Jason Sudeikis’ new series may be set in the UK, but it’s loaded with hometown KC

For Jason Sudeikis, promoting his hometown roots comes naturally — and frequently.

“The very first sketch I wrote as a writer on ‘Saturday Night Live’ (in 2003) took place at The Wheel in Lawrence,” says Sudeikis, who grew up in Overland Park. The “SNL” art department asked what kind of bar he wanted in the sketch, and he had one in mind. “I was like, ‘Can we make it a specific bar, The Wheel?’ And boom, we were off and running.”

Now, the nods to his hometown are baked into the premise of his latest project, the Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso,” which begins streaming Friday, Aug. 14.

The writer/actor stars as a Kansas football coach who takes on a new challenge: Coaching a British soccer club despite his ignorance of the game. Sudeikis first created the character in 2013 for promotional shorts for NBC Sports’ coverage of British Premier League soccer.

It’s filled with shout-outs to his hometown — Kansas City barbecue, friends from school — even if they sometimes caused the production agitation.

“In a classic Jason move, he wore a shirt — a barbecue shirt, I think — in a scene before we had cleared it,” says executive producer Bill Lawrence, referring to the Hollywood process of “clearing,” or getting permission, to use real-life, potentially copyrighted material on screen. “Then only afterwards did we realize, oh, shoot. I can tell you already everybody from Kansas City he’s giving shout-outs to is super happy because it’s never empty. It’s always stuff that he truly is a monster fan of to begin with.”

In a recent interview via video chat, Sudeikis says his backstory for Lasso situates the character’s hometown in the Kansas City suburbs.

“I believe he grew up in unknown parts of Kansas City,” Sudeikis says. “We’ll say on the Kansas side because I know it better.”

Lawrence, a veteran TV showrunner probably best known for NBC’s “Scrubs,” approached Sudeikis about working together. Sudeikis suggested expanding the Ted Lasso shorts into a series.

“Because football — soccer — is so big internationally, he said when he travels to shoot a movie, ‘I’m more known as Ted Lasso everywhere outside the United States than for anything I’ve ever done,’” Lawrence recalls. “I wasn’t interested right off the bat, because I thought it would just be a sketch that went on too long. And he said, ‘The trick is, I want to sucker people in, thinking that they’re gonna see that and have him be a three-dimensional character.”

Creating Ted Lasso

Sudeikis attributes the show’s existence to viewers’ appreciation for the NBC Sports shorts and encouragement from his partner, actress/director Olivia Wilde.

“It was her enthusiasm for the character,” Sudeikis says. “She was like, ‘You should do a TV show about that.’ The things that I don’t know about myself — like a good teacher, a good coach — a good partner can see something that you don’t see. And that was a perfect example of Olivia doing that for my benefit. And so that just started the wheels turning. … And then Bill Lawrence showed up at our front door and wanted to do something together, and he loved the idea of how we were going to change it from a commercial to a show.”

As Entertainment Weekly said in its glowing review, a show with its origins as a promotional video “has no right to be this funny.” And yet, the show “is a wonderfully amusing, surprisingly thoughtful sports sitcom that is, of course, not really about sports at all.”

To accomplish that, Lawrence says Sudeikis, as the show’s head writer, mapped out rules for the character: Ted is always optimistic. He’s ignorant sometimes, but never with arrogance. He’s curious to learn; he is no rube. The goal was to make the Apple TV+ version of Ted Lasso a grounded character who’s not as dumb as the Ted Lasso of the NBC Sports promos. Series Ted is earnest, forthright and sincere — like a character out of “Rudy” or “Hoosiers” — marking a sea change from TV’s anti-heroes of the past two decades.

“I don’t want to come off as being dismissive of cynical, edgy, snarky comedy. I love it. I’ve watched every episode of ‘Veep.’ … Each one of those characters is as soulless as the one before. And there is no more repugnant female lead than Selina Meyer, and I would watch her go get a coffee if they wanted to do a special of her going to Starbucks,” Lawrence begins.

“That said, part of Jason’s pitch that hooked me is what these sports movies have, besides being underdog stories traditionally, is they’re always very hopeful and optimistic in where they land. And Jason and I were both thinking, man, it would be cool to do a show like that right now, when that’s not a lot of what people are feeling in their real life.”

“Ted Lasso” was filmed entirely in England and never shows Ted back home in Kansas City in season one.

“Creatively, I would love to catch a glimpse of not only him back (home) but what it was like for him back coaching football,” Lawrence says, but he notes the real-world pandemic may hinder the ability to film anything like that in a potential second season. “The U.K. is opening for production business, and you know as well as I do that the United States is not anytime soon.”

Hints of Kansas City

Perhaps one of the more striking aspects of the Ted Lasso character is the twang in his voice.

“Even though we’re not the South, especially Kansas City, you’ll still get a nice Midwestern drawl,” Sudeikis says. “I went to Fort Scott Community College there for a little while and when you get down to southeast Kansas, it’s more prominent there or in Joplin, Missouri. You’ll hear it come out. I joke around a lot about my Midwestern mumble. My articulation has not been refined through years of dialect coaching from an acting school or anything.”

Sudeikis points out the sayings of Donnie Campbell, his high school basketball coach at Shawnee Mission West, that helped inspire some of the dialogue for Ted Lasso.

“He’d always say, ‘You guys look more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,’” Sudeikis recalls.

Mixed into that is the Oklahoma twang of the University of Kansas men’s basketball coach: “It’s probably got a little bit of Bill Self in there, if I’m being honest. But I just know folks that talk like that. And then after a couple of whiskeys, it gets more and more prominent especially when I’m back home with friends. There’s just an ease and a gentle, disarming candor to the flow of it that I’ve always liked and sort of slipped into when I’m at my most comfy.”

That might include when he’s decked out in KC gear on “Ted Lasso,” including a shirt from Three KC, the Kansas City clothing brand started by Sudeikis’ high school friend Brendan Curran.

“Yeah, I wear a couple of his shirts throughout the program,” Sudeikis says, including the barbecue joint mashup shirt, Joe Arthur GATESTACK, which he also wore on stage at last year’s Big Slick Celebrity Weekend auction. “As a person that gets asked the question, what’s your favorite barbecue place? It’s a tough question. It’s as tough as being asked what football club you support in the U.K. I mean, you can accidentally start a fight that you did not see coming. And so that shirt is probably the best version of my answer for the last 15 years.”

In addition to multiple Kansas City references in Lasso’s wardrobe, the show includes a wealth of what appears to be product placement but it’s largely for fake companies, particularly the non-existent Dubai Air. Lawrence says the real-life Premier League jerseys and stadiums are decked out in product placement, which inspired Sudeikis to do the same for filming on set and around Richmond, a part of London.

“Jason is a minutia guy and he had so much fun creating the fake products,” Lawrence says. “There’s a fake, caffeinated vodka we invented, and when we left Richmond, there were still some of the fake posters that we made out and about in the city that people I know confusedly walked by and were like, ‘Caffeinated vodka? Not a bad idea, keeps you from getting sleepy.’ Jason was way into that.”

Wichita State, sort of

“Ted Lasso” plants another seemingly real (but actually fake) brand in Lasso’s backstory. Ted moves to England to coach the Richmond soccer club after taking the Wichita State Shockers football team to the Rose Bowl. Wichita State hasn’t fielded an NCAA Division I football team since 1986.

“I think initially it was gonna be Pitt State because Pitt State has a long history of a great football team, and in my time at Fort Scott, Kansas, I got to know Pittsburg, Kansas, pretty well because that’s where the Taco Bell was, a whole half-hour away. So if I wanted a chalupa I had to head all the way down there.

“Maybe some type of ‘local boy done good’ Kansas karma came in our favor (with Wichita State),” Sudeikis continues. “We got to use the logo and everything and I like the fact that they don’t have a football team — just like AFC Richmond is fake, too — which allows us to create this mythology for Ted. I did not know (they didn’t have a football team) initially but then I was like, that’s pretty great. They do now and they went undefeated last year. They won the Rose Bowl in 2019. So if that gets on their Wikipedia page, then I think we’ve done something very important.”

Sudeikis also managed to work the names of old friends into “Ted Lasso,” including a tribute to his buddy Chris Sines. Ted’s assistant coach, Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), sports a KC Sines Original hat in some scenes.

“I’ve known Chris since fifth grade. We played high school basketball together. We played college basketball together,” Sudeikis says. “He was the guy who’d drive me to Pitt State for tacos. He’d fly, I’d buy, as my dad would say.”

When Sudeikis wants to put Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue sauce or a photo of their restaurant in a scene, Sudeikis says it just requires a phone call.

“As any Kansas City person knows, you’re one degree of separation away from someone, right? So I was able to speak to the owner and he kindly offered us to use whatever we wanted, however we wanted it.

“I think some of these connections that I made, the karmic payback of the kindness of people to allow us (to use these things), probably rattled these L.A. Warner Bros. lawyers,” Sudeikis says. “It makes me seem like I’ve got more power, like who knows what secrets I know about these people, but it’s really just Kansas City folks looking out for Kansas City folks.”

Freelance writer Rob Owen: RobOwenTV@gmail.com or on Facebook and Twitter as RobOwenTV.

This story was originally published August 9, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Jason Sudeikis’ new series may be set in the UK, but it’s loaded with hometown KC."