Season 1 & 2 Discussion

[nb360]

I like the fact that the reason why some viewers don't like the Sam/Rebecca thing is because of the age and employer issue... and not race.

Similarly (I think?) with the dr's assumption that Ted's concern about Sharon was a reflection of a husband's concern about a partner. Progress, people!

[twoods]

I didn’t know that my life needed a Roy and Jamie hug, but it did and I loved every second of it while crying. I was hoping that Sam would approach Jamie as well but maybe he will in an upcoming episode. 
 

I’m okay with Sam and Rebecca because I always thought they had a spark, but no good can come of this because of the whole boss/player thing. The age difference doesn’t even bother me.

Continue to enjoy Dr. Sharon and Ted’s scenes. I am very worried about Coach Beard (more than Nate).  

[Gwendolyn]

4 hours ago, Kostgard said:

But there’s something else here - why the hell has Ted STILL not learned a lot of the basics about the sport? At this point it is inexcusable. I’ll bet he knows plenty about American football (he even identified himself as an American football coach at the hospital) but he hasn’t bothered with what the rest of the world calls football. I know it’s most likely because Ted’s been hanging on by his fingernails since before he came to London, dealing with anxiety and probably depression, and right now he literally doesn’t have the mental real estate to dedicate to learning about the game. So he’s leaning into his strengths and coasting by. That only takes you so far.

See I think you're right, that Ted is trying so hard to hold it together mentally that learning all the details of new to him sport isn't possible. Also I don't think premiere league coach is Ted's life goal. He took the job to give his wife space, but I think his goal now is to get AFC Richmond promoted and then he and Beard will leave for Kansas and the next team that needs to become the best of themselves they can be. Ted isn't about winning, he's about allowing people to find who they're meant to be.

As much as Beard wants to win, outside of getting frustrated with Ted not pulling Roy for the good of the team last season (because Ted was putting Roy's feelings before winning), I don't think Beard is upset with Ted about the team and the wins or losses. He and Ted are a package deal. Ted knows Beard and Beard knows Ted. I think if anything Beard was hurt he didn't realize Ted was having panic attacks.

Also we know nothing of Beard's father (mom is full Q Anon), but clearly as much as losing the game upset him, he was more upset about the scene with Jamie's dad (loved that it was Beard that removed James Sr. and hit him with the door on the way out).  It will be interesting to see how next week's episode plays out.

[PWHCHCH]

Waiting for Christa Miller to be somehow shoehorned into this show.

[Jeddah]

18 hours ago, Penman61 said:

Rebecca and Sam age difference: not my business, consenting adults, good luck to you both, you crazy kids.

Rebecca and Sam boss/subordinate (she literally owns his team, right?) dynamic: This is fucked up, not good, and will end badly. Who does this anymore?

That’s where I fall on this. I’d probably momentarily side eye that age difference in real life, but then realize that they’re both adults who clearly like each other and make each other happy. So good for them!

But being someone’s boss makes this so wrong. I had coworkers who did this in real life, and lives and careers were ruined. They did a similar job, but he was technically her supervisor. It was a disaster. It would be so much worse with a power dynamic like the one between Rebecca and Sam.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Jeddah

[Jeddah]

I cracked up at Ted’s speech about the size of pitch being the same, and everyone having to tell him he was wrong. That speech worked in Hoosiers!

I wish they hadn’t made Ted’s character a dad when they created the show. We know Ted’s a good guy who loves his son, but in an episode about bad fathers it made me sad that his kid is across the world and hardly ever sees his dad.

[Penman61]

While I'm definitely not a lifelong soccer/football fan, via the spouse I have watched a fair amount of it in the last decade or so, and I STILL do not understand offside(s? Gah, I don't even know what it's really called!). So I have some sympathy for Ted...but then again, I'm not COACHING a football team. So, yeah, Ted needs to learn. 

And...pitch sizes can be different?!? 

Edited September 12, 2021 by Penman61

[Trillium]

I had an out do town wedding so I was just able to watch the episode now. Not much else to add because I agree with everything else people have said. 

One objective for Season 2 must have been to make Issac fucking cool as hell in every scene. Dang. 
 

[meep.meep]

The offside rule is not difficult at all.  It comes from the fact that a super easy strategy to win would be to have an attacking player just hang out in the box in front of the goal.  Anyone else on the attacking team would just have to pop the ball to that player and they could score.  The offsides rule says that there must be at least one defender (other than the goal keeper) between any attacker and the goal.

[akiss]

35 minutes ago, meep.meep said:

The offside rule is not difficult at all.  It comes from the fact that a super easy strategy to win would be to have an attacking player just hang out in the box in front of the goal.  Anyone else on the attacking team would just have to pop the ball to that player and they could score.  The offsides rule says that there must be at least one defender (other than the goal keeper) between any attacker and the goal.

Exactly this, but with the caveat that this applies before another player tries to pass the ball to the attacker. After the ball is in the air the attacker has the right to try to surpass the defender and be alone against the goalie / goal post.

[DearEvette]

4 hours ago, Trillium said:

One objective for Season 2 must have been to make Issac fucking cool as hell in every scene. Dang. 

I mean, right?  Between his truly bravura performance as a hair cutting maestro and his  SuperFly Santa. So cool.

Edited September 12, 2021 by DearEvette

[Girl in a Cardigan]

10 hours ago, PWHCHCH said:

Waiting for Christa Miller to be somehow shoehorned into this show.

I was actually surprised to see that she wasn't the actress picked to play Ted's wife last year. But maybe one of them needed to be in LA as their kids finish school? (Or have all of the Miller/Lawrence offspring go off to college/become adults because I'm SO OLD?!)

[Eureka]

On 9/11/2021 at 1:58 PM, Turtle Wexler said:

Yes, I think so. In Diamond Dogs (?) Higgins says he’s been married for 28(?) years, and then in Rainbow he tells Rebecca he’s been married for 29(?)

I think it was Sam’s 20th birthday in season 1.

[rejnel]

How I love the title of this episode.

[Ms.Lulu]

I know I may be alone in this, but Rebecca and Sam don't bother me as much as they do others.  The actors have really good chemistry together and Rebecca isn't the coach and she doesn't make staffing decisions.  

Also, loved that Roy comforted Jamie.  I am glad that he may have Roy as a father figure now.  

Like others have said, Nate is the only character that I don't like.  Even his admission wasn't the same level as everyone else.  His father made him afraid to be vulnerable.

[KittenPokerCheater]

21 minutes ago, Ms.Lulu said:

I know I may be alone in this, but Rebecca and Sam don't bother me as much as they do others.  

It doesn't bother me either.  This is a fictional show, not real life.

[SoMuchTV]

Am I the only one who has trouble flushing Cheers out of my mind whenever I hear “Sam and Rebecca”?

[mledawn]

18 minutes ago, SoMuchTV said:

Am I the only one who has trouble flushing Cheers out of my mind whenever I hear “Sam and Rebecca”?

Well, you aren't now!

[Maysie]

I finally watched the latest episode and really enjoyed it.

So, Rebecca and Sam: I don’t care about the age difference, I don’t care about race, class and cultural differences. I think they have great chemistry and Sam is far more mature than any 21 year old male I’ve come across. But the boss/employee relationship is the problem for me, even though it’s just a tv show. It’s going to be hard for them to keep it under wraps since pretty much everyone knew they were meeting their bantr dates, and Keeley knew Sam was in the bar, so she will figure it out. It feels like we all know how this will play out in the end, because it doesn’t seem realistic that they can get beyond that boss/employee thing. I’m thinking the ultimate takeaway is that Rebecca will learn that she doesn’t have to stay in her tried and true dating lane to find companionship.

By the end of the Jaime/Roy scene, it occurred to me that Roy should be the coach of the team, and I wonder if that is the series end game. Ted has been a cheerleader and not a coach; the team may have needed a cheerleader at first, but now it needs a coach. I think posters here have had great insight about where Ted is in his life and how that may impact his ability to really understand the game and coach/strategize to actually win games. I was kind of appalled that during old man Tarte’s abuse that Ted said and did nothing. I get that he was probably experiencing some of his own dad trauma there, but the fact that someone didn’t get security or something was kind of wtf for me. So now I’m wondering how Ted’s therapy is going to impact his coaching; I don’t think it could get worse. I hope.

Finally, Nate really is an asshole, isn’t he? I almost want to throw something at the tv when he makes his smug faces or his dickish comments. I noticed that when the team walked into Wembley stadium, everyone but him walked in with a look of awe. Not Nate-he swaggered in. For someone who is so insecure it didn’t take long for him to get an overblown sense of self importance.

[SnarkShark]

On 9/11/2021 at 10:12 PM, nb360 said:

I like the fact that the reason why some viewers don't like the Sam/Rebecca thing is because of the age and employer issue... and not race.

Similarly (I think?) with the dr's assumption that Ted's concern about Sharon was a reflection of a husband's concern about a partner. Progress, people!

Sure, but realistically in the world, no less in the UK (where football players of color were recently treated like trash by the general public) race probably WOULD be an issue once this went public.  Paired with the other reason, of course.

[SnarkShark]

2 hours ago, KittenPokerCheater said:

It doesn't bother me either.  This is a fictional show, not real life.

I personally can't work on that level.  FictionalIzed shows breaking reality to show fantastic things that would be illogical or impossible in the real world is one thing.  But setting different moral limits to fiction disturbs me.  Example: Christian Grey is a creep just as much in Fifty Shades of Grey as he would be in the real world.  

[AllyB]

6 hours ago, Maysie said:

For someone who is so insecure it didn’t take long for him to get an overblown sense of self importance.

It's text book narcissism. A massively inflated sense of self-importance, masking a complete lack of self-esteem. 

5 hours ago, SnarkShark said:

Sure, but realistically in the world, no less in the UK (where football players of color were recently treated like trash by the general public) race probably WOULD be an issue once this went public.  Paired with the other reason, of course.

The UK is made up of 3 and a bit countries. For one, the racism following the Euros was to do with the English team and had little to do with Wales, Scotland or NI. In fact, in large part people in Scotland and many communities in NI would have been cheering for Italy, as they view England as the oppressor country.  Not that there is no racism in the other parts of the UK, racism in NI is still, quite frankly, off the scale. (But that is not racism as would necessarily be recognised from an Americancentric pov, as it's about colonisers versus the colonised and the problems that were exacerbated following the British governments' decision to create partition in Ireland after they lost the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s.)

Within England itself, race issues will be utterly different in London and most of the rest of the country. The racial makeup of England and Wales (for some reason they are recorded together, belittling Wales!) is 86% white, with over 81% being white Britons, 3.3% of people are from black ethnic groups. In London, only 59% of the population is white, and only 44% is white British. Over 13% are from black ethnic groups, with a further more than 2% being from mixed black and white ethnicity. Richmond, is a London club. While it's clearly in the wealthy, more white than most, suburban South London region of Richmond-upon-Thames, the attitude there towards race issues are completely and utterly different in a city which is simultaneously the most important, powerful and wealthy city in the country and also the only city where the indigenous, white population are a minority. When you try to factor in issues such as upper/middle/working class stratification which really do not mean even remotely the same things in England as they do in the US, it's incredibly hard as an outsider to get a grip on.

[Trillium]

I’ll keep an open mind for Rebecca and Sam, wherever it’s going. I don’t know how I feel about it and I’m not sure if I know what the show wants us to feel about it. This show gave us a Roy and Jamie hug that was a truly earned authentic moment, so I have  faith this storyline will find its way, whatever it is. This all seems plotted by Jason specifically, so I’ll just sit back and enjoy this gem of a show. 

Edited September 13, 2021 by Trillium

[whiporee]

18 hours ago, Girl in a Cardigan said:

I was actually surprised to see that she wasn't the actress picked to play Ted's wife last year. But maybe one of them needed to be in LA as their kids finish school? (Or have all of the Miller/Lawrence offspring go off to college/become adults because I'm SO OLD?!)

Christa only plays Jorden/Ellie. I don't think they wanted Ted's wife to be mean, and I don't think I've seen Christa do anything un-mean in a while. She would be fun as Ted's loving but acerbic sister, though. 

[KittenPokerCheater]

Damn straight it won!

Creative Emmy Awards CASTING FOR A COMEDY SERIES
Ted Lasso

SINGLE-CAMERA PICTURE EDITING FOR A COMEDY SERIES
Ted Lasso

SOUND MIXING FOR A COMEDY OR DRAMA SERIES (HALF-HOUR) AND ANIMATION
Ted Lasso

 

Edited September 13, 2021 by KittenPokerCheater

[KarenX]

11 hours ago, SnarkShark said:

I personally can't work on that level.  FictionalIzed shows breaking reality to show fantastic things that would be illogical or impossible in the real world is one thing.  But setting different moral limits to fiction disturbs me.  Example: Christian Grey is a creep just as much in Fifty Shades of Grey as he would be in the real world.  

Ok, so put aside whether Rebecca being genuinely in love with Sam is fantastical. Let’s just say she truly loves him with all her heart.

I think the show wants you to feel dread, and I think the plot is headed for this to explode as a PR disaster. The show reminded us (from the phone call from Sam’s dad) of the sponsor controversy AND of investigative journalism (Trent Crimm, from the Independent) and we’ve seen scenes of Keeley the Busy at Work PR Manager. A perfect storm of context clues!

Rebecca’s joke about just buying the restaurant that was mean to Nate suggests to me that she is going to get stuck at seeing how this looks so so bad and get stubborn about how if she likes it so much why can’t she have it?

Also… Ted is panicking because his special coaching skills aren’t needed anymore and he can’t provide the skills they need now. But he can be very useful here moderating this disaster and getting Rebecca to step away. Which she needs to do. This is a very bad age difference and power differential for Sam and Sam’s father can’t protect him. Ted can, though.

This could lead to the downfall of Bantr as a company/sponsor and set the stage for dire team straits in Season 3.

[Good Queen Jane]

Maybe the season ends with the team in dire financial straits, being sued by Dubai Airlines, losing Bantr as principal sponsor, and the fans not buying tickets because of the team's performance and Rebecca and Sam's relationship. The players are asked to take a pay cut, but refuse and go off to other teams. Ted believes that Rebecca intended this all the time and betrayed him. Nate is offered and accepts a coaching position elsewhere. The season ends with everyone separated and in distress, which is pretty much how The Empire Strikes Back ended. If Season 3 started with Keely in a metallic bikini, we will know that the Star Wars analogy has gone too far.

[SnarkShark]

3 hours ago, whiporee said:

Christa only plays Jorden/Ellie. I don't think they wanted Ted's wife to be mean, and I don't think I've seen Christa do anything un-mean in a while. She would be fun as Ted's loving but acerbic sister, though. 

Yeah, but she played non-mean on The Drew Carey Show, and while that was a long time ago, I don't actually think its a specialized skill that would fall off with time.  I see that role just as proof she can do it.

 

6 hours ago, AllyB said:

It's text book narcissism. A massively inflated sense of self-importance, masking a complete lack of self-esteem. 

The UK is made up of 3 and a bit countries. For one, the racism following the Euros was to do with the English team and had little to do with Wales, Scotland or NI. In fact, in large part people in Scotland and many communities in NI would have been cheering for Italy, as they view England as the oppressor country.  Not that there is no racism in the other parts of the UK, racism in NI is still, quite frankly, off the scale. (But that is not racism as would necessarily be recognised from an Americancentric pov, as it's about colonisers versus the colonised and the problems that were exacerbated following the British governments' decision to create partition in Ireland after they lost the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s.)

Within England itself, race issues will be utterly different in London and most of the rest of the country. The racial makeup of England and Wales (for some reason they are recorded together, belittling Wales!) is 86% white, with over 81% being white Britons, 3.3% of people are from black ethnic groups. In London, only 59% of the population is white, and only 44% is white British. Over 13% are from black ethnic groups, with a further more than 2% being from mixed black and white ethnicity. Richmond, is a London club. While it's clearly in the wealthy, more white than most, suburban South London region of Richmond-upon-Thames, the attitude there towards race issues are completely and utterly different in a city which is simultaneously the most important, powerful and wealthy city in the country and also the only city where the indigenous, white population are a minority. When you try to factor in issues such as upper/middle/working class stratification which really do not mean even remotely the same things in England as they do in the US, it's incredibly hard as an outsider to get a grip on.

The short version is yes, realistically there'd be racial pushback.  The specifics being called complex and trying to work out the split of it, doesn't change that.   Racism is multifaceted in the US too.  One of the few major differences I've noticed was a stronger insistence for a long time in some quarters, only starting to wane now, that Britain was somehow post-racial.  Which yes, also happened to an extent in the US, but even the people saying it in the US clearly never believed it.  Obviously its mixed with a strong general xenophobia too, an overall anti-immigration stance, and that's complex too (hating the very white Polish, for example, because they don't always assimilate cleanly), but again, complexity doesn't erase the basic fact that racism is part of the stew.  Realistically, the very posh rich white team owner "lowering" herself with an African young man barely out of boyhood is going to explode for a ton of reasons.  The right leaning tabloids would stop short of overt racism, but imply things instead.  One only needs to look at Meghan Markle to see how they do that (although of course they're even more protective of the Royals).  That someone is "common".  That they just don't like someone for deliberately vague reasons and its just their opinion, so you'd better not call them racist.  That someone is grabbing attention or trying to elevate themselves by hooking up with a certain person.  Etc etc etc.

[marceline]

I actually like Rebecca and Sam from the standpoint that they obviously genuinely like each other as people. Seeing them talking and laughing felt good because they both deserve it but the workplace situation makes this impossible. It's not like Rebecca is Sam's assistant manager at Walgreens. She's the team owner. She holds Sam's fate, as well as the fate of everyone else (players and coaches), in her hands. That's too much pressure to put on any relationship let alone a brand new one that will eventually end up under intense public scrutiny. There's just no way this works without a LOT of collateral damage.

Edited September 14, 2021 by marceline

[MissLucas]

I keep wondering what about the ugly scene between Jamie and his Dad triggered Ted so much. Was his Dad also an abusive jerk? We know little about him except the darts thing but the way Ted froze during the altercation makes me wonder.

As for Rebecca and Sam - one reviewer made an interesting point about their plot that gets easily overlooked: Rebecca's character arc has been completely focused on her romantic life, we just see her as a protagonist in a rom-com when her story has so much more potential. She talked to Keeley and Nate about what it takes to attend meetings as the only woman present but that was just a rare glimpse. Other than that she was more or less constantly shown agonizing over her smartphone and that's not a good look. The more I think about this the more I expect their relationship to implode in a PR disaster and Sam being the person responsible for the change of main sponsor will come up again and Rebecca's professionalism will be called into question, urgh. Now I've depressed myself.

[Schweedie]

6 minutes ago, MissLucas said:

I keep wondering what about the ugly scene between Jamie and his Dad triggered Ted so much. Was his Dad also an abusive jerk? We know little about him except the darts thing but the way Ted froze during the altercation makes me wonder.

I've been wondering what the connection between Jamie/his dad and Ted's own emotional issues is, too. From what Ted has said his dad wasn't abusive; Jamie asked him something along those lines in episode two and he said no, his dad was a lot harder on himself than on Ted. But there's still something there. Right before his panic attack during the Tottenham match he was hearing that echo of Jamie's dad yelling at him. Maybe it goes further back, like, his grandfather was hard like that on his dad?

[Trillium]

4 minutes ago, Schweedie said:

I've been wondering what the connection between Jamie/his dad and Ted's own emotional issues is, too. From what Ted has said his dad wasn't abusive; Jamie asked him something along those lines in episode two and he said no, his dad was a lot harder on himself than on Ted. But there's still something there. Right before his panic attack during the Tottenham match he was hearing that echo of Jamie's dad yelling at him. Maybe it goes further back, like, his grandfather was hard like that on his dad?

Or Ted was lying or in denial about how his dad really was. And is it possible teen Ted was a bit of a Prince Prick of All Pricks himself before he started “believing”? 

 

Also, I still have not emotionally recovered from Roy hugging Jamie. 

[Kiddvideo]

I'm wondering if Ted had a normal teenage relationship with his father (arguments, etc.) and Ted blames himself for the suicide which is why he's obsessively positive. He's thinking if only he'd gotten along with his father, he'd still be alive.

[Schweedie]

14 minutes ago, Trillium said:

Or Ted was lying or in denial about how his dad really was. And is it possible teen Ted was a bit of a Prince Prick of All Pricks himself before he started “believing”? 

Y'know, I could absolutely imagine teenage Ted being a pretty regular teenager with an attitude, who changed after his father's death, maybe due to guilt about something that happened between them.

14 minutes ago, Trillium said:

Also, I still have not emotionally recovered from Roy hugging Jamie. 

The amount of times I've rewatched the whole locker room scene is frankly embarrassing at this point. It's amazing what Phil Dunster does with only two quiet, short lines throughout. All the acting is in his face and the way he holds his body. The sheer terror on his face when his dad starts to get back up after the punch.

Also I really want to give props to the actor playing Jamie's dad. His performance in that scene makes my skin crawl.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Schweedie

[whiporee]

I have a long term Ted prediction, and it involves Christa:

I think Ted's mom is going to be a monster. Or if not a monster, the kind of person who teases and criticizes constantly and aggressively. That's why he's always working hard to please women -- Sassy's comments about his eagerness, his wife's complaints, the biscuits every morning -- because he watched his dad kill himself, and he's making a connection between his mother's behaviors and his father's suicide. He might even blame her for it. He's trying to keep the women around him happy.

So we might see Christa playing that part in a flashback.  Ted's reaction to Jamie's father might not have been a response to the way Ted's father treated him, but rather his mother. She might have been brutal on his father, and then later on Ted himself -- maybe not mean, but the kind of aggressive, heartless and attacking person Christa plays very well.  Jamie's father, after all, wasn't yelling at him like he did the last time -- he was mean-spiritedly teasing him. Ted didn't respond to the yelling; he did freak out a little after the aggressive teasing. 

Or, on a less bad note, she may have just left. But thinking about it, I think there are mommy issues at play here. Daddy ones, too, but if we get deeper into Ted, there's got to be a reason a guy like him -- so attached to family, to showing appreciation -- hasn't mentioned his mom very much. 

Just a thought.

Edited September 14, 2021 by whiporee

[KittenPokerCheater]

3 hours ago, Schweedie said:

I keep wondering what about the ugly scene between Jamie and his Dad triggered Ted so much.

You folks have great theories.  

When I watched it, I thought Ted was trigged because he was watching Jamie torn apart when he lost his father (metaphorically speaking). And Jamie's breakdown  reminded Ted of his own loss, and how he (probably) coped with his father's death by being upbeat and funny, rather than letting himself fully feel/grieve.

[DEL901]

Interest take on how Ted avoids self reflection by concentrating on others needs. 
https://www.primetimer.com/item/Ted-Lasso-reveals-its-been-about-mental-health-all-along-xXS0Xw

[nb360]

9 hours ago, MissLucas said:

[Rebecca] was more or less constantly shown agonizing over her smartphone and that's not a good look.

You know, I think you've just explained why I found the whole Bantr storyline less interesting than the others. Rebecca is a powerful, accomplished woman -- I want to see her battling other team owners and having them (mistakenly) underestimate her. 

Also, I want to know where she gets her clothes. 

[DEL901]

According to IMDB, Brett Goldstein gets co-writing credit on the next episode.  

[MissLucas]

29 minutes ago, nb360 said:

Also, I want to know where she gets her clothes. 

Good question, she's not featured on wornontv.net. And only one entry on shopyourtv. Her shoes are mostly Louboutins (of course), on another show I'd say they're knock-offs but given this show's budget they're probably the real deal. I hope Hannah Waddingham put it in her contract that she can keep Rebecca's wardrobe. I'd like to have that camel coat and the purse where you can hide dinosaur bones.

[Schweedie]

5 hours ago, DEL901 said:

According to IMDB, Brett Goldstein gets co-writing credit on the next episode.  

Given that he also wrote The Signal episode, I'm excited!

5 hours ago, nb360 said:

You know, I think you've just explained why I found the whole Bantr storyline less interesting than the others. Rebecca is a powerful, accomplished woman -- I want to see her battling other team owners and having them (mistakenly) underestimate her. 

Yeah, that's the thing that's bothering me about Rebecca this season. I get that her finding love/appreciation is a storyline that's relevant after what she went through with Rupert, but... I want to see more of the powerful businesswoman Rebecca.

[AllyB]

16 hours ago, SnarkShark said:

The short version is yes, realistically there'd be racial pushback.  The specifics being called complex and trying to work out the split of it, doesn't change that.   Racism is multifaceted in the US too.  One of the few major differences I've noticed was a stronger insistence for a long time in some quarters, only starting to wane now, that Britain was somehow post-racial. 

Britain certainly isn't post-racial but the experiences London and almost all of the rest of England are two very, very different places because the racial make ups of the populations are incomparable. Day to day in London, Rebecca and Sam are unlikely to hear a word about their different ethnicities. It's not something that would even occur to most people to be an issue one way or the other, but most especially not when there is the age difference and the boss/employee relationship, which are glaringly unusual and potentially problematic. Would there be some snarky/catty comments in certain newspapers? Absolutely, and not only in the tabloids. But while there are certain British newspapers that immediately spring to mind as being happy to jump on the racial differences, I can guarantee you that each of those newspapers has a much, much, much bigger problem with misogyny than they do with race. 

The season one joke that the papers were calling Rebecca, "old Rebecca" came from a place of reality. These are the same newspapers that ran headlines under photographs of an important meeting between Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon (respective British and Scottish Prime Ministers) about who had the best legs. The age difference would be a much, much bigger deal to these newspapers. In reality, even though Sam surely has a very good salary and solid visa, the papers would paint Rebecca as the naive ageing hasbeen, being hoodwinked by a foreign youngster out to use her for her money and passport status. (And Rebecca, is not remotely posh, she's very, very solidly middle class.)  Misogyny and Xenophobia, because those papers also have a larger recent history of xenophobia than racism. 

Would there be racist chants in the stadiums? 100% depending on the team. And it would be with a lot of teams. Racism is rife within the FA fandom. Would certain papers carefully stir up racism ahead of certain games in order to ensure they have racist chanting to report on the next day? Absolutely. But the misogyny and Sam being an immigrant would be much more blatant.

Then equally, there will be reports from the opposite end of the media, cheerleading the brilliance of their relationship. With all of the potential red flags either ignored or actually argued as positive. And that would set the stage for ongoing discussions on tv shows like Loose Women, where the presenters constantly just argue back and forth on the rights and wrongs of the relationship.

[SoMuchTV]

On 9/12/2021 at 10:10 PM, SoMuchTV said:

Am I the only one who has trouble flushing Cheers out of my mind whenever I hear “Sam and Rebecca”?

 

On 9/12/2021 at 10:28 PM, mledawn said:

Well, you aren't now!

Now it's reminding me of a throwaway joke very early in the first season.  Someone says to Ted "Cheers!" and he replies "Night Court!" I commented on it at the time but not sure if too many people caught it.

[whiporee]

11 hours ago, AllyB said:

(And Rebecca, is not remotely posh, she's very, very solidly middle class.)

No, I think she's mega rich. Private plane, chauffeurs, offering to buy the restaurant so Nate could get the good seat he wanted. The Christmas charity tour. Plus, she does own a major-league sports franchise. She's a long long long way from any middle class. She's no Beezos, but she's the richest person on the show (except for evil Giles) by far, and there are a lot of rich people on the show. 

And Sassy said so. 

[KittenPokerCheater]

36 minutes ago, whiporee said:

I think she's mega rich

She comes from money.  Didn't her father woo her mother back by giving her a Tesla?

[Crs97]

The Cheers/Night Court exchange remains one of my favorite moments.  IIRC, Sassy said Rebecca got the nickname Stinky because she was rich and new.  I’ve assumed she is quite wealthy.

[xaxat]

Not only is Rebecca wealthy, she hangs out with wealthy people. Her statement that she was going to hang out with Elton John on Christmas seemed sincere,

She's the kind of person that would get invited to the Met Gala. And look stunning on the runway.

[MissLucas]

I think I've read in an interview that Rebecca is a multimillionaire - she also has a Bentley or a Rolls (somehow I can never really catch a good look of the hood) plus never-to-be-seen chauffeur.

I've been thinking even more about Ted's triggers, an abusive father figure plays a part plus what Ted said about his father being harder on himself than on Ted. Maybe his father had a temper but was also trying to keep it under control and after one particularly bad outburst just gave up and out of guilt killed himself. 

And now I try to imagine Rebecca at the Met Gala!

[LADreamr]

1 hour ago, xaxat said:

She's the kind of person that would get invited to the Met Gala. And look stunning on the runway.

 

1 hour ago, MissLucas said:

And now I try to imagine Rebecca at the Met Gala!

Same.  I can't stop thinking about it, now.  She would have been the showstopper.

[Ms.Lulu]

1 hour ago, LADreamr said:

 

Same.  I can't stop thinking about it, now.  She would have been the showstopper.

Nothing at the Met, but great.  I love the color.