic stories, but it's enough already) and tiresome formats (reality TV, for the most part, is a cultural blight that does no one any good).  

There's echoes of NBC's "This Is Us" in the way "Ted Lasso" manipulates your emotions and skillfully surfs sad and happy moments alike, but "This Is Us"was deadly serious and self-important whereas "Ted Lasso" is chipper and frothy.  The best comparison we can come up with is NBC's "Friday Night Lights," a similar show where everyone was so dang likable and interesting and fully realized that the plots were almost beside the point.  You just wanted to hang out in that world for an hour.   Even better, "Ted Lasso" is in so many ways an old-fashioned workplace comedy like "The Office." "Friday Night Lights" never made us laugh out loud.  With "Ted Lasso" there's always a gag or a joke, but it's not following a cheesy, laugh track sitcom set up/punchline structure.  The jokes and humor here flow naturally from these screwball characters.  Nothing ever feels phony.  It's a polished gem of a show.

If you haven't seen it, give it a shot.  Full disclosure: this is one extremely profane show that loves the F-bomb.

And now, we present the main characters ranked in order, starting with the most layered, complicated, and funny one at the very top.

1. Roy Kent, obviously
2. Rebecca Welton
3. Jamie Tartt
3. Coach Beard
4. Leslie Higgins
5. Ted Lasso, how crazy is it that the supposed main character barely cracks the top five; that's how stacked this show is
6. Keeley Jones
7. Nate Shelley
8. Trent Crimm of The Independent
9. Sam Obisanya
10. Dani Rojas
11. Isaac McAdoo
12. Zava
13. Sassy Collins
14. Colin Hughes
15. Dr. Sharon Fieldstone
16. Rupert Mannion

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