Hacker Cinema
Ted Lasso
2020 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis, Joe Kelly, Brendan Hunt
Ted Lasso, an American football coach, moves to England when he's hired to manage a soccer team—despite having no experience. With cynical players and a doubtful town, will he get them to see the Ted Lasso Way?
40 positive9 negative1 mixed30 neutralfrom 80 commenters
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84 comments on Hacker News
You can have the most everyday-setting movie or TV show imaginable and still have it VFX'd to hell and back compared to something shot on film 30 years ago. Not even just like Ted Lasso faking the stadiums/fields they were on, but just retouching every single little thing.
Sad. I just finished binge-watching Ted Lasso yesterday, and his character in it made his presence felt even if he only had a kind-of minor role in it.
Such a great show, but difficult to classify. No drama, action or nailbites, no big belly laughs, more like smiles and chuckles. I was just a little happier after having watched most episodes.
Very few shows like that, but Ted Lasso actually reminded me a lot of NEX in how it made me feel.
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
I’ve seen most of those. Slow horses is phenomenal no notes. for all mankind would be as well if not for the low grade melodrama of the middle seasons, but all the space stuff is amazing. silo is good fun but like severance we’ve gotten two short seasons in how many years? shrinking started out great but did a speedrun in one season of what normally takes jenji kohan three. Foundation has decent highs especially with the dynasty and invictus in season two, but the lows are loooww. And of course severance might even be a masterpiece.
But my point wasn’t that they don’t make good television because they do, it’s that their shows aren’t talked about nearly as much in the mainstream because people don’t have Apple tv. I think Ted lasso and to a lesser degree severance are really their only major popular hits. Most people I talk to haven’t seen slow horses. If it were on Netflix it would be the opposite.
I wouldn’t exclude TV shows: Halt and Catch Fire, Dark Matter, Ted Lasso.
NPR had 3 stories last week in their NPR News Now Podcast about K-Pop Demon Hunters. Like I said it has 4 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 all in the top 10. It's the best performing movie ever on Netflix with over 236 million streams. It was so successful they actually did a run of showings on over 1,700 screens topping the box office charts for that week and grossing over 18 million in a weekend.
I'm not sure what else it would need to do besides dominate the music, box office, and streaming charts to be considered a success. It was widely covered in the news media as well. I predict that Rumi is going to be maybe the most popular costume with kids this year. My daughter and all her friends all claim they're going to be Rumi for halloween.
Stranger Things was huge, and maybe it's trailed off over the years. It never was quite as big as say Game of Thrones, but it was probably at least same tier as a Ted Lasso.
Wednesday is big as well, but hasn't dominated the work conversations as much as other shows, but I've heard it routinely mentioned in media. Wednesday Addams is also predicted as a top costume this halloween. The Wednesday dance was definitely a huge cultural meme last season.
But I guess to your point, there isn't something as big as a Game of Thrones out there right now on Netflix. But they have hit a pretty hot streak recently.
> major streaming services cutting back on original content due to production costs
Are we sure about that? Apple seems to keep making more and more TV shows instead of focusing on technical debt. Last I knew my phone didn't work right with Apple Intelligence or whatever "Siri" is supposed to be but we're on season 4 of whatever a Ted Lasso is.
Like many others have pointed out, Apple is obsessed with avoiding antitrust scrutiny. A fun (edit: incorrect) example: they are fine owning the device you use to connect to their own streaming service to watch their own produced TV shows, but appear to strictly avoid showing their products in those shows.
EDIT: I stand corrected! Multiple "Apple Original Series" contain Apple products, such as in Ted Lasso and (I think implied) in For All Mankind, as people pointed out below. Shows what I know about TV.
I wonder why some Apple Original Series have Apple products, and some don't. I would love to see if there's any correlation between the number of shows which feature a specific product and that product's market share in the show's region or demographic.
I think the GP was making a reference to the Apple TV show “Ted Lasso”.
“Wunderkind” mispronounced as “Wonder Kid” is a running joke in that show.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TedLasso/comments/132rw9v/what_the_hell_does_nate_mean_when_he_says_i_think/
Value isn't static, of course. Take the food that was brought up earlier. Food saw a real increase in value by around 30% from 2019 to 2024. A couple of destructive weather events, fertilizer scarcity, and war in the Ukrainian breadbasket shook people enough to think that maybe they shouldn't take food quite so for granted.
Drying racks aren't considered terribly valuable today, but if you lock up manufacturing to a single country and impose a number of other restrictions, sentiment can change quickly. The latest episode of Ted Lasso might not seem so important anymore.
Alternatively - and now that I'm thinking about it - I think Apple TV might adopt the A/24 model of purchasing individual movies and shows that they like, and marketing it like crazy.
In fact, that does seem to be Apple TV's model already. For example, Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest, Pachinko, Foundation, Silo, Severance, The Studio, and For All Mankind are all produced by entirely different production houses but licensing for them was acquired by Apple.
> See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
Does it make great content? I've only watched 3 series and then cancelled because it was annoying (but all three were fairly popular), and the more they progressed, the more underwhelming they got. The premise was always good, but scenario was meh and getting meh-er by the episode, everything was kept superficial. Kind of like to tick a box "we talked about X", but without actually exploring the topic. And it was the exact same thing over and over again in 3 separate series - be it the gay footballer in Ted Lasso or the relationship with religion while in climate catastrophe in Extrapolations. No real depth, no real thought provoking discussions, no nothing. Just a quick mention, and jump on to the next topic to gloss over.
It seems to me that they spend a lot on big name actors, had some good initial ideas on what to do, but the actual execution was pretty meh.
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
Slow Horses Lessons in Chemistry Severance Ted Lasso Shrinking Mythic Quest Roar CODA The Problem with John Stewart And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order:
Palm Royale For All Mankind Criminal Record Killers of the Flower Moon Foundation Strange Planet The Morning Show Greyhound They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.
The Morning Show, Severance, Silo, Tehran, Presumed Innocent, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Disclaimer, Shrinking, Loot, Severance, Where's Wanda?, Foundation, Cowboy Cartel (short documentary), Midnight Family, The Last Thing He Told Me, Invasion, Mythic Quest, Bad Monkey, Dickinson...
There's so many good shows on Apple TV.
>When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2
Honestly, that seems to be part of the playbook for almost every show now. I wonder if people just didn't notice it much until the Bear or Ted Lasso, or maybe just because it's more of an abrupt departure from the main story line in those shows instead of just being a b-plot part of a normal episode.
There's a popular if snarky narrative that Ted Lasso started out as a straightforward comedy and then became too enraptured with character trauma-drama schmaltz. When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2, people mocked it by likening it to Ted Lasso.
Whatever the reason may be, the article outlines a few possibilities, I do agree there is a ton of great content on Apple TV+ that people are sleeping on. I recently watched "The Morning Show", "For All Mankind", and "Presumed Innocent." All were absolutely incredible shows, and none of my friends had heard of them (people who are usually very up to date with shows) furthering that their marketing is not the best for their tv content. Ted Lasso seems to be the only show of theirs that I've felt like broke through all the noise and is most widely known.
However, I do think they have been marketing their movies a lot better. One the new movies "Wolfs" with Brad Pitt, and George Clooney had billboards all over my city. I know many people that did watch that the first week it came out.
If I look at my streaming platform subscriptions (very few anymore), AppleTV is still a source of more good series than any other: Separation, Ted Lasso, Acapulco, The Morning Show, etc. YMMV. If I think of cancelling it, I think, "well, but they do have good shows now and then."
So turning a movie almost no one sees into a hit series makes total sense. "Theatrical release" still has some prestige with actors, but they'll get over it someday.
Being HBO 20 years ago isn't so easy, even HBO couldn't figure out how to keep it going and arguably AMC took over from them for a while.
I don't watch all these TV shows but I do know Ted Lasso turned to utter dreck after one season, it's just hard to write high quality fictional television, especially if you want to be ground breaking and not write with a fixed formula to work off of (e.g. crime procedural).
It does have TV in the name (Apple TV+), which the Oscars doesn’t cater for. Apple seems to be doing just fine (Ted Lasso, etc.) at the Emmys considering most of their originals are TV series AFAICT.
While true and a good counter point, the tech companies own both the means of distribution (platforms) and the devices used to consume.
These are subsidized across unrelated business unit profit, enforce the moat of these businesses, and create substantial barriers to entry for businesses across all sectors, including entertainment businesses.
It's really weird that my grocery store is producing Lord of the Rings, selling me the router and TV with which to watch it, and shipping it to me.
Or that the device I use to pay for dinner pops up a notification for Ted Lasso, which also gets prime real estate across several screens that all cross-sell first party experiences.
We've strayed really far from the regulations that produced dealerships and mandated that movie studios couldn't own theaters. Now these companies own everything and can force your hand on distribution and marketing.
> This leads to shows like “Ted Lasso”—a “sunshine enema”, in the words of one of its producers—and “The Morning Show”, which debuted as a hard-hitting drama about a broadcast-news network’s toxic culture but has degenerated into a mindless soap opera. Amazon, whose early TV commissioning was more daring, now also focuses on the middle ground, with series such as “Citadel”, a big-budget, low-imagination thriller with plenty of explosions and no surprises.
It's pretty telling, to me, that the TV show I have most enjoyed in the last year is "Who is Erin Carter?", a solidly B grade miniseries. Little character development and little in the way of relatability, drama or believability, but at least it had realistic motivations for its main character: wanting to fit in, be accepted.
"Ted Lasso", I just get "the ick" thinking about. Even the name seems "1980s porn star"-ish. "The Morning Show" was always going to be a sub-par soap, just from the name and setting.
The new generation of writers is low calibre.
I had to find out from my Uber driver that Apple TV
* Was a streaming service with a library that could stream on any smartTV, like Netflix
* Only cost $5/month (I assumed since it was Apple it would cost double what other services cost, as opposed to half)
That said, it doesn't have much I want to watch. Severance and Ted Lasso season 1 are good and what else?
We're unsubbed from everything except Apple (inertia of the Family Plan is high, but I want out because Apple Music is buggy, I've already seen Ted Lasso, and PBS is better for what I'm interested in) and PBS, though that's considered a donation. Wait a couple months and new movies and serials show up at the tax-funded public library. I'm so proud of our local library system. We donate money to help pay for electronic media and job training.
I don't miss Netflix, Prime, or Hulu (now that we finished watching Reservation Dogs and Creamerie- those are worth it, especially RD).
My hope is that this anecdote helps someone pull the plug if they're equivocating.
I would posit that Dimension Apple also extends into the shows it does product placement in, where they stipulate that villans can't use Apple products.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/apple-wont-let-filmmakers-put-iphones-in-villains-hands-rian-johnson-says/
Once you see it, it's really hard to unsee and can make certain shows like Law and Order SVU seem like a longform Apple ad. Ted Lasso on Apple TV (and presumably other Apple TV shows too, though I haven't really watched others) is very bad about the amount of Apple product placement and comes close (but doesn't quite) ruin the show.
My version of this problem is when there are violin scenes in movies/TV shows. It’s immediately clear when someone is not in sync with the music, has bad form, and generally just doesn’t know how to play. It just zaps me out of the scene.
However, if the scene/actor actually knows how to play, then it’s an awesome surprise and I have even more respect for the scene.
The most recent example of the latter is in Ted Lasso, when Nate plays the violin - it’s legit and a great scene.
TwoSetViolin regularly review movies of both good and violin portrayal[0, 1]
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9dfCRbrlkU
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=vR_VbDd-CA8
That scenario is easy to explain. If it hasn’t been trained on the Ted Lasso script then it’s going to just be guessing and will likely be wrong. Training a GPT model to identify when it lacks enough information to answer is something researches are actively pursuing. In the mean time you could try pasting in a transcription of the episode in question and then asking.
> The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out?
This is precisely the reason why narrative storytelling cannot work in VR (other than a simulated movie theater). The reason is that a TV show or movie presents a point of view by its creator and you, the observer, isn't meant to interact with a story whose plot you cannot influence.
Apple has been shooting all shows in 180° 3D since the beginning?
And editing for that? And doing the special effects? And set dressing for those areas not on screen?
And no actor or director or crew member ever leaked it? Or they didn’t notice despite the incredibly obvious camera pictured in the article?
No way at all.
Also, what’s the point? The entire job of the director and film crew is making sure the audience sees what they need. So now I can watch Ted Lasso and choose to look at scenery the entire time that was purposefully cropped out?
Come on. If you’re going to make up rumors do a better job. That camera may very well be real and the thing they used to film the demo videos they showed people.
But it hasn’t been filming all Apple TV+ shows for years. I’ll eat my hat.
I have the opposite perspective: studios will stop looking for ways to give audiences what they don’t want (and stop calling them toxic for not wanting it).
People are voting with their wallets. Hollywood in the 90s was much better at entertaining people and therefore much better at getting their money.
Studios will start making shows with good writing again. Apple TV often already is, with some glaringly bad exceptions like Foundation and parts of Ted Lasso season 3. Severance, for example, is good enough on its own for me to pay for the whole subscription.
Making entertaining and thought-provoking original content, without calling their audience sexists or racists when the writing or casting misses the mark, will be profitable and that profit will fund the next wave of prestige tv.
I’ve found literally no shows on Apple TV that I’m interested in. The only one I got through more than two episodes was Ted Lasso and I had gave up on that after five or six as it got worse not better.
So, I wasn't really sure about the final season of Ted Lasso until the episode "Sunflowers". I won't go in to detail as to what the relevance here is in case you haven't seen it, but I thought it was just simply beautiful.
If you can do the same thing as today's biggest movies with fewer people, it means that you'll need to do more to separate your big movies from the rest of the pack.
TV and movies today use extensive visual effects for stuff that would've been shot on-set or on-location and not retouched at all 20 years ago. All the soccer field and stadium stuff in Ted Lasso, for instance. The 20 year ago version probably would've had stock photos/video and hard splits between shots of "the stadium fans" and shots of "the coaches by the sideline," and nobody would've complained... but try to get away with that today as a top-end TV show and you'd get panned for how fake and cheesy your penny-pinching looks compared to your competition.
I certainly don't think I can predict what that "more" looks like in twenty years, but I doubt it's purely "throw more generative tools at it." It could be something like "throw an army of hundreds of people to review, collate, and cherry-pick the coolest out of hundreds of thousands of generative outputs" - if everyone has access to good tools, then maybe the truly breathtaking stuff will be the stuff from people who can afford the time to curate to a specific vision.
A scene in the second most recent episode of Ted Lasso, when a character uses Siri on their iPhone triggered Siri on my HomePod Mini in the same room. Siri attempted to follow the instructions spoken by the character but failed miserably. If Apple is going to plug their half baked assistant in their shows, the least they could do is prevent it from being invoked. It may vary by language – I’m in Australia and the character speaking has a British accent, yet sounds nothing like me.
There was also a period of about 18 months where running water in my shower would trigger Siri on my Apple Watch. Dismissing Siri was pointless, as it’d get triggered again 5 seconds later.
I skip most of the Ted Lasso scenes with Mr Gruff and lil' Ms SideBusiness. If you had told me back in season one that I'd prefer watching the scenes with Mr BoringHomeLife, I wouldn't have believed you.
You can't please everybody.
Tried with Mythic Quest for two seasons and just couldn't stick with it.
Ted Lasso OTOH I'll watch as soon as a new episode pops up.
What a coincidence, I heard this word for the first time on the latest episode of Ted Lasso, which released yesterday.
Ah yes, another fellow Ted Lasso viewer.
For context, this word was a key plot point in this last night's episode of the show.
The tv show Ted Lasso introduced me the phrase: "It's the hope that kills you."
And in the show they rag on it, because people take it to mean "be hopeless". While I would never want people to be hopeless, I think that it is irresponsible to be hopeful without much more concrete plans to actually get things moving.
Climate Change is a tragedy of the commons, and nothing that Elon is working on fixes that. It still needs action as a tragedy of the commons, and Elon (and Tesla) can't fix that. We need other actions, and it's not enough for people to sit by and do nothing. It's not even enough to buy an electric car. We need people to change the ways in which they consume, and more than that we need them to vote to force companies to change the ways in which companies consume.
Sports help bind communities and shape regional narratives.
Whether you are a sports fan or not, I can recommend the documentary series "Welcome to Wrexham" as a fun look into the people and community of sports. (The show is about how while everyone was watching Ted Lasso, Rob McElhenny of It's Always Sunny and Ryan Reynolds of too many movies to name bought the Football Club of Wrexham, a Welsh city.)
> the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time
I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Compare that to the last 10 years of shows like: Succession, Ted Lasso, The Queen's Gambit, The Handmaids Tale, Better Call Saul, Ozark, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Silicon Valley, The Crown, Fargo, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Veep, and even (controversially) Game of Thrones.
It’s funny, I’m more sympathetic than ever to pirates, given how frequently creative works are disappeared or moved these days - pulled from streaming for political/social norms reasons (1984 style), “purchased” items removed from libraries for licensing reasons or because a platform outright closes, and then the garden variety shuffling of content between platforms in what seems like a hypermodern version of IP musical chairs (“who has 30 rock this week”).
But at the same time I engage in piracy less than ever before. For me it seems like the hard part used to be obtaining the content — “why can’t I buy or rent the new Sopranos online” — but now the hard part is choosing something worth my time in the oceans of available titles.
This past week I watched a Norwegian miniseries about people stuck in an airport at Christmas (Netflix). Prior week I watched videos from a London Clojure conference (YouTube premium). Prior to that I rewatched an old Jim Jarmusch movie (Criterion). A couple months ago I was on a Hulu binge (The Bear, Only Murderers) before cancelling. I bought a comedy special from Louis CK’s own website. I only used a couple months of a free year of Apple TV, to watch Ted Lasso.
My default is to watch old Anthony Bourdain, either streaming (back when I had Hulu, or when I had HBO Now for Curb Your Enthusiasm) or buy a copy on Apple’s store.
But just as often I look around and give up. Most nights there’s nothing I want to watch. If I can, I make myself read a book or do some coding or maybe a podcast. I subscribe to streaming platforms then cancel. It’s so easy to sign up and then leave.
My point is, if I can find something I want watch it’s only a few clicks to watch it legally for a decent price (helps that I am not in my 20s, income wise). But it’s hard to find anything I want to watch. Piracy is almost a non sequitir these days, most of the time. But sure, if you find something you love, make sure to torrent a copy, because it will disappear eventually for one reason or another.
Elon deserves a lot of credit for Tesla. But now I'm starting to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about when people refer to his car. It's not like Tesla is the only game in town anymore either.
In a weird tangent, I've been thinking about the TV Show "Ted Lasso", and why it's so popular lately. Ted Lasso is the exact opposite of Elon Musk, even to a fault. People don't care if Elon succeeds anymore, but they do want Ted Lasso to.
I think some would think they are abusing it and discover they benefit from it.
Someone who doesn’t nap at work gets home to find Season 3 of Ted Lasso has landed, stays up to watch it because they can just nap at work if six hours of sleep turns out to be a bad idea. But then they have a good afternoon because of the nap and decide to try it again.
I enjoyed these TV shows: - Ted Lasso - Severance - Bad Sisters - Servant - Trying - Mythic Quest - The Morning Show (season 1)
And these movies: - Cha Cha Real Smooth - Swan Song - Coda - The Banker - The Tragedy of MacBeth - The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Looking forward to the Sidney movie as well.
>Do Blu-rays and VODs just not exist anymore?
Yes. My mom watched an episode of Ted Lasso on a flight recently, and was interested in watching more. It is straight up Apple TV+ only. No physical media release or VOD. Subscription only.
Same with a bunch of animated shows that HBOmax axed recently. They were streaming only with no other releases, and it is now impossible to watch any of the past episodes legally.
Liked Ted Lasso season 1. Underwhelmed by most of the other offerings. Also I can’t cast Apple TV which is a big downside.
The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has. Look at Apple TV+, they're absolutely TINY compared to Netflix in both library size and money spent on new production, but they have arguably more hits than Netflix. Like, since when has any drama on Netflix been as buzzy or as good as Severance on Apple TV+? When was the last time they had a comedy success like Ted Lasso?
They have a couple of things that are very good (including Russian Doll, which is better than the article gives it credit for). But it's the ratio the that's troubling: the value of [good shows] / [shows produced] is absurdly much lower for Netflix than for Apple TV+, HBO Max or Disney+. All their spending seems to result in is endless mediocre True Crime documentaries that try recapture the magic of the first season of Making a Murderer, and the occasional golden nugget you binge in a weekend.
The article makes a big deal of the binging thing, and I agree it's a terrible model compared to weekly releases. But I feel like Netflix's real problem is that they just don't make enough good stuff.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.
This is nonsense. ATV is struggling to build a library worthy of a subscription.
Over the last 2-3 years, I sign up when a season of a show I hear good things about is completely out (Ted Lasso, Severance, etc) and then watch another show or movie or two for the month it takes me to finish that season.
I have never bumped into another show that made it worth renewing for a consecutive month, despite the show that I came for being totally worth the one month, and there being other shows that are strongly "related".
I will admit the production quality of the shows is very high on average, but that's not the same thing as the shows being very good.
I get the feeling people here think that the Apple Film/TV crew is somehow related to the actual Cupertino company we know as "Apple". Not really. Not to pretend I'm in the know, but it's clear from every press release that Apple (and Netflix) hire creatives and production executives in LA. Apple provides the budget and some direction (like, put a sexy iphone into every episode of Ted Lasso), and then the Hollywood pros make the creative decisions that actually result in an awesome or mediocre production.
So maybe Apple is spending more money on better talent. Or maybe they're just funneling it better (big productions like Foundations instead of a bunch of cooking shows).
Oh hey, it's HN's favorite subject!
There's a lot of good here.
Do companies have bad interviews? Yes. Is it because they ask stupid trivia questions, demonstrate stupid biases against races, genders, ages, and nervousness, or otherwise don't have a rigorously meaningful process? Yes. Is interviewing stressful? 100%, and every interviewer should be cognizant of and prepared for the intensity of that stress for some people.
But saying that software engineers shouldn't have to code in an interview is always going to sound absurd to me.
> A live coding exercise often has little to do with what the candidate's output is like on the job.
That's not an argument against live coding exercises. It's an argument against ones that aren't representative of the scale of expected work given the available timeframe and the position's responsibilities.
There's a parted Red Sea of difference.
There isn't to my knowledge any other way to demonstrate ability to perform that can be completed in an hour or less. That isn't to say that there are no other ways to evaluate someone. Certainly one could completely restructure their business around zero-onboard few-hour contract jobs, but that's really an untenable degree of accommodation if we're looking for something that can be applied broadly. Is there yet another way? I don't know. I can't think of one, and the author doesn't provide any useful insight.
Do you know what a senior engineer in the US gets to do after they're done demonstrating competence though? They get to make a shit-ton of money compared to everyone else on the planet except for drug lords, investment bankers, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. We're talking Scrooge McDuck swimming in his money bin money compared to approximately 100% of all people on the planet. All they have to do is put on a t-shirt for an hour or two and show that they're halfway decent at their profession.
Maybe that's worth some performance anxiety for a few miserable fucking hours and then they can go back to tweeting or binge-watching Ted Lasso or whatever it is that stressed people do to unwind these days. Does that privilege people who are better at demonstrating themselves? Yes. That is always going to be the nature of demonstration. But if they fail, there are a thousand more tries ready and available right now. And if they can't do better after a few...well...nobody wants to hire someone who doesn't improve when given the same test over and over again.
> Why are you giving Senior Engineers coding interviews anyway?
Because most so-called engineers quite frankly really suck.
> Do you really think someone who has been holding increasingly more demanding jobs over the past decade or two was faking knowing Python the whole time?
Uh. Yes. I've seen way too many "senior" bombs, and this is definitely the reality. Many if not most people who call themselves software engineers are actually very bad at what they do ranging from being utterly incapable to just not caring about quality. If that's not you, show it.
> If you say to me "tell me about a time you dealt with an unusual networking problem and how you resolved it" I'm going to tell you a way more detailed and interesting story about Dell Optiplex 2x0 boxes that all had the same MAC address when their Service Tag was cleared.
If you let me contact your previous/current bosses _before_ the interview, then I'll gladly let you tell me all the stories you want. Otherwise I think I need to be able to see how you perform. And, yes, that also includes seeing if/how you perform with pressure.
Look, I'll plan, architect, code, document, and mentor circles around 99% of my peers and also be the life of the workplace that everyone enjoys interacting with, but ask me for a story about something I did one time and I'm going to stare at you with an eyebrow raised for a few seconds before saying "Sorry, I don't remember or even care about what I was thinking 30 seconds ago let alone before that. Are you hiring someone who builds software or someone who tells anecdotes? Perhaps I can solve a problem for you." And if I a person thinks that they'd rather have a story than a demonstration, then that's their mistake to make, and I hope they find someone who tells very good stories after the fact. Maybe I've just solved so many significant problems that none of them are memorable anymore. Maybe the thing that makes me so good at solving problems is that I reserve all of my neurons for solving and don't waste neurons on remembering.
> Take-home quizzes are dramatically less anxiety-inducing for a lot of people (myself included).
Take-home quizzes also don't show anything about how well you perform. If I build a take-home quiz that should take a reasonably competent person 30 minutes and you spend all night on it, or worse ask a friend for help, then what? How do I know? Honesty? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
> Why bother asking a question that tests someone's ability to retain information for 12-24 hours?
IMO that's not consistent with the immediately following paragraph suggesting that you should ask for "tell me about a time when" stories. You either care that they retain information for some period of time or you don't.
> Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you?
What actual content do they have?
I've seen a Beastie boys doc, Ted Lasso and The morning show * edited from Newsroom when my error was pointed out.
That's a month's worth of content. What else do they have to justify continuing a subscription?
Disney has more content with just the Simpson's episodes alone. Add on top of that the entire Marvel catalog, the entire Starwars Catalog and the entire Pixar catalog.
I like some Apple TV shows a lot, but there's not a lot. RN I think I'm "finished" with what I really wanted to watch: Ted Lasso, Central Park, Dickinson. I started Acapulco and it's nice, but things in other platforms seems more appealing.
That being said, I think as they expand, it's going to get pretty good.
> Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you?
Isn't this basically just asking why doesn't Ted Lasso appeal to you? I think the biggest problem is Apple doesn't have much of a catalog.
Haven't experienced that myself, but I'll check when Ted Lasso season 3 comes out.
At the very least I appreciate that Apple defaults to emailing a receipt every month when it renews, unlike some other subscriptions that go radio silent and hope you'll just never get around to canceling it.
https://youtu.be/i_FofLSherM
We're currently binge watching Ted Lasso, and that scene really stung and stuck with me. I am someone who is often judgmental and contrarian, exacerbated by the Internet and many things in our society being not enjoyable, and it has masked the underlying humanity of curiosity that lies inside. It's hard, but focusing on what I can do to learn more about something and actually do things rather than critiquing some existing thing is a process I'm trying to implement. While being a critic is valid, too much of anything is not a good thing.
LOL, this reminds of an episode of Mythic Quest where the lead engineer (Poppy) imagines "real-time, persistent, globally-reflected environment changes" for the MMO they built, gets told that it's unfeasible by the entire dev team, mows ahead anyway and ends up with a disastrous demo at the end when the system basically collapses on itself.
Funny how reel-life and real-life collide into each other! :D
---
As an aside, after Ted Lasso (which gets all the well-deserved hype), Mythic Quest is a great trope-filled show esp. for anyone who's worked in tech in general (and game dev specifically).
Industry (TV Show - HBO)
It's a but over the top at times, but I enjoyed the drama of the interns joining the finance industry. Reminded me of what it's like to be in your twenties and not really know how life will turn out for you... Like Ted Lasso, it made me think of when I visited London for work.
These are all things I've experienced in the past three years, though some started or came out earlier.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (even better if you liked Children of Time)
Ted Lasso on Apple TV+
Star Trek: Discovery on CBS/Paramount (especially Season 2)
Letterkenny on Hulu
Cobra Kai on Netflix
The Country Things album by Granger Smith
I mean I’m not a fan of advertisements myself but I don’t find the whole Apple products in Ted Lasso overwhelming compared to most other shows and movies. I mean any time someone is on a phone or laptop obviously it’s gonna be an Apple product. Other shows and movies always find a way to more awkwardly shoehorn something in and call attention to it other than just being a prop. Or the new trend to advertise is to make a joke out of the product as if that wasn’t the plan all along, like Ryan Reynolds hocking his liquor in Free Man or daytime tv shows joking about products.
> What recent (non-animated) funny movie or show have you seen that is not "feel good" or filled with sexual jokes?
I don't really watch comedy films but I watch a reasonable amount of comedy shows:
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Avenue 5, Fleabag, The Good Place, Silicon Valley, Resident Alien, Barry, Home (UK), Mythic Quest, AP Bio, Tacoma FD, Ted Lasso, Russian Doll, Veep, You're the Worst, Better Things·
I'm not sure what your qualifier for "recent" is so feel free to ignore some of those.
Sure a lot of these aren't farces like Airplane or Scary Movie but it's not all feel good or dick jokes. There is plenty of comedy out there for all types of tastes.
Watching the first season the absurd amount of Apple product placement was annoying me.
Yet it wasn’t - to me - the sheer amount, but the lack of diversity.
I do a lot of sports activities to control my emotional state. Many people around me use headphones, most of them actually Apple/Beats. Yet it’s never all of them using beats. Many have Sony or mpow.
In Business Video calls I tried a shfloat on headphones during the pandemic. Particularly because of lack of choice during the hot time of the pandemic. Having days with 6hrs on the phone/webcam to kick of a big project was challenging on many levels. And, my POV again, there was an evolution to Air Pods. Many people use them today. Some stuck at typical helpdesk on-ear gear, some use their notebooks. It’s not that Apple Pods has been the best. Many people just walked that path during the pandemic because of what I believe is a mixture of actual availability, personal comfort and seeing others with it, so it must be ok. Yet even in this scenario not everyone* has apple products.
Finally I put the focus on iPhone and FaceTime. See this post as a product placement but the pandemic put a burden on parents in my region of then world. Schools closed for month, offices, shops & everything, too. Travel was limited. Nightly curfews. So on the one hand I bonded much, much tighter with my 9yr old daughter then this would be usual at that age. On the other hand these bonds were broken. Me working in IT directly responsible, I had to spend days away. Suddenly due to a power problem 3 switches simultaneously had corrupted their flash drive, all down, backups,… I had to leave home for three days and we were stuck to FaceTime. No other service provided a even remote feeling of being at home with here them for example watching a movie together with FaceTime . Yet not everyone has an iPhone. People cannot use FaceTimes across brands. Deliberately by Apple.
So, to come to my conclusion, please excuse the long introduction:
I have seen product placement. Big discussion among YouTube and social media. Big discussion with Coca Cola, McDonalds and Red Bull along with Sport events. It’s very prominent, very annoying. Very subtle. The refreshing taste of beer. We all now the adverts with that sound of beer flowing into a glas. Or Coca Cola. And how hard these companies work to make us believe Coca Cola would actually be more refreshing then water after sports.
The problem with Ted Lasso is the lack of Apple products diversity. They have one design of laptops. They have one iPhone. Air pods. Tv station. It’s really annoying that everyone has the same iPhone in Ted Lasso. It’s like they have two iPhones and two laptops on set and just switch them during scenes and actors.
It’s not like people wouldn’t use their products actually as depicted in Ted Lasso. To me it partially was how I handled my life during pandemic, not so much product placement. It’s how a certain kind of people lives. It’s part of their story about these exact kind of people.
But the absurd amount of the same apple product just makes it ridiculous.
I would go so far to suggest that apple will reduce the amount since marketing must have noticed that people at some point find it annoying that their super expensive iPhone isn’t as exclusive if everyone on Ted lasso has the same one.
It’s most noticeable with notebooks to me. Because that’s were I experience most diversity in real life. People have so many vendors, … the amount of Apple Books in Ted Lasso is unnatural.
So, yes. Obscene amount of apple products. But apple wouldn’t include Samsung Notebooks. So it is maybe not completely product placement but a necessity due to the plot and apple being apple not allowing any competitors.
Eventually I’d like to point out how annoyed I am by product placement in TV shows. Big show runners intended at female viewers are stuck with make up and fashion products to a amount where it is annoying to watch. I recall a TV show where they suddenly praised the features of the car they were using or people say „oh nice shirt“ and the hero was wearing it the whole episode. Even if no specific product it used, the bottles or colors clearly resemble Coca Cola….
I wouldn’t be mad if the journalist would review more shows and we have not only apple bashing but a generalized TV show discussion.
> As an adult it seems everyone has Amazon and everything they want, so what's to do but trade boring gift cards we don't need. How exciting.
From one terrible gift-giver to another: Once you are no longer poor and the people around you also aren't poor and can afford the things they want, gift-giving becomes about knowing the person. What have they always wanted or needed, but wouldn't get for themselves?
When you distill gifts to a monetary exchange they lose all value. Know the person, show you care, share that you thought about them, that you put effort into their gift. Then gifts become magical and amazing once more.
Your mom appreciates a $600 weekend getaway with her son/daughter infinitely more than a $600 fancy bluetooth speaker.
As Ted Lasso said in a recent episode – the effort is the gift.
> I additionally believe that they dogfood it internally before release
Given how frustrating iTunes/TV can be to use, I can not believe the highest echelons of Apple are using their software, or at least not the way I’m using it (as UI to my large collection of owned albums or to watch TV on my iPad.)
I want to watch the next episode of Ted Lasso. Does TV “now watching” give me a direct link? Hell, no! It’s stuck on “Watch First Episode”! Gotta hunt click through and scroll and select. Even though all the previous episodes are marked as watched. My device is set to English, I want subtitles so I can understand some thick Brit accent, is English CC top of the list? Hell, no!
Apple executives do not eat their dogfood. They can’t be.
Torrent is still better experience (in my particular case, lol).
Tried to watch Ted Lasso at peak lock down. Apple TV+ bumped the quality something to 480p since it was evening in nationwide lockdown so all streaming services are down to 40mbps (tho realistically Apple was barely moving at 3-4mbps). They do let you downloading episodes, but that's still at 1080p.
Fired up WebTorrent and was watching it glorious 4k in matter of minutes...
"I’d wait an entire week to watch the next episode." -- Try Ted Lasso or Shmigadoon on Apple TV! That world is back.
As for cameras: I wrote a book "Inventing the Future" about the Xerox Star (1977-1981). No one took pictures then! It's such a drag. I was sure we were on the 3rd floor of the A&E Building, and everyone told me no, it was the 1st floor.
Fortunately, people at Xerox did write documents and many, many of those are up on bitsavers.org.
This clause stuck out for me: "he would recognize and get help for his own depression."
I don't know if anyone watches Ted Lasso, but in Season Two, they bring in a sports psychologist. No spoilers here.
He talks about never showing vulnerability and the destructive effects of that. But also: "Everything in life is a skill, and you’ve got to learn when to use it and when not to use it." Bingo.
Any sports trainer who doesn't force his or her way past the athlete's reflexive "I'm fine; I don't need any help." is guilty of malpractice, IMHO. Looking after their mental health is just as important as looking after their cardiovascular fitness.
I didn't watch Ted Lasso for a while because I'm not particularly interested in soccer. But a friend highly recommended it to me and now my wife and I have watched the whole season 3 times and can barely wait for the next one to drop.
I've watched Mythic Quest several times too. Love that show a lot. For All Mankind is also great. I've been really happy with my Apple subscription and can't wait to see what else they do.
It's a one hour heavy drama, so it's harder to consume. I watched all of Ted Lasso in two days, I'm still working my way through For All Mankind. Only so many episodes I can watch in a day before I need to decompress.
I got a notification a few days ago telling me that my Apple TV+ trial was expiring, and that it was time to pay $4.99 a month.
I can't justify it. Yet I love Ted Lasso. It irritates me that I can't just buy individual episodes of shows any more, I have to buy into a whole ecosystem.
Ted Lasso is a show that I didn't think I'd like at all based on the synopsis. But after a rave review from a friend, I gave it a go and found it to be compulsive watching. It just goes to show that music, movies, and art that is way outside your usual tastes can still appeal if it is really good.
Hugh Howey gives shout-outs to so many good TV shows I tamped down my initial “why bother when the books are so good” reaction. He says Ted Lasso was the best show to come out during the pandemic, and though I don’t think I watch much TV, I did watch TL and was ready to watch it again, which I rarely feel. My now-feeling is: I like that art exists, and good luck to this team! As resources are treated more dearly we’ll have to adjust how we make art. We creative, ingenious humans will find a way to tell our stories.
Ted Lasso is worth watching. Other than that, I didn’t use my year trial either.
You haven’t really given AppleTV+ a fair shake. There are some great shows and movies on the service. Ted Lasso, Dickenson, Wolfwalkers, etc. It’s on the low price side of streaming services and a free year is included with many product purchases. I wouldn’t call that a failure by a long-shot.
Ted Lasso is great. I am a football fan and I was initially attracted to the show for being a comedy about football. After watching it though, I agree that it's a lot less about football and a lot more about humanity. I hope Season 2 comes out soon!
For All Mankind is another great show! A very interesting take on an alternative space race history. Compelling narrative, deep characters, great ambiance. One of the best sci-fi shows of late.
Exactly! Apple TV+ is a sleeping giant. So hooked on Servant. Ted Lasso is one of the best Sitcoms (if that's what this is called) in a long time.
Also don't forget about "See", which I laughed at, at first, but it's actually really good. Defending Jacob, Palmer (movie), and The Morning Show (which I still need to start)
Obviously they don't have the volume but their average quality is probably as good as any streaming service. Over 16 non-film/doc/kids series the mean tomatometer/metascores is a pretty solid 74/64 and there's 5 with 90+/70+:
Ted Lasso, Tehran, Mythic Quest, Little America, and Central Park.
I enjoyed the first 4 of those and haven't seen the last.
Seasons 2 and 3 of Ted Lasso are locked in, season 2 is expected in August.
But now, from beyond the grave, Gawker is revealing another reality in this era of media consolidation: that the chief executive of one of the biggest companies in the world, who testifies before Congress and negotiates with China, also decides what television shows get made.
I'm having a little trouble with the premise of this story, that it's somehow novel for an executive to have a hand in killing a show. This is like 40% of the premise of 30 Rock. But that was about the Sheinhardt Wigs hegemony over NBC (and tri-vection microwaves), not Tim Cook's influence over a tiny portfolio of streaming shows nobody watches.
As long as he doesn't fuck with Ted Lasso, I honestly don't give a shit. I'm sure I'll buy another Apple product in 2021, which will re-up my Apple TV+ subscription somehow.
Does mythic quest get a lot better after episode 1? We watched it right after Ted Lasso and it was so ... mean. It _seems_ like something I should like, though.
SEE is a show I expected to hate but really loved. It looks hetter than any l movie on my iphone (I think they are using really wide dynamic range and color gamut, which is ironic given the premise.)
Ted Lasso was great too.
I just wish Apple would bring back 20-25 episode seasons from the golden age of TV.
That’s when shows became part of your life, rather than a friend that shows up for a couple months every couple years.
>Why can't you just enjoy a one or two well done seasons?
Not OP, but I share the opinion. For my viewing there are basically two types of shows. The first is relatively mindless entertainment. I enjoy an episode here or there but I'm not invested in the plot. I'm not watching YouTube recaps and "explainers" after the episodes, and I'm not engaged in a community where we discuss the plot and predict where things are going. Barry is a good example of that. Ted Lasso is another good example.
Then there are the shows where I get invested in the plot and story. Shows where I am theorizing with my wife, watching YouTube videos on it, and discussing it online. Shows such as Westworld or Game of Thrones.
There are some shows that straddle the line well, but you usually know ahead of time. Watchmen falls into that category. Single season, compelling drama, had me engaged the whole time, and it was a single season. But I knew it was going to be a single season from the start.
This is the same reason I typically try not to read unfinished trilogies. Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM have ruined me.