Using Data Analytics To Figure Out If Twitter Thinks Ted Lasso Is Bad Now
Ted Lasso is Apple TV+’s breakthrough hit comedy series in which Jason Sudeikis, the titular Ted Lasso, plays an American Football coach hired to manage an English Premier League Football team, the fictional AFC Richmond. The first season was highly praised for its optimism and feel-good factor, especially since it was released when people needed that kind of thing. Everyone who watched the first season loved it, including me. It’s been nominated for a lot of Emmys. And on the 23rd of July, 2021, episodes from season 2 began being released.
The reception to Season 2 is decidedly more mixed. Some praise the season as being a perfect continuation of the first in tone and quality. Others criticize it for being conflict-averse, and for leaning far too much into its reputation for being warm and positive. Only five out of a total of twelve episodes of this season have aired so far. I’ve seen every single episode of this show. I know what I think about it so far. But what does Twitter think?
I collected 169,230 tweets from 23rd July 2021, when the first episode of the new season was released, to 25th August 2021. Since I really don’t have the time to go over each and every tweet, I’ve used Python’s flair package, which performs machine-learning based sentiment analysis meaning that it’s more capable of picking up on the meaning of sequences of words in a sentence.
On Twitter, reception to the show appears to be majorly positive. In all there are around 111,000 positive tweets and 55,000 negative tweets. I looked through some of the tweets marked ‘negative’ and really, a lot of them are mislabeled, so the real number of negative tweets is almost certainly even lower. However, there are two very noticeable spikes in negative tweets. One on August 9th and one on the 24th of August. They’re too large to all be simply mislabeled tweets, so I looked at the tweets in those half-hour periods. The reasons behind these spikes are quite amusing.
On August 9th the official twitter account for Ted Lasso tweeted this:
In the show, Ted Lasso is established as being a staunch tea-hater, so people had a lot of fun with this tweet, replying with pretend-shock, pretend-horror and pretend-callout posts, which are all visible in the replies of that tweet. Poor flair has lived up to the stereotype of robots not understanding sarcasm and marked these tweets as negative.
As for the reason for the second spike on the 24th? It’s as weird and Twitter-like as the other one was wholesome and in keeping with the show’s tone.
Communications exec Carol Blymire tweeted this in response to a thread criticizing the show
Which caught more and more attention and led to people poking fun at the obviously ridiculous tweet. Even the official Ted Lasso account joined in. But it also seems to have led to people using Carol’s tweet as an example of the defensiveness of some fans towards criticism of the show.
As well as mocking the arguably hyperbolic praise surrounding the show
There are a lot of tweets in this vein now, criticizing the audience of the show and the rapturous praise it gets as much as the actual quality of the show, if not more.
So now we know why those specific spikes in negativity happened, but what does a normal day of Ted Lasso criticism look like? And for that matter, what are these 111K odd positive tweets saying? To find out, I calculated the likelihood of phrases being used in a positive or negative context. These are the most likely positive and negative phrases
On the positive side, things look quite like you’d expect. ‘Roy Kent’ is higher up than ‘Ted Lasso’ meaning that he’s Twitter’s favourite character right now. Juno Temple is also the only actor in the cast who makes an appearance, meaning that she’s Twitter’s favourite cast member. One more point of interest is that the Christmas episode ‘Carol of The Bell’s makes two appearances on the positive side, meaning that despite the bad press it got in some corners, on Twitter, it was largely positively received.
But what’s going on in the negative half? Why is Ryan Reynolds of all people at the very top of the list?
On the 21st of August, he tweeted this
Which led to a lot of jokey ‘HOW COULD YOU?’ meaning that poor, sarcasm-challenged flair took those tweets at face-value and marked them as negative. This explains co-owner Rob McElhenney’s appearance as well. Diane Sawyer’s appearance a bit lower down on this list is because of a joke as well.
In fact the only genuine criticism comes from the appearance of ‘dog’ a reference to Season 2 opening with a dog being accidentally killed and the incident mostly being played for laughs. This rubbed some people the wrong way, and some negativity ensued. Even the phrase “the backlash” is more to do tweets about a backlash rather than any actual backlash-y tweets, like ‘Even though the backlash has begun, I still think the show’s OK’.
There is definitely a sense that the tide is turning, as we saw in negative responses surrounding Carol’s tweet, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more critical tweets directed at the show’s audience and the rapturous praise around it, and about the show’s perceived decline in quality (especially since season 2 so far is not as funny theres no conflict and there are no consequences for anything ok rant over)
Conclusion
Twitter loves Ted Lasso. Twitter might love Ted Lasso less by the time the season ends. There will be a lot of sarcastic tweets and we may even get a meme or two out of it.
