By Brandi Wylie ‘24
Dr. John Lefebvre, professor of psychology, has broken the Apple TV hit series, “Ted Lasso,” down into three main ideas: positivity, soccer and improvisational acting.
Twenty students used Wofford College’s four-week Interim semester to explore the series with Lefebvre.
With written permission from Apple TV, Lefebvre and his class watched the show together and discussed several components of the first two seasons.
“I would go over a concept, such as improvisational comedy, and have the class practice it,” Lefebvre says. “Then, they would see it in the episode later that class period, and it would all make sense.”
Lefebvre did this with many topics throughout the course, and he dedicated three months before it started studying and becoming as informed as he could on those topics.
“This course has been very expansive,” says Barrett Funderburg ’24, a finance and government double major from Charlotte, North Carolina. “We not only studied the show, but we studied subjects like soccer.”
This was Funderburg’s third time watching the show, so he came prepared to discuss his prior knowledge as well as learn new ideas.
“It’s also been fun to be in this class because everyone was so involved and into the ideas,” Funderburg says. “Everyone’s been engaged each day.”
After studying the show together, the class broke off into pairs and presented their predictions for what they believe season three, the last season of the show, will entail.
Several of the students agreed on components of the show’s potential, future ending, such as Ted Lasso returning to the United States from London and Roy and Keeley breaking up and getting back together.
Other students got creative with their approach and had mythical creatures such as dragons appear in the show’s finale
Lefebvre saw the joy that came from each student watching the feel-good show, and he hopes that the feeling starts a ripple effect on Wofford’s campus.
He sees the character of Ted Lasso as a genuinely good person, caring about the world and the people in it. Because of this, he challenged his students to think, “How would you apply the positivity in Lasso on campus?”