I have been feeling a little overwhelmed with work. I figure work will get done, and I do not want to stress about it. Instead of doing my work, I binge-watched Ted Lasso. It is such a heartwarming drama series. I am not a football fan and I know very little about football but the show has given me a little insight about football. It is definitely teamwork.
I omitted to unsubscribe on expiry of three months’ complimentary subscription of Apple TV plus last month and now that I had another month I decided to pick up from where I had last watched Ted Lasso. It turned out that I really liked the show. It would have been enjoyable to work on scripts like that, not that I am in the script writing business. The last time I wrote any script was in my teens and they were merely for school performance.
In Ted Lasso, Rebecca Welton becomes the new owner of AFC Richmond, a Premier League soccer team when she divorced Rupert Mannion, her philandering husband. Ted Lasso is the newly appointed manager for Richmond. Rebecca recruits Lasso, an obscure American College football coach who has no experience in coaching soccer. She hires Lasso as a manager with a view to sabotage the club’s chances of winning. The club means a lot to Rupert thus she wants the club to fail to hurt him.
Lasso is seemingly unqualified. He is unaware of the offside rule in UK football and also terminology like “into touch” rather than “out of bounds”. He is surprised that there are four countries in UK and that their players come from countries outside UK. Lasso arrives at Nelson Road Stadium together with coach Beard, his best friend. As they stand before the stadium, he is distracted by the grass that feels different from the grass back home. As Lasso settles into his role, he seeks to get to know the players and helps them grow on and off the pitch. Initially , Lasso’s hiring is not well received by the news reporters and the players. Rebecca tells everyone that things are going to change with the way things are done and that thing is the Lasso Way. When the players ignore their introduction, both coach Beard and Ted decide to decorate their offices with American football posters and they tape the ‘Believe’ poster just above their office door. He notices that there is tension between players and he is patient in trying to improve the dynamics between them.
Every morning Lasso brings fresh baked biscuits to Rebecca and he is oblivious that Rebecca wants him to fail. As the story goes, Rebecca relents seeing that how both the coaches and the players clearly want to succeed despite how diffident and demoralized they have been feeling due to the overall predictions of the season. Ted continues to work on the dynamics between the players and developing positive relationships with them by instilling confidence and imparting his personal wisdoms.
He has taken up the coaching job abroad to give his wife , Michelle some space. When he realises that his wife actually wants to divorce him, despite feeling distraught and sad, he accedes to her request. He wants to offer Michelle the chance not to feel trapped and they can both move on with life. He is shocked when he finds out that the marriage counsellor Dr Jacob whom they see to save their marriage is now in a relationship with Michelle.As he fixes the dysfunctional relationship between the team players, he has to also examine the root of his personal issues. Ted Lasso is hilarious and heartwarming. He is a mess but he has a good heart, that is what matters.
Prior to watching Ted Lasso I watched Drops of God on Apple TV plus in May . That is the other series that I absolutely loved. It made me want to read the manga comic books that it is based on. The Drops of God (神の雫, Kami no Shizuku) is a manga series about wine, written by Tadashi Agi, a pseudonym employed by creative team of sister and brother Yuko and Shin Kibayashi and illustrations by Shu Okimoto. The manga series is instructive about wine as a character and the art of pairing wine with food.
In the television adaptation , Camille Léger ‘s estranged father Alexandre Léger dies in Tokyo leaving multi-million-dollar worth of wine collection . Alexandre, a world renowned and influential wine critic has left a will instructing his daughter Camille and his talented mentee and ‘spiritual son’,Issei Tomine to compete for his legacy. The winner will take ownership of the entire inheritance worth 148 million dollars that comprises of his mansion in Tokyo, the rights to Léger wine guide, the crown jewels and a wine cellar comprising 87,000 bottles of rare and top quality wines. Why did Alexandre set them against each other? That is a mystery. He is definitely an egocentric wine connoisseur who loves wine above everything else. In the beginning Camille has a violent immune reaction to drinking alcohol. Due to some false childhood memory, Camille cannot drink alcohol without keeling over and having nosebleeds. She overcomes her psychosomatic allergy when she has a sudden epiphany that it was not her father who had forced her to drink wine as a child but she herself had drunk an entire glass in her father’s absence. Her mother, Marianne had taken her far away from Alexandre thinking that her husband was to be blamed for the drinking incident. Camille is natural and instinctive when come to her sense of smell and taste. She must have inherited her father’s nose and tastebuds. She has mixed memories of how her dad had trained her in distinguishing all the different smells and aromas by blindfolding her when she was a child. With her gifted palate and as a writer, she is able to discern subtle notes in any given wine and describe them with such flowery and poetic flair.
Issei’s passion and career choice as an enologist is very much frowned upon by his mother and grandfather who strongly disapprove him of competing for the Frenchman’s inheritance. His distant mother asks his father, Hirokazu to persuade him to withdraw himself from the competition. His father has always been supportive of him in pursuing his career choice hence he knows that his father is only following his wife’s instruction. Issei becomes angry and says some hurtful things to his father as he thinks that his father is too subservient to his mother who is not treating him well at all. His father decides to leave after being browbeaten by his wife who does not turn up for their anniversary dinner.
Neither Issei and Camille have a head start in this competition but they are both determined to win the competition. Camille is aided by two of his father’s friends, Luca Inglese and Philippe Chassangrean. Luca is Italian restaurateur who has an agenda of his own, and he has delegated his two sommeliers Miyabi and Lorenzo to prepare Camille for the competition. Miyabi and Lorenzo are funny and delightful characters. Philippe’s son Thomas trains Camille and he remembers how Camille had such natural talent as a child. Issei is not entirely without aid. As he becomes closely acquainted with Yurika, a reporter, she uses her journalistic instinct to help him unearth secrets and find his missing father.
While there are a lot of flashbacks about Camille’s childhood in the past and Issei’s parents, there is a lack of narratives about the dynamics between Issei and Alexandre. Though it is about wine, a luxurious pursuit, it is also about nature and how the weather and soil condition affect the wine making business particularly small wine makers who have put their heart and soul in making the wine only to find that the verdict lies in the hands of the wine critics. The story is about dealing with your heritage, family ties and expectations, understanding your demons, and ultimately knowing and fighting for what you are passionate about.
Drops of God the television adaptation by French-Vietnamese screenwriter Quoc Dang Tran is a stylish production that takes us on a gorgeous journey through vineyards in the fall and winter and provide insights about the wine and food business. Fleur Geffrier acts as Camille Léger and Tomohisa Yamashita acts as Issei Tomine. I read that there will be a season two to the series. Looking forward to the sequel.
Burgundy 2008
Bookaholic Macchiato 