Ted Lasso

I got off on the wrong foot with Ted Lasso, my first exposition to the show was through a corporate presentation at my previous workplace including AI generated images of Ted and it was about how believing and optimism were the path to a successful sales year to leverage our core competencies and deliver vertical growth. Moreover the pitch of deeply American man being very American in a very British UK wasn’t exactly grabbing me, it was true then and it is truer now: I could do with less American stuff.

So season 1 caught me off guard because it was downright amazing. Coming out of a messy divorce Rebecca hires Ted to train AFC Richmond, a premier league football team which her ex husband loved. She’s fully expecting Ted to fail as he’s a mediocre American football coach at best and doesn’t know the first thing about real football. The first half of the season is really just spent accompanying Ted as he runs into issues trying to acclimatise to the UK, its inhabitants, the football players and football itself. Unexpectedly though, despite the many setbacks and string of defeats in games, Ted is unendingly positive, not only is he nice to everyone, he also keeps a deeply positive outlook on the future. This contrast between Ted’s attitude and the Britisheries of the British is the bread and butter of the show, it leads to a lot of fun situations and amusing character interactions. Ted’s disarming niceness also leads to some character exposing more of their personalities than they otherwise would.

There is a dark side to Ted if we can say it that way which is unveiled through the introduction of a sports psychiatrist to whom Ted slowly and difficultly but progressively nonetheless reveals his difficulty with dealing with his dad’s suicide, his mom’s reaction to it and his situation with leaving his son behind in the US whilst he’s facing divorce himself. Almost every character in season has a similar multifaceted personality with the promise of a lot of potential growth as the story develops. Rebecca clearly needs to get over being vindicative towards Rupert and learn to move on. Jaime, Richmond’s star player needs to learn humility. Roy, the club’s veteran needs to face the reality of his age and learn to open up to others to help him with it. Sam, is a young and ambitious player who was to understand his position as an up and coming star player. Keeley who has always relied on her looks is now looking at a more mature lifestyle. Nate, the current kit boy of the team who is getting bullied is looking to escape his situation and looks up to Ted for help. I could go on, there’s many, many characters in this show and they all get some form of set up in season 1 and that’s maybe where the show starts to stutter.

There simply are too many characters for a show that is only 3 seasons. Game of Thrones didn’t manage to stick the landing with 2 decades of book writing and a decade of TV show and Ted Lasso certainly wasn’t going to do it in 3. Developing characters takes time, not only do you need the time to set them up, you also need several episodes to develop them into their better self as doing it all in one episode usually feels cheap and forced (yes this is foreshadowing). Ted Lasso didn’t have the time to do this and so a lot of characters simply don’t grow or abruptly stop. Roy is a prime example of that, as he retires and the show takes time to develop his dilemma about his position in the world of Football after being a professional player, he eventually goes back to coaching Richmond, a touching and dramatic moment of season 2 that is well deserved. That’s where his character stops however, he doesn’t grow emotionally afterwards, and worse than that, in the finale of season 3 he goes back to being a rival to Jaime in their common romantic interest for Keeley. Speaking of which, Keeley is a massive question mark for me as she simply does not change. She’s the same superficial and completely out of her depth character all the way through. She somehow nepotisms her way to being CEO of a marketing firm that is simultaneously so expensive that it is shut down the second her investors pull out whilst also being so cheap that Rebecca offers to finance it without even a second thought and downplaying it as “I’ve got this much change in my handbag”.

Making things worse are the jumps in time that the show does especially between seasons. Season 1 ends on Richmond losing their place in the premier league and being relegated and season 2 begins with them already being halfway through the new football season. Unfortunately, the show writers apparently had no idea on how to handle such a time skip because this is where we see characters just change without any preamble. Nate who was subservient and thankful to Ted in season 1, is suddenly bitter and angry at him all season long until he implodes at him at the end of the season and quits to train Richmond’s rival team which was bought by Rupert. Season 3 starts and it’s another time skip and Nate is already miserable and questioning his actions against Ted. By the end of the season he’s back to square 1 being a kit boy for Richmond just without the bullying this time. Rebecca is another frustratingly static character who starts out bitter against her ex husband, then learns to not be bitter anymore at being dreadfully disrespectful at her own father’s funeral, then goes back to being bitter, then learns to not be bitter anymore again, then goes back to being bitter again and this time she “wins”.

Most frustrating for me however is how the time skips mostly let the writers avoid writing about football and instead let them write about all the goddamn relationships this show is intent on pushing down my throat. Sam and Rebecca, Jaime and Keeley, Roy and Keeley, Keeley and Jack, Ted and his ex wife, Ted’s ex wife and their fucking marriage counsellor (I still don’t have the singlest clue how and why the shows paints this as a side anecdote and not something majorly disturbing), Rebecca and some dude in a boat in the Netherlands, Beard and his emotionally abusive girlfriend whom he sticks with all the way through for some cursed reason of trauma. Half of these relationships have no rhyme nor reason to exist but they’re there to add cheap and uninteresting relationship drama so everyone can break up and get back together a few times along the way. Ted Lasso past season 1 is a show about football that is ashamed to talk about football. It becomes a mediocre slog of a show about drama with characters who lose their multifaceted personalities and instead stick to their rigid niche (Keeley is a dumb blonde with social skills, Roy is a gruff man, Ted is the funny positive man, Rebecca is the bitter ex wife, Leslie is the man who fucking gags).

Season 3 also commits the sin of keeping things off screen that have no business being off screen. Nate finally deciding to quit Rupert’s team? Off screen. The team deciding to invite Nate back despite having hated him so much they collected 5 red cards in a single match? Off screen (also the show never addresses the consequences of so many players getting red cards in a game of football). Ted announcing he’s leaving and going back to the US? Off screen goddamit. Beard having a drugged up wacky adventure in the streets of London for 45 agonising minutes? Yeah that’s gonna be on screen…why?!

There’s plenty of other issues that I can pick out of seasons 2 and 3. Ted’s development through his interactions with the psychiatrist is halted when for some reason the psychiatrist decides to leave. Season 3 has an episode centre around an evil billionaire having an evil plan to make football much more expensive to become richer and more evil, only so that Rebecca gets to do a forced speech about the emotional importance of football in the hearts of the people. Interactions stop being carried out through the lens of Ted’s positivity and instead his positivity just becomes a comment or joke on the side whilst the characters do their own thing which isn’t very interesting nor original. However there’s no singular element I can point at and say “that’s the big reason why it sucks now”, in a very similar way to season 8 of Game of Thrones having been a catastrophe, so is season 3 of Ted Lasso, simply every single minute thing that used to be good, well written, logical, enticing, cute, pleasant, nice, just at bare minimum competent is gone. I haven’t watched a single episode of Game of Thrones since season 8 came out, after all why bother, I know I’m not getting a satisfactory ending, I know all the time investment is going to be a waste and I feel the same about Ted Lasso. Season 1 was really really good but all the nice set up it did is thrown out the window half way through season 2 and then pissed on for good measure in season 3, it’s really that bad.