The Real Hero of <em>Ted Lasso</em>
Ted Lasso, like an athlete meeting the moment, peaked at the right time. The show premiered during the waning months of Donald Trump’s presidency; against that backdrop, its positivity felt like catharsis, its soft morals a rebuke. Soon, Ted Lasso was winning fans and Emmys. Articles were heralding it as an answer to our ills. The accolades recognized the brilliance of a show that weaves Dickensian plots with postmodern wit. But they were also concessions. Kindness should not be radical. Empathy should not be an argument. Here we were, though, as so much was falling apart, turning a wacky comedy about British soccer into a plea for American politics.
The show embraced its sunny reputation, and started clouding it. It built story lines around suicide, trauma, guilt, anxiety, the slow pain of age and decline. It began its second season with … the violent death of a dog. And then Ted Lasso made its most daring and long-running play against its own brand of corrective optimism: The show turned one of its sweetest characters, the kit man turned coach Nathan Shelley, into a villain. It made him bitter. It made him mean. It transformed him into an avatar of regressions that have shaped this moment: selfishness, incuriosity, individualism gone from rugged to rogue.
[Read: The new comedy of American decline]
For many viewers—myself, at first, included—the twist seemed an error: A show known for is telling. It led, for one thing, to the latest episode’s satisfying showdown: Nate and Ted, now coaches for rival teams, clashing on the field in epic fashion. But Nate’s villainy is also necessary, I think, to ’s broader argument—the one that keeps giving this of a show its . Empathy and cruelty are rarely as distant from each other as we’d like to believe; good guys, under the wrong circumstances, can all too easily go bad. Nate’s descent bears that out. His transformation is jarring and confusing and maddening and a little bit heartbreaking. It turns the show’s fantasies into battlegrounds. If has argued for earnestness in a time of cynicism, and empathy in a time of cruelty, then Nate is the show’s rejoinder to itself: Speak up for kindness, by all means. But more important, fight for it.
