Christa Miller is well known for her roles on television from The Drew Carey Show to Cougar Town and, most recently, Apple’s hit series Shrinking. But she’s landed her first Emmy nomination for her work behind the camera, as the music supervisor on Ted Lasso.
Miller doesn’t play a role on Ted Lasso, but she’s more accustomed to doing double duty, as she did for Scrubs, Cougar Town, and now Shrinking. “When I’m in a show and I’m doing the music, the timing works out perfectly,” she says. “I have time before to prep. I can listen to music in my car and figure it out with all the characters and scenes. And then afterwards, we are usually wrapped for the season when they start really editing.”
But Ted Lasso was not a show she was ever going to appear in. When the show’s cocreator—and Miller’s husband, with whom she shares three children—Bill Lawrence asked her to take on the role of music supervisor, she discovered she’d be working closely not only with co-music supervisor Tony Von Pervieux, but with cocreator and star Jason Sudeikis too. “He has great music taste, and he was very specific about a lot of the music choices,” Miller says.
Miller, who fell in love with music at a young age (“I was always the dorky person, but I had the best mixtape that everyone wanted,” she says), had originally thought that the UK-set Ted Lasso would lean heavily on the music of British bands. But Sudeikis brought in his own taste to create a blend that perfectly parallels the show’s story of an American coach traveling across the pond to coach a British football team. “It’s cool to work with someone that has a different music sensibility than you do,” she says. “I know his music, but it’s not music that I normally work with.”
As the series grew in success and popularity, they were able to get bigger names and songs onto the show. Nominated for Ted Lasso’s series finale, “So Long, Farewell,” Miller and Von Pervieux are especially proud of the original songs they landed for the third and final season, including Ed Sheeran’s “A Beautiful Game,” which is produced by Max Martin. “They were both fans of the show,” Miller says of the pair, who are also nominated for an Emmy for original song. The song is played as the team watches an inspiration video during halftime that then leaves them crying on the field—and lets the audience laugh. “It was such a perfect placement for a song because that’s what you want: If you can make someone cry, then it’s really funny.”
Miller prefers to feature songs in their entirety instead of snippets—“I only really want to use songs that I love and that I think are great”—and says the real magic happens when you pair a great song with a great scene. “The goosebumps are when you’ve matched a special song with the scene properly that’s not too on the nose and that’s different than you thought it would be,” she says.