Ted Lasso: Is Your Screenplay Idea Good Enough?

Ted Lasso: Is Your Screenplay Idea Good Enough? What's interesting about Ted Lasso is that on the surface it is not exactly the newest, freshest, most original idea at all. On the surface, Ted Lasso is actually just Major League. Sure, it takes place in soccer rather than in baseball, but you essentially have the exact same setup. You have the nasty owner who has inherited her husband's team and is now trying to drive it into the ground. You have the unsuspecting coach who's trying to win with the Bad News Bears of soccer, who ends up turning his team around against the odds. It's the same story. It’s just Major League.  Yet, Ted Lasso is able to hit a place of transcendence that we rarely see in a 30-minute comedy. Ted Lasso is actually able to do things that Major League—as funny as it may have been—doesn't manage to achieve. As screenwriters, we all have this desire to write something "really good.” We have this fear that maybe our ideas aren't good enough.  Of course, this fear gets exacerbated by the screenwriting industry which says, “What's your logline? What's your outline? What's your treatment? Show us the plan. Show us how you know this is going to be good. What differentiates your work? Why is this different? Why today? Why now?” We have all of these voices chattering in our heads telling us what our script is supposed to be.  We're starting out with a little baby script and it's still kind of drooling on itself. It doesn't walk right yet. The truth is, at this early stage, it is just a reboot of whatever your equivalent of Major League is, or inspired by something else you’ve seen on TV or in the movies, sometimes consciously and sometimes not consciously. It's probably riddled with clichés, not that you put in on purpose, but that you just kind of inherited. Sure, sometimes the brilliant idea for a script or a TV show just comes to you, but so often our initial ideas are just not that good. It's easy to feel “Well, what am I supposed to do? I don't want to start writing some crappy idea that's not going to take me anywhere. I have to keep figuring out the idea. I need the better idea. I don't have the right idea.”  If the screenwriting gods are kind, and they come down and they give you the perfect idea, please take it! say, “Thank you. Thank you, screenwriting gods. I will take this and run with it. I will turn it into something beautiful.” But sometimes the screenwriting gods are not kind. Sometimes they only give you a piece of an idea, or a thought that’s maybe even been seen before but that for some reason you want to write. Don't run away from that! Don't allow the most insecure part of you to cut you off from the direction you need to take. Having worked with thousands of writers, from little baby writers to Academy and Tony Award-winning writers, it is my sincere belief that you can make anything good.  Even some of the best writers in the industry hit that place where they don't know how to make it work. It doesn't feel like a good enough idea anymore.  If that happens to you, what I want you to remember is that you can make anything good if you are willing to push on it hard enough. If you take the movie Mannequin and you push on it hard enough, it turns into Lars and the Real Girl.  If you take the movie Major League and you push on it hard enough, it turns into Ted Lasso.  Don't try to find the idea that’s good enough. Even if you think you've got a brand new idea for a screenplay or a show, the chances are, early in its development, that someone’s seen something like it or someone's thought of it before.  Darwin came up with the idea of evolution, but a lot of people don't know that some other dude actually beat him to it, the dude whose name you'll never know (unless you listen to my podcast about “