Series · Prime Video · 2020

Ted Lasso

Decency as a strategy. It works better as a character than as a theory of everything.

Lasso's actual virtue is that he will not use a person's weakness as the joke, even when the room expects it. That is worth learning. The show then inflates it until niceness is supposed to heal a marriage, a club, and a personality disorder by the finale. Take the locker-room standard. Decline the miracle.

The eight

Industry
6/10
Coaching, training, a club that has to be run.
Household
4/10
A failed marriage back home. The team becomes the substitute house.
Piety
4/10
Belief, in a secular key. He means it.
Courage
6/10
He absorbs the mockery and stays.
Republic
5/10
A club is a small polity. The locker room has rules.
Temperance
5/10
Kindness is the discipline. The show sometimes thinks kindness replaces standards.
Truth
6/10
He tells the truth in a mode other people can hear.
Stewardship
5/10
He is trying to leave the club better. The diamond is still about him.

Live historicallyThis week, refuse one joke at someone who is not in the room to answer it.

Series · Prime Video · 2010

America: The Story of Us

A wide overview. Useful as a map, too smooth to be the map's last word.

A house that does not know the order of things, settlement, revolution, the river, the war, the factory, the highway, cannot tell a true story about the present. This series gives the order in a voice that wants you to feel inspired. Take the order. Go to a better book for the chapter that the inspiration sands down.

The eight

Industry
6/10
Canals, railroads, factories. Making is in the story.
Household
4/10
Families are examples more than characters.
Piety
3/10
Providence is offstage. The tone is documentary uplift.
Courage
5/10
Wars and crossings are included.
Republic
6/10
The country is the subject, which television usually will not sit with.
Temperance
6/10
Broad, not lurid.
Truth
5/10
True in outline, proud in narration, thin on the argument.
Stewardship
6/10
It exists to hand a sequence down. The sequence is worth having.

Live historicallyPick one chapter and read twenty pages of a real history after the episode.