University High graduate helps bring smash-hit ‘Ted Lasso’ to the screen
Robbie Stevenson was a big fan of Jason Sudeikis’ commercials for the Premier League even before he saw his first script of the “Ted Lasso” series.
Those promotional shorts, produced for the NBC Sports Network, produced some great one-liners from Sudeikis’ fictional American football coach, hired to take over as head of Tottenham Hotspur.
“How many countries are in this country?” Sudeikis deadpans, in a folksy Southern accent, when he’s told one of his star players is from Wales.
It was the last scene of the first episode of the show built from that character that hooked Stevenson, a University High School graduate who had just completed post-production work on the “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” series for Amazon. The hopelessly optimistic college football coach phones his son from England, and it’s hinted that his marriage is on the rocks.
“We all expected a 30-minute Jason Sudeikis comedy with a little bit of sports inclusion,” Stevenson, 32, said from his home in Los Angeles earlier this month. “What it blew up to be was a way bigger show.”
The 11-time Emmy winning series is wrapping its third season on Apple TV+, and as post-production supervisor, Stevenson has the job of putting the final artistic touches on the episodes. They’re then sent to air on the streaming service at 9 p.m. Pacific each Tuesday, with this week’s installment the third to last of the season.
It’s a season that is expected to end the story arc of Lasso, coach of the fictitious Richmond AFC, and his club of loyal, but broken, players, coaches and owners.
“This is, in the best way to put it, wrapping up the story they set out to tell,” Stevenson said, referring to the show’s developers Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly.
Stevenson’s mom, Leslie Lowe, said she, too, was immediately hooked by the series.
“It just instantly draws you in,” said Lowe, who is the chief forecaster at KHQ-TV. “You think it’s going to be one thing, and then all of a sudden, it switches.”
“I think it’s a show we all need right now,” she added. “We need some positive, kind things in the world.”
Sudeikis and the team are meticulous about their scripts, Stevenson said, but there is room for some improvisation. He used the example of when Sudeikis, as Lasso, orders “a double and a single in one” at a bar, making pincers with his fingers. Then, the straight line: “a triple.”
“I do think that comedies can be sometimes more intricate with detail and editing,” said Stevenson, whose credits also include the action-comedy series “Future Man” for Hulu.
That can include lingering on a character’s reaction for just the right amount of time, or switching the focus to someone else, Stevenson said. He described the process of post-production like the idea of the “multiverse,” a concept recently made popular by Marvel and the Oscar-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” in which multiple versions of a scene are occurring in real-time.
“I’ve seen every single episode of every show I’ve worked on a thousand different ways,” Stevenson said. With “Ted Lasso,” there’s the added challenge of visual effects work to simulate the matches, made in partnership with the Premier League. This season is supported by a licensing deal between the show and the league, allowing for use of logos, archival footage, uniforms and more.
Stevenson took some classes at Spokane Falls Community College after graduating from University High School in 2009. He then went to the Virgin Islands, he said, where he did some event planning, which prepared him for being involved in post-production and juggling several different quality-control tasks at once.
Stevenson said he’s anxious for fans to see the final episode of the season, scheduled to premiere May 30.
He’s quick to point out, however, that the end of the story arc doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world inhabited by Lasso and Richmond.
“The final episode is massive. It’s a big one,” he said. “It’s been like working on the ‘Ted Lasso’ finale movie.”