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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

OPINIONPop CultureMarch 19, 2023

Hear me out: Stop doing encores

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Unless, that is, the crowd truly demands it.

Mt Smart Stadium was a sea of colour and noise last week. Handwritten signs, screams, singalongs and hollered appreciation of the main attraction via the chant, “Harry, Harry, Harry [contd]”. Puzzlingly, however, when Mr Styles departed the stage after 70 minutes or so, waving goodbye with a polite thank you, the crowd went mostly quiet. There were smatterings of applause, a whistle and squall here and there. But compared with most of the show that had gone before, it was a library. 

A few days later at Western Springs, something similar went down. I wasn’t at My Chemical Romance, but according to a giddily effusive review by “maybe their biggest fan on earth” on RNZ, this is what happened: “They hadn’t played ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ yet, so when they left the stage nobody chanted for an encore because why would we? We know they’re coming back to deliver the emo anthem of our time. So everyone just waited and chatted and cried for a couple of minutes.”

Why would we? You would because the very essence of an encore is a crowd demand – the exhortation for more. The alchemy of a live performance is kindled in the interplay of audience and artist. And the encore roar is its summit. If everyone has scrolled Setlist-dot-fm and knows exactly which songs have come in which order across the last 20 dates, has committed to memory the main set and the encore, and so decides to treat it like an intermission, taking a break, waiting and chatting, wiping away mascara or picking bits of feather boa out of each other’s hair, an important part of the magic is gone.

Harry Styles at Mt Smart Stadium: Was he wrong to perform an encore? (Photo: Bianca Cross)

To which you may roll your eyes, I know, and say: come on sad Gen X man, the whole encore thing is a masquerade. That magic is obvious illusion – everyone knows what to expect. Some smaller venues aside, the script is exit-cheer-encore, then the house lights flick on and we all go home.

True, yes, fine. But it is, after all, called a “show”. It is theatre, performance, an act of complicity, of delight and suspended disbelief. The critical thing is we all go along for the ride.

Some bands forswear encores. The likes of Foo Fighters and The Strokes, for example, routinely go without, in favour of an unbroken blizzard. Others, Bruce Springsteen or Fleetwood Mac, say, like to serve up what seems like several thousand encores in a single night, as if in pursuit of the long distance runner’s euphoric high. 

Either approach works. Good for them all. But if there are to be encores, they must surely crest on what Maggie Rogers calls the “crowd as a tide”. Otherwise the whole glorious connivance comes tumbling down. Something, you know, must be done. And that means putting the onus on the artists. Yes, you, Harry, and you, the various Chemicals Romance (thanks for reading this far, by the way) and performers all – I wholesomely hereby entreat you not to do an encore unless the crowd noisily craves it. For the greater good. It’s the only way. 

At least the encore has not been hollowed everywhere. “Big strong encore chant from Backstreet Boys crowd,” attests a colleague who went to Spark Arena last weekend. Thank you, Backstreet Boys crowd.

I have another couple of paragraphs to write but if there’s no one … No? … Nobody?  Ah. There’s the house lights.

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Toby Manhire
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Ted Lasso
Ned Flanders – or Ted Lasso? (Photo: Supplied; Treatment: Archi Banal)

Pop CultureMarch 18, 2023

Why would anyone let Ted Lasso quit now?

Ted Lasso
Ned Flanders – or Ted Lasso? (Photo: Supplied; Treatment: Archi Banal)

The new season is supposedly the last – but is everyone’s favourite cornball coach bowing out too soon?

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Microphones are laid out on the table. Cameras are live streaming every word. The coach eyes the packed press gallery and attempts to crack a joke. “I’m so dumb, the first time I heard y’all talking about Yorkshire pudding, I thought it was a fancy word for dog poop,” he says. Eyes roll. Undeterred, he keeps going. “I’m so dumb, whenever I text someone over here about money, I still spell pounds, ‘lbs’.” That gets a smile, so he doubles down on the personal insults. “I look like Ned Flanders is doing cosplay as Ned Flanders … When I talk, it sounds like Dr Phil hasn’t gone through puberty yet.”

There’s only one character on television who can crack jokes that bad and get away with them. We are, of course, talking about Ted Lasso, Apple TV+’s hit series about a fish-out-of-water American football coach tasked with taking a middling UK soccer team into the big leagues. Those kinds of lame, drunk-uncle-at-the-Christmas-dinner-table gags are at the heart and soul of Ted Lasso. They shouldn’t work. They don’t work. If you don’t believe me, try using one on your friends next time you’re having drinks. Watch their faces scrunch up. They may ask if you’re doing OK.

Ted Lasso
No, it’s not Star Trek, it’s the new season of Ted Lasso. (Photo: Apple TV+)

But, when uttered by a naive buffoon with a heart of gold, there’s something reassuring about this coach’s cornball quips. During those hazy, horrible Covid lockdowns, we needed comfort. We needed cosy nights on the couch. We needed bacon and donuts, trackpants and oversized hoodies, short walks and long naps. We needed homemade sourdough. What we didn’t know we needed was Ted Lasso. Yet we loved it. We loved it so much, Apple TV+ – then struggling to gain a streaming foothold against Netflix and Disney+ – scored its very first runaway hit.

It shouldn’t have worked. An American character from a series of NBC ads is bought by Apple and worked into a fully fledged character. He’s sent to the UK to manage a former Premier League football team despite knowing nothing about the sport, then has a classic sitcom structure and a constant stream of quotables wrapped around him. But somehow, a hit was born.

Now, it’s ending. Season three, which began last week, shows Ted Lasso is back at the top of its game after a dicey second season (and that Christmas episode). The first episode, ‘Smells Like Mean Spirit’, is delightfully funny and packed full of belly laughs, yet remains stupendously heartwarming. You feel for these characters. They give you a warm glow. There’s so much heart in Ted Lasso, but it’s also ridiculously weird. At one point, an entire football team is sent into London’s underground sewage system.

Yet these 12 episodes are the last. “This is the end of this story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell, that we loved to tell,” star Jason Sudeikis told Deadline this week. Rumours have it that, just like Lasso, Sudeikis isn’t much of a fan of decamping to the UK for long stretches of filming, taking him away from his kids.

Apple may beg to differ. Letting Lasso go now, just when the streaming service is finally on a roll, seems like an incredibly dumb thing to do. Apple has big shows coming, including Silo (looks great!), Extrapolations (Meryl Streep!), new seasons of For All Mankind (space!) and Severance (goats!), and whatever the hell this is. Netflix is struggling for the first time, and in May, big HBO hits Barry and Succession will end on the very same night. While it’s hard to see Apple TV+’s end game, there’s no denying there’s room for another streaming service to step up and dominate the void.

Ted Lasso
Is three seasons of Ted Lasso enough? (Photo: Apple TV+)

Apple needs an anchor for all that content, and Ted Lasso gives it that. It’s a show that delivers numbers. It brings in subs. And it’s really good! It balances the right amount of heart and humour, weirdness and stupidity, and it has a Michael Scott-style boss at the centre of it. Aside from The Office reruns, there’s no other show like it. Hell, there are barely any other comedies left to compare it to. He might be “cornier than Kevin Costner’s outfield” but letting this coach depart after three seasons seems like it won’t happen. Surely we haven’t seen the end of Ted Lasso and his bad gags just yet.

Ted Lasso is available to stream through Apple TV+.

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