This Is Not a Post About…
This is not a blog post about Ted Lasso.
No, it’s not at all. It’s a post about how much I like Ted Lasso, and about how much I didn’t expect to like it. When Joe saw the first ads for it and eagerly showed them to me, I scoffed at the show. Another cheesy sports show with a goofy lead actor who doesn’t know what he’s doing yet endears himself to everyone. I pass.
Until I started actually watching the show, and I couldn’t stop. I invested in the characters and the plot and was righteously offended by the end of Season Two, which still didn’t stop me from starting at the beginning of Season One and going through it all over again. The BELIVE sign makes me happy every time I see it. Joe and I loved that show so much that he bought us matching T-shirts with Ted Lasso’s face on them, and a Roy Kent shirt for me. Roy is my absolute favorite character…if I make myself choose.
I don’t watch TV that often, and so it was really, really fun to sort of lose myself in this story and these characters. I looked forward to watching every night and to talking about the show and the characters with my husband. I looked up show merch and enjoyed Brett Goldstein’s Instagram account from when he went to Sesame Street and spent time with Oscar the Grouch.
This kind of fun obsession/hobby is the subject of Tabitha Craven’s new book, This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch. The object of her affection is, of course, Benedict Cumberbatch, but the book is a collection of essays that moves beyond why she loves him. It looks at how she came to fall in love with him when she was a new mother trying to hold on to some sense of self, and it examines why people, but especially women, seemed ashamed or afraid of passions like these that don’t have a clear, straightforward benefit to anyone beyond the person who’s fallen in love. It’s a book about why we should have these passions. It’s a book about chasing joy and delight and throwing off the opinions of others to chase down this bliss.
This is a thin book and a fast read, and it looks at everything from fanfiction to the difference between hobbies and obsessions, and especially at how what women love is too often treated with less seriousness than what men love, as well as how men don’t tend to make themselves feel guilty for pursuing hobbies like women sometimes do. It was so interesting and sad to consider how we underplay our interests because we worry about how it will be judged.
I thoroughly enjoyed this fun look at pop culture and this really personal look at how anything can bring us joy, if we are willing to let ourselves just love what we love, without worry or shame.
