One Final Ted Talk

We saw two shows come to an end this week: Succession and Ted Lasso. One was about terrible people doing terrible things, and the other was about basically decent people trying to be better.

I always preferred Ted Lasso. The first season was pretty much perfect (as I’ve said before) and I see enough of the worst impulses of humanity when I read the news.

But now Ted is gone, and he (probably) won’t be coming back. My friend Rick Porter has an excellent wrap-up here. (Spoilers ahead for anyone who did not watch it immediately at 9:00 p.m. Pacific last night.)

In short: Ted and the Richmond Greyhounds make it all the way to the top of the Premier League after being losing their spot at the end of Season One. They have a chance to “win the whole fuckin’ thing” as Ted promised Rebecca. And they’re up against the team owned by Rupert, Rebecca’s billionaire ex-husband.1

Again, spoilers:

They win. After a rough first half, Ted delivers one of his patented inspirational speeches, and the Greyhounds score a last-minute goal to take the game.

And Ted goes back to Kansas, leaving Richmond and everyone he’s met a little better than when he found them.

Roy Kent and Jamie Tartt are friends now, and more open and generous and kind, both to themselves and to their teammates.

Nate has returned to the side of good and has reconciled with his dad.

Rebecca is no longer obsessed with punishing Rupert. She’s back to being the strong, confident, slightly hilarious woman she was before her marriage.

(Rupert, as Rebecca says, does a brilliant job of punishing himself. He loses his temper when West Ham begins to lose the match, and shoves his coach to the ground in a fit of rage. He’s bounced out of the league, divorced again, and disgraced.

I want to take a moment here to praise Anthony Head, who played Rupert. He always packed a lot into his performances despite limited screen time. He was charming and funny and false, generous with both his gifts and his vengeance, vicious even when he was being gentle. In this season, he went full Dark Side, dressing in a Matrix trenchcoat, lurking in his high-tech office, terrifying his underlings. You also got to see how far he’d come from the poor kid who had to sneak into Richmond games. But Head really outdid himself in the finale. There’s a moment in when he takes a deep breath, draws himself up, and puts on his persona like a burden he carries before entering a room. Then, later, he charges down to the pitch to demand that his coach “take out” Jamie Tartt to stop Richmond’s comeback.2 The inflection Head puts into Rupert’s “Oi!” reveals more than any monologue could. For a second, he’s back to being a working-class oik, a thug who will fucking bash your skull if you cross him. Any other actor could have played Rupert as a one-dimensional villain. Head gave him life.)

Keeley has come into her own, going from a WAG to the owner of her own PR firm.

Higgins is no longer a cringing toady, but a trusted, moral, voice. Sam has turned into a superstar. Isaac has become a leader. Colin has come out to his teammates and the world.

And Beard is ready to live on his own, without Ted to keep him from self-destructing.

It’s a pretty happy ending. But there’s a lot that’s unresolved.

In what might be a dream sequence, we get to see the future of all the characters: Rebecca has begun an affair with her handsome Dutchman and might become a mother to his daughter. Beard and Jane get married. Roy becomes coach, with Beard and Nate as his assistants. Keeley and Barbara run their PR firm together. Trent Crimm’s book on Richmond becomes a bestseller.

All of this seems poised to launch a possible spin-off, as Apple TV and the show’s producers have hinted. Richmond AFC might go forward without Ted, like The Hogans without Valerie, or AfterMASH without Hawkeye.

Or maybe Ted will return. Apple TV and the show’s producers, including Jason Sudeikis, seem to be keeping that possibility open, too. There are loose plot threads in Ted’s life. Ted’s ex, Michelle, seems to be cooling on her unethical marriage counselor/boyfriend, Dr. Jacob.3 He’s nowhere to be seen in the last vignette, when Ted is coaching Henry’s soccer team.

But I’d be fine if it ended here.4 Bill Lawrence and everyone involved gave us a great show in dark times. It’s okay to let it go now.

I suspect Jason Sudeikis might be done carrying the weight of Ted’s niceness.5 It was a little weird how quiet the formerly hyper-voluble Ted was in the finale. He barely said anything to Nate in their big reconciliation moment. He was almost silent when Rebecca tried to get him to stay. And he even tried to get out of his usual inspirational speeches. Sudeikis was one of the writers on the episode, so I think this was a deliberate choice.

And I suspect the WGA strike will rob any spin-off of its momentum. I suspect the other actors and writers are going to launch themselves onto new projects now.

This will likely make some TV critics happy, who turned on the show after praising it to the heavens. Sure, there were some pacing issues: the seasons started like they were running a marathon, and then ended in a sprint, with big chunks of the action offscreen. (Nate quit West Ham, and we didn’t even get to see his final interaction with Rupert?)

Still, I’m not about to condemn a show for giving us most of what we want. And even before Ted Lasso, I was sick to death of TV that dwells only on the crap side of human nature.

Both Succession and Ted Lasso are fictions. One pretended that people are ultimately limited to their worst selves. The other imagined that we can improve, that we might stumble and fall and backslide, but that we can still try.

Neither is the whole story. But I know which fiction I’d rather believe.

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