Ted Lasso & Emily in Paris vs Henry Kissinger

What its most popular TV says about America in 2023

Artwork by Alex Naughton

You know the story. The plucky, optimistic, and charmingly naive American arrives into a hostile foreign culture.

After struggling to decode an alien milieu riddled with cynicism and limited ambition, after mis-steps where the Yanks fail but are never quite defeated, they win hearts and prevail.

They do not integrate, they dominate. They refuse to drink tea, speak proper French, or abandon their high ideals or fundamental belief in people. What is crucial to their victory is that they never compromise on their American-ness, which is always the key to their eventual victory.

When you think about it, Ted Lasso and Emily in Paris are essentially the same story - one told through football and the other through Parisian Fashion - something that hadn’t occurred to me until my wife pointed it out.

This is Dall-E’s best take on Ted Lasso crossed with Emily in Paris

Both are shows that many people profess to hate, not least because their general tone and manner is best described as a ‘sunshine enema’,¹ and yet feel impelled to watch. But Ted and Emily’s significance is about more than just viewing figures. Ted Lasso and Emily in Paris are to 2023 America what James Bond was to post-war Britain.

It was no coincidence that James Bond became a popular icon when Britain’s empire was on the wane - 007 offered a soothing alternative to declining economic and military dominance, a world where the UK had immense influence in saving the world behind the scenes even if it couldn’t dominate the international stage as it once had. Shows about perky and optimistic Americans making friends and influencing people abroad start to assume a different meaning when you map them alongside the curve of history, and compare them to American popular entertainment from earlier eras.

24 now seems like a time capsule for the post 9/11 America, an audiovisual bullet train perennially hurtling towards some moral cliff edge where the ends always justify the means: every episode demanded human rights infringements from Jack Bauer for the sake of National Security, and when you laid it alongside the horrors of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib it isn’t hard to see how they ended up there.

Homeland was the cultural reflection of the Obama years, with its drone strikes, ethical grey areas and ambivalence about America’s global purpose, its murky explorations of where cause and effect overlapped when it came to keeping America safe. It was a fictional version of the ‘Are we the baddies?’ sketch from Mitchell and Webb.

Viewed in this light, Ted and Emily are fictional avatars for how a certain kind of American wants to see themselves - an output of the liberal and progressive panic about its role in the world. After a series of failed forever wars that have ground to stalemates, after 4 long years of Donald Trump wrecking their international standing, the last decade or so has been hard on people who just want to see the USA as one of the good guys. These shows are a halftime pep talk by America to America, and a reminder to the wider world of what it has to offer at its best: a global power that is not only interested in foreign countries, but actually wants to spend some time in them and help make them better. America still wants to believe.

I don’t mean to suggest that any of this is a bad thing. For reasons I won’t go into, in my day job I’ve had to do a fair bit of thinking about what it is about America that remains compelling, appealing and attractive to people from other countries. I’ve lived there twice, once in Texas and once in California, and the creative agency where I ply my trade is a US-founded one with a mile-wide streak of America in its spirit, values and the creative work it produces.

I disagree with the American attitude to vacation, the needlessly gargantuan size of their food portions, the way their cities are planned, their out-dated notions of British gastronomy, and their general inability to sell bread that hasn’t been sweetened with corn syrup. I think their chocolate tastes like shit, deplore the batshit nature of their politics, and remain horrified by their utter inability to remove firearms from their civic life and politics.

But god, I also love their swagger and the optimism, the restlessness and creative energy, the sheer scale and ambition of the American project. I love their friendliness and optimism. At their best, I envy Americans the simplicity of their national story, and the clarity of their ideas about themselves. I am, it’s fair to say, about as much of a believer in the promise of America - the bring me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The Shining City on The Hill - as it’s possible to be without being a total sucker.

This makes me odd because generally the British love nothing more than a good whinge about Americans:

“We spend endless hours either carping about it or quite properly noticing its many faults. We spend much less time looking under the hood – as Americans would say – and examining what it is that makes pretty much everyone in the world still want to live there, that makes it such a cultural superpower, that makes it so attractive. One of the things that impressed me about America is they genuinely think things can be improved, whereas most of us Brits just think everything’s falling apart: we just need to fall apart as gently as we can……That sense of the ability of human beings to do stuff and make things better…..when you see it up close in America itself, it’s fascinating as a cultural difference. ” - Justin Webb, reflecting on the legacy of Alistair Cooke²

And I still believe that the world needs America, a view that has become increasingly unfashionable - and not without good reasons. The theatre for America’s biggest and most spectacular blunders has often been foreign countries. Anyone seeking a rich buffet of evidence about the negative effects of American intervention abroad can feast on the smorgasbord of Roast Henry Kissinger that has been served up over the last week since the Eminence Grise of American Realpolitik died. The type of America that Kissinger helped craft was one untethered to any principles other than its own power and security, and capable of horrific behaviour in support of those goals whilst crouching behind a shield of assumed moral superiority.

And even if some of its foreign interventions began with good intentions, we all know what the road to hell is paved with. American idealism is no guarantee of harmlessness when it comes to foreign countries. It’s hard to find a better skewering of this idealism and over-reach than Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American:

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”

Even when there have perhaps been more idealistic and less cynical motives driving American adventurism, it can still go belly-up. The botched pull-out of Afghanistan was the latest chapter in this story of disastrous foreign entanglements: it was especially poignant watching the slow-motion implosion of another attempt at regime change whilst reading George Packer’s Our Man, which explores the question of whether the world benefits or suffers from American intervention via Richard Holbrooke, one of the nearly-great-men of American politics.

“That’s always been the weak spot of our Foreign Service—other countries. It’s hard to get Americans interested in them, and the more interested you get, the worse your career prospects. Strange for a country of immigrants from everywhere. But to become American the new arrivals have to erase the past. We wipe out this immense store of knowledge about the rest of the world and lose ourselves in the endless drama of America the Exceptional. So other countries are never quite real to us.”

Yes, when you revisit some of their most horrendous international errors, you might be forgiven for wishing Uncle Sam would just leave the rest of the world alone. It’s hard to look back at the errors of yesteryear and wish for a world where a cynical America uses human rights as a justification for bombing foreign countries to rubble. The world is increasingly shifting to a multi-polar one when were no single nation is the pre-eminent world power. Post January 6th, a good chunk of the US population no longer seems to care about democracy, and so its lectures to other countries on the topic sound increasingly hollow. Fewer countries are prepared to tolerate an America which, to quote Reinhold Niebuhr, sees itself “as the tutor of mankind on its pilgrimage to perfection.”³

But there has always been the capacity, over the course of American history, for it to take an inward turn that is not only hermetic but ugly and mean, the ‘America First’ that is already popular in many places. This America is currently embodied by a Republican Party trying to undermine support for the Ukraine, and I prefer the alternative.

No, the world does not want a cynical America riding roughshod over foreign countries using international order as moral carte blanche. But we do need an ambitious, engaged and optimistic one leveling the full range of its capacities where it matters. It’s not just Americans that want to believe in this better America: when you look at the data, their reputation might have taken in a hit over the last 20 years, but a majority of people in many other countries still do too⁴.

Watching their response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine felt like a reassuring return to a sense of responsibility to its allies. Over the last months of horror in Israel and Palestine, the world’s eyes have turned westwards to watch Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken saddle up and sally forth once more as the world’s mediators, the one nation that everyone is hoping might bring some stability to a terrible geopolitical mess of barbarism and war crimes. Whether or not it will succeed, and to what extent America is partly culpable for the current situation unfolding, I will leave for another time. But what matters is that in some way the country still wants, or believes, that it has a responsibility to try.

In a recent statement laying out his belief in this more engaged international role, President Biden⁵, embodied the same old mix of idealism and hubris that has always characterised such behaviour abroad.

It was hard not to read it without the sense of history being about to repeat itself, as both tragedy and farce. But we are living through a crucial era with global-scale challenges when it comes to security, conflicts, energy, climate change and the existential questions of the AI race. Right now, which country on earth has the ambition, the will, or the sheer chutzpah required to tackle such problems?

The world doesn’t need more of America’s hubris, its cultural myopia, or its arrogance. But I believe that we do still need America’s vision, its ambition, its optimism and ability to build and create, and its leadership too. Perhaps it’s always been the case that you don’t get those upsides without suffering the downsides as well - but I don’t want to face the challenges of the 21st Century without the nation that put people on the moon and helped rebuild Europe after the Second World War.

Next year’s Presidential election feels like another epic battle for the soul of The Republic and The Shining City on The Hill. A few voters in swing states will decide which America we get, and the one they choose will have an impact on the war in the Ukraine, the Middle-East, and many other places beside. It’s a cheap joke to claim that the American election is far too globally important to be left to Americans, but seldom have the hopes of so many been laden on the shoulders of so few. It’s maybe hoping for too much that undecided voters in those swing states might seek to escape from six months of political shit-fighting and attack ads via some light relief from a football coach in Richmond or a clueless fashionista in Paris.

Hate the shows all you want, but I would rather that the America embodied in its moustachioed and beret’d characters - wide-eyed, optimistic, engaged in the world beyond its borders even if it doesn’t fully understand it - is the one that wins at the ballot box.

In John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire, an Austrian describes the distinguishing characteristic of American literature as being “a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness”. It’s there in the literature because it’s part of the national soul, and it will always remain both a strength and a weakness.

We still need America’s giddy and illogical hopefulness on an international scale. It might seem ridiculous and irrational - but it’s also highly effective, and the only way that anything will ever change for the better.

Thank you for reading.

1. https://www.economist.com/culture/2023/10/27/a-golden-age-of-tv-is-losing-its-shine

2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/25/letter-from-america-justin-webb-alistair-cooke

3. https://www.noemamag.com/what-comes-after-liberalism/

4. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-views-of-biden-and-u-s-largely-positive/#:~:text=In%20the%20third%20year%20of,they%20lack%20confidence%20in%20him.

5. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/20/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-unites-states-response-to-hamass-terrorist-attacks-against-israel-and-russias-ongoing-brutal-war-against-ukraine/