In the waning months of 2020, all television and movies became a grayish blur of mediocrity. I mean, how could it compete with the madness of a divisive election season held in the middle of a global pandemic arena? It was only when I stumbled upon a quote from a former Daily Show host that I realized what we all crave:
“The enemy is noise. The goal is clarity.” – Jon Stewart
When we feel like everything is just pure noise, cacophonous and bright and demanding of our attention, we feel adrift. But the beauty of clarity is it only takes one thing. One line, one show, one movie – just one. As we approached 2021, unsure of what the new year would bring, my wife and I were gifted with two doses of clarity from two very different, yet exceptionally-made TV shows: Halt and Catch Fire and Ted Lasso.
From the first episode of Christopher Cantrell and Chris R. Rogers’ four-season masterpiece, we hear a line that will echo throughout: “Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets you to the thing.” Through the first season, we see our main characters collapse together to go all-in on the pursuit of creating a computer twice as fast for half the cost. It’s incredibly ambitious, and HACF repeatedly shows us how many roadblocks must be overcome to get to the finish line. But what threatens to derail these advancements are not just engineering problems yet to be solved; they’re human relationships either starving for something or inundated with overcompensation. They all lead to the true engineering problem at the heart of us all: how do we lead a happy, meaningful existence?
What’s brilliant about the seasons that follow is that they all dance around tech problems we already know have been solved. As a result, we know they will fail and we can instead focus on the cost of the relationships that are lost and built in the pursuit. When Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) fights to include a very rudimentary, Siri-like personality in the first season’s new computer, we recognize what she’s doing and just how right she might be. In the second season, when we see Cameron and Donna develop their own company and build Community, we can see the birth of social media and sites like Craigslist. When it goes even further in the third season with market valuations and privacy concerns, we know they’re dancing around the kind of things we commonly accuse Facebook and other media companies of not valuing. By the fourth season, we know they’re going to miss the event of creating something special. It’s the Halt and Catch Fire way: our characters might be fighters, but history is an undefeated foe. Instead of trying to invent something anew, the HACF team uses the forms of modern-day technology to show just how close so many people were to the winning idea. It is, as Rogers once said, a “tribute to the losers.”
I’d argue computers are the thing that gets them to the human connection and safety they crave. And the deeply ironic thing the show so beautifully and heartbreakingly lays out is how a team of people can work so hard to connect others while pushing each other apart. We see a great deal of ideas destroy marriages, friendships, and business partnerships. And yet we watch as the same tools that destroyed them build them back up again.
When The Losers Get to Rewrite History
Across the pond, we got to see another delightful tribute to losers in Ted Lasso. I’ve long believed that sports are a safe arena for big emotions. While men are known to be more reserved for the most part, ‘reserved’ is not something you see when their favorite teams are losing in the final, shocking seconds of a game. Often you see sides of a person you’ve never before witnessed. Sometimes it’s exhilarating. Sometimes it’s deeply concreting. All of it goes to show that sports are the thing that gets many to the thing – which is actual human and emotional connection.
When I think about the NBA, I still cannot tell you how certain plays are run. That’s not why I watch. I don’t particularly care about most of the statistics and what they mean. What I do care about are the players. And what makes the NBA a season that runs the whole year – the preseason, season, playoffs, and delicious off-season – is the human drama weaved through it all. Will certain players prove themselves? Will they get traded? Will they air their grievances on Twitter or upload a hilariously opaque post on Instagram?
When Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) arrives in England, the joke is already written all over it. The pilot is smart enough to acknowledge it upfront at a press conference: why is an American football coach being brought in to coach English football? It’s a joke that doesn’t seem to quite hold up to reality. It’s a premise that would never pass in the real world. But somehow TED LASSO makes you believe it. And it does it by instinctively understanding that sports – this special Richmond AFC team – is what gives people not so much what they want, but what they truly need. It is the thing that gets them to the thing.
For owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), she starts off committed to ruining the football team her ex-husband loved so dearly. She wants to run it so far into the ground it becomes the roots for her resurrection. But while she wants her team to be an embarrassment, what she needs to learn is her mission only goes to show how much power her ex still has over her. Her team isn’t her life. Her team is a way to motivate her to the unencumbered and well-intentioned existence she clearly craves.
Ted Lasso arrives, all unassailable optimism and Midwest charm, it doesn’t seem like anything could possibly take him down. But we come to find out he’s in the middle of a divorce he cannot solve. There is no rah-rah-ing his way out of this one. No handy metaphor or clever pun he can use to make sense of it all. The team teaches him to let go of some things – such as his asshole of a star player – so that something better can grow in its place.
When a certain veteran player suffers an injury in what may be his final game, he’s determined to sit in the locker room alone. His new girlfriend, knowing he needs something he will absolutely fight against, comes down and sits by him, holding him close. The player does everything he can to tell her to leave, but his body tells a different story: it sits, motionless, desperate for someone to hold it and give it warmth. Roy needed the team to get him to what he really needed. He wouldn’t be in the healthy place he ends up in without them.
I could go on and on with every character in this wonderful show. They all come in broken in some way, and they all end the season still a bit broken but broken together. The team is not the thing. The team is the thing that gets them to the thing – the true understanding of themselves and the human connection they need to ground them through their toughest challenges.
Just as I grew to love Ted Lasso and his team (“Football is life!”), I grew to empathize and at times love our rag-tag HATC team of hotshot visionary Joe McMillan (Lee Pace), brilliant yet troubled engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and his equally brilliant yet deeply underrated wife, Donna Clark (Kerry Bishé), of hot-shit talented coder Cameron Howe (Davis) and her inability to get out of our own way. Rounding all of this out was Boz (Toby Huss), the coolest cucumber from the hot state of Texas. All five characters had long-spanning, deep-rooted character arcs. The Joe McMillian in Season One and in Season Four are almost unrecognizable to each other, but the core remains the same.
2020 is a year that broke a lot of things. Records we didn’t want to break. Records that gave us hope. Spirits we are barely holding onto into a year of unknowns. But I am thankful, in the closing months of a wild, unforgettable year, we had Ted Lasso and Halt and Catch Fire to remind us, over and over again, the thing you want is just the thing that gets you what you really need. For them, it was human connection. For us, it was clarity amidst the noise; a reminder of the true meaning behind the whir of our lives.
