The Return of Ted Lasso

I admit: I was late to Ted Lasso. My favorite pop culture was confined to the fringes until fairly recently, and I’m used to standing in the corner with the rest of the geeks at the party. So I’m suspicious of bandwagons. There are very few things that live up to the hype.

But I have always loved the work of Bill Lawrence, one of the greatest producers of sitcoms ever to do it, and people would not shut up about how good the show was. So one night when I was (again) struggling with insomnia, I figured what the hell and punched it up on my iPad while my family slept.

The pilot was pretty funny. Then something happened at the end. Ted got on the phone with his wife back in America. And the yee-haw, Ronald McDonald, happy-warrior mask slips for a moment. Jason Sudeikis, with only one side of a phone call, lets us see how much trouble Ted is in; it becomes painfully clear that he’s in this ridiculous situation because he doesn’t know what to do next as his marriage dissolves.

By 2:00 a.m., I thought, “Holy hell, why didn’t someone tell me how good this show is?”

I made my wife watch it. I made my older daughter watch it. I made my mom watch it. I became a believer.

Ted Lasso hit at just the right time in the pandemic, when people were looking for a little kindness and forgiveness. But I suspect it might have found an audience even if we hadn’t been sequestered in our homes, scared and angry about a new virus. The show simply has one of the best first seasons of a sitcom I’ve ever seen.

It didn’t have to be as smart as it is. It starts out with a Frankenstein plot from other sports movies: a lot of Major League,1 a little of Bull Durham,2 a little of Mystery, Alaska.3

Ted could have been no more than Ned Flanders with an impressive knowledge of sports trivia. Rebecca could have been a one-note villain, a pure antagonist to Ted’s blithe optimism. Roy could have stayed an angry monster. Jamie could have stayed a shallow prima donna. Keeley could have been a dumb bimbo. Nate could have remained a hopeless loser.4 

I have no doubt the moments the actors and writers could have wrung from those situations would have been slapstick gold.5

But the people behind Lasso made a really interesting choice: at almost every point where a character could have devolved into caricature, they asked, what would a human being do here instead?

Each time, they had the characters tell the truth.

It’s much harder to make that funny. Most sitcoms depend on the hilarious misunderstanding. A single honest conversation would undo 90 percent of the TV I watched as a kid. But in Ted Lasso, it made the show better.

Nate, encouraged by Ted, diagnoses the team’s weaknesses and proves he deserves to be more than an equipment manager.

Roy asks Ted and the Diamond Dogs for help with his anger over Jamie and Keeley even though it kills him. Then he’s honest with her, because, as he says, “I like you more than I hate him. Barely. It’s very close.”

Jamie, in a rare moment of vulnerability before the team, admits he’s not a person his mom would admire when he plays. (It’s even more painful when this moment is undone by Rebecca’s betrayal of sending Jamie back to Manchester.)

And in the season’s greatest moment, Rebecca confesses to Ted —undoing the central premise of the show, exposing herself to Ted’s anger and to possible public humilation— and he forgives her.

That was fucking genius. I was genuinely surprised by that. I assumed I would at least get Sudeikis going off on a Ted Lasso rant. Instead my eyes welled up because we are so very short of forgiveness in this world, and finding it anywhere is enough to bruise my heart.

Way back in the early days of my marriage, my wife and I were fighting. And she turned to me at one point and said, “Why are you doing this? What are you going to win?”

I’d like to say that stopped me cold, but I am sure I ranted and argued for a while longer before we reached the end. But I thought about it. And it came back to me every time I got angry over something after that. If you fight the person you love, what exactly are you going to win?

A few years after that, my wife —you’re probably picking up that she’s a lot smarter than I am— asked another question: would you rather be right, or connect?

These are the little lessons of emotional intelligence that are planted all through Ted Lasso. They’re the same ones we’ve tried to pass on to our kids and we’ve learned from them. They’re the same questions every drama or comedy has to answer.

How do you get what you want? What’s stopping you? How do you get past that?

The genius of Ted Lasso is that it asks these questions in a setting where winning and losing have real consequences, where people like Rupert and Rebecca hurt each other for sport. And they somehow make it funny, while we usually take our problems so incredibly seriously.6

The third season of Ted Lasso starts on Apple TV today. It might be the last, depending on how much money Apple can fit in a dump truck for Sudeikis. The characters and show have expanded beyond the tight perfection of the first season, and they’re facing all-new problems. Do Roy and Keeley break up? Will Ted and Rebecca get together? Will Nate and Rupert triumph over all that is good and noble?7

That’s because the problems we face never really go away. They mutate and change and burst into our lives in new places. We have to learn the same lessons over and over again until we get them right.

It’s okay. That’s why we’re here. It takes faith to get up in the morning, to put your feet on the path and keep walking.

Yeah, it might seem stupid to put your faith in a sitcom and the imaginary people in it. Or it might seem dumb to root for a team of millionaire athletes who don’t know you exist. If you’re cynical enough, it’s pointless to care about anything in the face of the inevitable heat-death of the universe.

But you have to put your faith somewhere. You have to find the stories you want to believe. I’m happy I found this one.

As Ted says, “Onward. Forward.”

Believe.