During their time on SNL, I kind of hated Will Forte, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. Every major iteration of the show’s cast seems to include at least a few interchangably bland white guys… every now and then one of them will emerge as an underrated performer —the tragic, brilliant Phil Hartman— but for the most part, they quickly fade into obscurity.

When Forte’s Last Man On Earth turned out to be both unpredictable and approximately 1,000x funnier than any MacGruber garbage Lorne Michaels made him crap out, I was shocked. When Hader’s Barry turned into a critical darling, I was modestly impressed.

But Ted Lasso? My mind is blown. Jason Sudeikis can be endearing and quietly funny and even moving when he feels like it? What the hell?

Naturally, I refuse to give Sudeikis full credit… he conceived the core characters and the situation, but showrunner Bill Lawrence’s fingerprints are everywhere on this thing. Lasso himself has been converted from the amiable, one-joke good-ol’-boy-out-of-water that Sudeikis created into what is, essentially, a male version of Molly Clock from Scrubs. Roy Kent is a 2020-ready, post-toxic-masculinity iteration of Perry Cox. Rebecca Welton and Rupert Mannion combined form a Voltron version of Bob Kelso.

(There are probably some Cougar Town references I’m missing, because, well… I did my duty to my generation by watching Friends repeatedly back in the day, but that’s as far as I go with Courtney Cox.)

The result actually feels a lot like Bill Lawrence looking at his most beloved creation —the aforementioned Percival Ulysses Cox— and deciding to dissect and dismantle every testosterone-fueled, anger-soaked, chest-thumping lesson that Dr. Cox ever taught his underlings. The men in Ted Lasso’s world are unmistakably men, but they’re allowed to have conversations about things other than fucking, winning, or going down with the ship… their world views encompass compromise and kind persuasion and open-mindedness and a fundamental optimism about the value of pursuing a common purpose.

Yeah, the writing gets sloppy in places; like any show set in England and written by over-confident American anglophiles, there are occasional bits of dialogue that sound off. And the show criminally wastes Anthony Head, who is simply an evil-minded bastard and nothing more. But everything else is a delight that leaves me feeling faintly hopeful about the concept of hope.

(Aside: between this and Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, Apple TV+ has clearly figured out the comedy side of their business.)