A transitional Ted Lasso finale understands the show’s future better than it reckons with its past
The second season was ambitious but messy, and this finale only further muddled its intentions.
TV Reviews Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso’s second season began with a penalty kick, as Dani Rojas looked to give AFC Richmond its first win of the season and ended up ending Earl the greyhound’s life. And so it’s fitting that Richmond’s season comes down to another penalty kick in “Inverting The Pyramid Of Success,” and that Jamie—even though he hasn’t missed a penalty all season— decides that Dani should be the one to seal the draw that would earn the team promotion back to the Premier League on their first attempt following their relegation.
But while these moments are clear narrative bookends for this season of television, I was deeply perplexed by the suggestion of this moment as a climax for this finale. Dani’s story functionally disappeared after he was cured of the yips, and outside of some quips and a battle with dress shoes we never got any clear sense of how his onfield performance or off-field life were unfolding. And while Jamie being willing to give up the ball during a key moment is certainly related to his maturing as a player since his return to Richmond, it does nothing to connect with his relationship with his father, or his more recent self-insertion into Roy and Keeley’s relationship that causes some tension throughout the episode. The scenes may be bookends, but there’s no meaningful connection to the stories being told in between them.
This is, unfortunately, a common theme across “Inverting The Pyramid Of Success,” which is a logical transition point in the series’ larger narrative but makes a collection of very strange choices in how it resolves or escalates the season’s storylines in order to reach that transition. If you were to go back to the beginning of the season and say that Rupert would purchase West Ham United and poach Nate from the coaching staff to become the Cobra Kai to Richmond’s Miyagi-Do, that would feel like a logical evolution of the series’ storytelling.
But what confused me most about this finale is that so much of the work the season did to place Ted’s philosophy under a microscope and consider the limitations of a culture of positivity was effectively unwritten by how the show chose to resolve those stories, creating almost no accountability for the lapses in personal and professional conduct that we saw unfold. The core truth of the season of television I’ve been writing about is that AFC Richmond was promoted in spite of—and not because of—Ted Lasso’s leadership, and yet this finale undercuts even the parts of the season that worked the best by refusing to explore this reality.
This is most prominent in the circumstances of Nate’s departure, which was foregrounded by last week’s cliffhanger when Ted learned that it was his own assistant coach who told Trent Crimm (The Independent) about his panic attack. It’s perfectly in character that Ted has no desire to lash out at Nate, and that he plans to go about his day ignoring that everyone is staring at him, there’s paparazzi outside his door, and he mixed up the salt and sugar in the previous night’s batch of biscuits. Ted is hoping that Nate will apologize, but it’s quickly clear he’s too cowardly to do that, and that isn’t helped by how quickly the team rallies around the idea of hunting the culprit down. Beard pushes him to confront Nate to help get closure over what happened, but avoidance is Ted’s instinct, and so it’s no surprise that it takes Nate losing his cool in the midst of the match with Brentford before they’re able to have an honest conversation about it.
However, there’s not a whole lot of honesty in that conversation from Nate’s perspective, and it took a storyline that I thought was working pretty well and muddled it considerably. Up until that point, the episode does a great job of poking the bear when it comes to Nate’s situation, and Beard’s growing anger at Nate’s cowardice. During the Diamond Dogs scene where Roy asks for advice, the moment where Nate says he has to admit something is a terrific swerve, and Beard’s reaction to discovering he kissed Keeley has such a joyous contempt to it. The episode was building to the moment when Nate’s anger would boil over, and where Ted would be able to see the ways he failed to recognize his loss of perspective, and a deeper reckoning seemed to be on the horizon.
But then, mid-match, Nate’s breakdown—while well-rendered by Nick Mohammed—was delusional in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. There are kernels of truth about how Nate has far more knowledge about football than Ted, who still doesn’t understand the basics of the game despite having had a lot of time to do so, but most of what he complains about is juvenile and self-centered.
He effectively lays into Ted for not getting enough attention, explaining that he had made him feel special and then didn’t offer him enough positive affirmation afterwards. It’s his Daddy Issues jumping to the forefront, but it turns into the whole emotional core of his frustration, and frankly if I were Ted I would feel as though there was nothing I could have done to keep this from happening. If Nate needed that level of babysitting, he was always going to lose touch with reality such that he perceived Ted agreeing to go along with the “False Nine” strategy as a plot to blame him for a loss as opposed to a vote of confidence.
Essentially, the only way Nate’s story really works for me is if it forces self-reflection from Ted, Beard, and the rest of the coaching staff about their responsibility for Nate’s heel turn. However, that never materializes here. Beard knew that he was inappropriate with Colin, but no one has clued into the way he was treating Will, and Beard never accepts responsibility for failing to realize his initial intervention didn’t pan out. Ted, meanwhile, completely missed how his inability to take Nate seriously—like when he thinks he’s a “big dog” and Ted laughs at him—was accumulating in his psyche, or how the hiring of Roy would have added to this. But for these realities to sink in, Nate’s exit would have to be seen as a preventable occurrence, and as something that they would have wanted to avoid.
However, the way Nate salts the earth by literally tearing the “Believe” sign in half after storming off during the team’s celebration makes it hard to imagine anyone being sad to see him leave, and the sight of him in full Cobra Kai mode with Rupert at West Ham turns him into such a villain that you can’t come back to that. We never see a scene equivalent to when Ted found out that Rebecca let Jamie return to Man City in season one, and he laments his missed opportunity to get through to him. There’s never a moment where Nate’s absence is read as anything other than “good riddance,” robbing the show of a chance to assess how his story punctured the idea that Ted’s positive culture carried only positive consequences.
It’s clear that we haven’t seen the last of Nate, and it’s likely the show will explore his path to redemption once Rupert’s whispers turn into the type of judgment and ridicule that Ted never actually directed toward him. But it’s a bizarre way to move into that story because it cuts off the actual implications of his descent into darkness, as Ted simply sips champagne with Rebecca and toasts to their future in the Premier League as though this chapter of the show is over.
It’s a bizarre tone for the episode to set at its conclusion, and takes what should have been a moment of reckoning and turns it into an awkward encounter that Ted just sets aside for next season. And while it’s true Ted didn’t yet know at that time that Nate would be joining Rupert at West Ham, it’s bizarre that we don’t get an epilogue scene for Ted reacting to that development: his last scene is his farewell to Trent Crimm (Independent), which doesn’t accomplish much of anything. The choice to instead end on the “stinger” of Nate’s Villain Hair as a teaser for the third season certainly clarifies the narrative arc moving forward, but it misses an opportunity to solidify how the events of this season will carry forward in Ted’s coaching philosophy.
I know Game Of Thrones has become something of a joke after the response to the final season, but one thing it modeled very effectively was using the penultimate episode of each season as a climax, allowing for a finale that would simultaneously reflect on the season that came before it and gesture toward the future. And that’s what Ted Lasso really needed, because across the board the actual resolution that comes after Richmond’s promotion is rushed and frankly confounding.
This is perhaps most true with Roy and Keeley, whose story in this episode is a bit chaotic throughout this episode but reaches a new level of confusion in the epilogue. Last week, many argued that the show wasn’t actually setting up a love triangle for the characters, and that it was just testing their connection. And sure enough, despite leaving them in a very tense moment on the sofa during the photo shoot, they’re basically operating as normal when the episode starts, which really underlined how much the pileup of complications was a narrative ploy more than an organic character development.
The seeming lack of continuity is jarring, but once Jamie comes clean to Roy about his mistake and Roy forgives him, the story settles into a moment of uncertainty about their future, and whether Roy believes that he is the right person for Keeley as she takes the next step in her career and starts a P.R. firm. It’s not the worst place for the story to land, even if it does raise the question of why any of the bullshit with Jamie or Phoebe’s teacher was necessary to get there (the Nate kiss is honestly most justified as a way to escalate his anger that no one takes him seriously during the Diamond Dogs meeting, which is very effective).
But then the epilogue scene makes no sense. Why is Keeley suddenly convinced that she has to focus so much on her career that she can’t work remotely? Wouldn’t they have communicated about this previously? The season was already set to place their relationship in a murky place given the changes ahead, but why did they need to create this forced separation as Roy goes on vacation with his paper tickets (although he does leave them behind)? We either needed an additional scene of Keeley facing pressure related to her firm or the scene itself needed to be longer and have them actually discuss where her anxiety was coming from. And all of this could have been facilitated if they had used one of their extra episodes to take the cascading epilogues they felt were necessary and let them breathe, exploring the aftermath of their promotion to consider the consequences that might not have been as clear when the dust hadn’t settled.
It would have also allowed the show more space to consider the power dynamics of Sam and Rebecca’s relationship, which resolves in an agreeable fashion but reinforces the mess leading up to that point. Where Sam ends up—choosing to stay in Richmond to continue making a difference for young people and committing to engaging with his diasporic identity by turning the empty storefront from the previous episode into an actual Nigerian restaurant—is totally fine.
While I’d have preferred an emphasis on the messed up power dynamics of their relationship, his choice to sever his decision from it was at least a positive development. But it is again frustrating that Rebecca’s arc in the season more or less boiled down to waiting for Sam to make a decision: we get the nice emotional moment with Keeley, but their relationship never really changed much as the season went on, once again putting Rebecca into a contingent place in the narrative without much to show for an entire season of storytelling.
And while I know I’ve harped on the Dubai Air storyline being dropped to the point I’m getting subtweeted about it, it does strike me as strange that Sam’s decision-making is so narrowly drawn given what he’s gone through this season. The choice to introduce Edwin Akufo last week and then turn him into a joke so swiftly after Sam rejects his offer makes the whole thing seem trivial, despite the fact that there are elements in his speech—like the threat Sam will never play for the Nigerian national team—that feel like they should have been part of Sam’s consideration to begin with.
It’s an example where Sam’s story would have been far better if the fallout from Dubai Air had been more prominent, and if the show had been able to introduce his agent—which he surely has—to work through the negotiations, but the show has too many stories to serve for it to commit the time necessary to do so. The result is a story that has a basic kernel of truth but struggles to feel like a culmination of a narrative arc, which is a problem across the board here.
It’s particularly a problem because this was the single biggest strength of the first season. In general, the show’s sense of humor and its strong performances have been as strong in the second season, and there are moments here—Ted’s speech to the team about honesty, Roy warming up to the Diamond Dogs—that capture the energy that served the show so well. For this reason, I completely understand how there are some people who are mostly unconcerned about the storytelling issues I’m detailing here.
But by choice, the writers chose to muddle the story being told, which on paper I’m more or less in support of. There’s something very dramatically effective, for example, in placing an increasingly begrudging Nate in the midst of those types of scenes where he was once a willing participant to underline his character arc. But in every story but Ted’s, the show’s plotting became far more imprecise than it had been in season one, regularly struggling to articulate character motivations and ground the stories being told in the trajectory of the team, their season, and the world they operate in.
“Inverting The Pyramid Of Success”—and the second season as a whole—was going for complicated and landed on confused. For every story being told, there were a collection of open questions as to why characters behaved in a certain way, but the show generally ignored these questions, or answered them offscreen in unsatisfying ways.
With so many stories to address, the on-field play was sidelined, and the writers struggled to keep player stories like Isaac and Jamie afloat when their priorities were elsewhere. Moments like the lack of consequences from the Dubai Air protest were emblematic of a larger dramaturgical struggle, as the writers were unable to place stories in relation to one another and to the world those characters occupy. And while no one of these stories was a dealbreaker—yes, even for me, the person who keeps harping on one of them—the accumulation of odd decisions was too significant for this finale to address while also setting up where the story is headed moving forward.
The optimistic view for Ted Lasso’s future is that these growing pains were inevitable given the specificity of the first season’s fish-out-of-water narrative, and that a combination of reflection from the writers and the natural progression of the story will help the show get back on track next year. The cynical view is that the show’s first season energy was fundamentally unsustainable, and that no amount of adjustment can ever fully balance this collection of tones and stories. And while these last couple of episodes made the case for the latter stronger than I would have anticipated even while frustrated with the show earlier in the season, in the end there’s too much potential in these characters and this world for me to embrace cynicism at this time. However, I remain curious to better understand how and why this season lost its focus, and what might change in the future to try to gain it back.
Stray observations
- I realize that British tabloids are trash, but in this day and age there would be a strong counter-narrative about mental health—particularly for men—that would emerge immediately after hogwash like the Soccer Saturday rant from Ted’s predecessor, and so it was weird for the show to pretend as though there was no discourse on that level until Ted’s press conference after the match the next day.
- As much as I thought letting Sam Richardson turn Edwin into a slapstick routine undercut the seriousness of that story in ways that do a disservice to Sam’s arc, I did laugh at the handshake surrogate leaving Sam hanging.
- One thing the season never really had a clear grasp on is the state of Ted and Rebecca’s friendship: they rarely interacted alone, and despite the fact she was one of the only people who knows about Ted’s anxiety she still only texts him when the story breaks even after their big emotional moment last week? It just doesn’t add up.
- I expect many folks will be using the Masculine Melancholy Renaissance painting as their cover photos. Fun shot.
- I enjoyed Beard’s reaction when Ted uses the name “John Obi-Wan Gandalf” while making up an inspirational quote during his speech to the team.
- So not only are the venture capitalists behind bantr able to step in to replace Dubai Air, but they’re also handing out money for P.R. firms, apparently. (I can’t nitpick money storylines because money is not actually real, but did anyone else find it weird that Keeley would get that news in an email?)
- It makes absolutely no sense that we never saw the team speculating about Edwin’s arrival—especially given his helicopter is somehow still on the field—and/or quizzing Sam about what was going on. You would think that would trigger a lot of anxiety, and yet there’s Sam casually opening the gift of another team’s jersey in the locker room in clear view of everyone else? Just a few episodes ago they were all gathered around tracking his love life, and now no one even seems to know he might be leaving? It just doesn’t add up.
- “I’d be happy to headbutt you, Nate”—using Beard as the audience surrogate in these scenes was an important dimension, albeit one that really does seal the deal on Nate being irredeemable.
- So after that long journey into Beard’s personal life, we get one final “we broke up, wait it’s back on” with Jane and that’s pretty much it? In retrospect, it remains confounding that the writers would look at the season they broke and think that episode was a good use of narrative oxygen. Even if I had liked the episode more than I did, the choice not to see an extra episode as a solution to the problem of an overstuffed narrative strikes me as weirder now even than it did while watching “Beard After Hours.”
- Not enough Higgins here, necessarily, but I liked how it took him a few tries to get in sync with Keeley as he works to give her advice. It’s actually really hard to put yourself into someone else’s shoes, and there was a nice rhythm to her efforts to articulate her anxiety and his adjustments therein.
- As with Jamie and Dani, I don’t know if Isaac had enough characterization for his moment with the Believe sign to register as anything close to a character beat, but it was still a nice moment albeit one that—like most in the episode—has Nate’s non-participation hanging over it.
- Colin Corner: More than a concern about not following up on a throwaway line about Grindr (which, again, might have never been meant to mean anything), I think in general it’s disappointing that despite two episodes where the team gathered outside of work, we really didn’t get much of a deeper understanding of individual players and it’s Jan’s one-joke personality that gets the big moment at halftime. I hope we get more focus on the team next year, regardless of whether we wishfully thought Colin’s queerness into existence.
- So if you are unaware, commenters pointed out early in the season that the Championship’s promotion scheme puts the top two teams through automatically but then includes a playoff for the final spot. And so technically, per the claims made by the commentators, Richmond earned the second-place position and thus promotion, but this was technically not a do-or-die game despite it being presented as one, provided that the rules around the Championship are the same in this universe (which next season will have Premier League licensing, per a recent deal).
- Always happy for puppy content, but can anyone explain a reason for the lesbian dog breeder coming on to Keeley being a thing that took up time in this episode of television?
- “Advice for being a boss: hire your best friend”—I mean, I would argue that hiring a P.R. person who might have warned you about the potential risks associated with dating one of your players instead of celebrating it might have actually been preferable given how that could have blown up in your face, but hey, you do you. (This really was a lovely scene, though).
- Like, are they giving Trent Crimm his own spinoff? I feel like there wasn’t nearly enough information to understand why he would purposefully burn Nate, resign from his job, and go off in search of himself.
- They never quite circled back to whether Roy kept up his reality TV habit with his yoga ladies, but we do learn that he shares in the national schadenfreude when the U.K. earns zero points at Eurovision, so he’s still got his appetite for it.
- I want to take a brief moment to thank everyone—and I do mean everyone—who’s been reading and commenting on these reviews. I realize that invariably my critical approach to a show that had such a distinct connection with audiences generated some disconnect, but from that disconnect came some really productive conversation, and a dialogue that I feel helped us all collectively better understand the somewhat surprising divergence of views on the season as a whole. As I said on Twitter, writing criticism on a weekly basis like this is not an effort to persuade people who love something that it’s flawed, or bad; it’s about expressing your point of view such that people who care about a show can better understand their own reaction to it, either by helping to clarify concerns or galvanizing one’s appreciation. For all of our ups and downs and the comments claiming I hated a show I ranked as my top show of 2020, y’all’s contributions to these reviews really did become a critical part of my experience of the season, and I’m hopeful we’ll be back together next year for the next phase of Ted Lasso’s journey.
293 Comments
What confused me most about this finale is that so much of the work the
season did to place Ted’s philosophy under a microscope and consider the
limitations of a culture of positivity was effectively unwritten by how
the show chose to resolve those stories, creating almost no
accountability for the lapses in personal and professional conduct that
we saw unfold.
I can’t entirely agree that it did unwrite it. If that was the case, Nate would have stayed on the team and Ted wouldn’t have been confronted in a way that I think clearly hit him. The limitations drove the team to a breaking point, but the groundwork Ted & Co. built was luckily overall stable enough to weather the storm. But when everything settled, it’s clear that Ted has work to go through still. That ripped Believe sign was very melancholic; I agree that there should have been a conversation between Beard and Ted afterwards where there was more lamentation, but I don’t think it really needed to sign-post it because it trusted its audience.
If that moment clearly hit Ted, the episode needed a moment of self-reflection. The closest we get is his desire to walk home instead of accepting Trent’s ride. Otherwise, we get his scene with Rebecca and that conversation with Trent where there’s no real clarity. A Beard/Ted scene would have gone a long way to acknowledging that Nate’s heel turn is not just about setting up an antagonist, but also about uncovering cracks in the foundation of the team.
Again, I agree but personally didn’t think it needed to signpost it. I found it all conveyed in that scene where he found the “Believe” sign — the core ethos of Ted’s style — ripped in half. Could there have been another scene? Absolutely, but to me that was a promise of more to come in terms of Ted’s own personal journey of challenging himself.
I can’t picture these 2 twats at my beloved Hammers. Then again, it’s not like it’d be out of line with the club history….
The big question is ‘What’s happened to David Moyes’?
A+ episode.
The trouble with the show is that the showrunners realized that there needed to be some kind of conflict but clearly hadn’t thought through what, precisely, it should be. So we’ve got a bunch of complicating stuff thrown at the wall without anything cohering into a satisfying through line. Psychologist lady is immune to Ted’s charms! The Dubai Air thing! The Nate thing! Whatever the hell Coach Beard has going on! Ted’s having more panic attacks! It doesn’t make the sweetness, nice as it is, feel earned, it just muddles it.Ted Lasso is very lucky that it has as good a cast as it does (shoutout in particular to Hannah Waddingham and Juno Temple, whose characters I refuse to admit will not become an endgame couple), or else it would completely fall apart.And side note: is there any other show as successful as this one with worse music choices?
I’m so glad someone else loves Rebecca/Keeley as a couple. They need to be endgame.
I’m baffled that the writers/showrunners didn’t see that their central conflict for season 2 clearly could have (should have?) been the trouble brewing in the coaching staff. I mean, by the episode where Roy joins the staff, it is all perfectly set in motion. You’ve got Nate bullying the kitman and Ted not noticing. You’ve got Ted inviting Roy onto the staff without doing any work to integrate him into the staff and let people know where they stand. You’ve got Beard not playing his key role as Ted’s #2 in any meaningful way. And you’ve got the whole staff of coaches who know that they know more about both the game and the locker room than the head coach. It’s practically Shakespearean. Fuck it, they could have gone full King Lear. IT WAS RIGHT THERE! AND IT WOULD HAVE LET THEM EXPLORE ALL OF THE SAME THEMES IN A MUCH MORE COHERENT AND MEANINGFUL WAY. If this is your central conflict, then Ted has to use his therapy to understand both himself and the dysfunction he has created. He has to do the hard work of sustaining culture change within an organization—how do we figure out how to win now that we all like each other? Roy has to figure out who he is as a coach, and that could have made his developing relationship with Jamie all the more rewarding. Beard has to figure out how to value himself and feel like he has a stake in the outcome of their work. And the team has to figure out if there is a way to win using the Lasso Way. This, to me, would have given the writers so much more fertile ground to cover with almost every character, even those not on the coaching staff. Rebecca, Higgins, Keeley, Jamie, Sam, Isaac, and Dr. Sharon would all have more substantive things to contribute in a story built around this conflict rather than the mishmash of distractions that stood in for tension this season (Dubai Air? A Ghanian billionaire? Roy being a jerk at a funeral? All really weak and poorly executed).
Wow. That season 2 finale was a whole series of choices. And I agree with you, they could have been much better. So, Edwin Akufo apparently really is a billionaire from Ghana, and a much bigger prick than he seemed last episode. I’m disappointed that my wild guess that he was a scam is wrong, not so much because I need to be right (it’s fine, I can quit any time :), but more because I think it would have been far more interesting that what we actually got.The Dubai Air protest didn’t have any consequences or costs. Just before the press conference in episode 2, Ted reassures Sam that doing the right thing is always the right thing to do, which is great and true advice, but glosses over the sometimes drastic costs of personal virtue. I mean, Sam’s a wonderful person and I don’t want bad things to happen to him, but his demonstration of moral fiber and political consciousness could have caused problems for him and/or the team as a whole and/or Rebecca as its owner. Moreover, if the blowback he was getting a public figure associated with a cause and the financial headaches she was getting as CEO had gotten some attention, it would have added depth to their relationship and brought their connection into sharper focus.Again, it’s fine the show didn’t go for an elaborate scam worthy of a telenovela, but one reason why I entertained the idea was that season 1 established Rupert as vindictive, petty, and still invested in hurting Rebecca. And after Richmond got relegated (which does seem to have gutted him, just as she had hoped it would when she hired Ted), a scheme to snatch back control and punish Rebecca and Ted for upsetting him struck me as consistent with his character. (So, for example, hiring PIs to follow them around, leading to photos of Rebecca and Sam kissing would have fit perfectly.) Instead, he just went and got some other team and hired Nate to run it.Nate’s turn to the dark side is in many ways the strongest arc of the season, yet also feels like missed opportunities. If we had seen signs of Rupert wooing him over the course of the season, it would helped this all land better. As it is, I do have to wonder what led Rupert to hire Nate over any of the other available coaches. Consider that Nate has never been a head coach, and has only been assistant coach for 1 season. There must be candidates with better resumes out there. Also, before Ted raised him up, Nate was the downtrodden kit man, bullied and ignored by everyone else in the club. No one cared about even his name, much less his football ideas, so it’s not like Rupert had noticed him or his talent. Heck, Rupert had stuck with the aggressive mediocrity that was Ted’s predecessor.All of which is to say that, now that we have the full story of season 2, we can assess how everything fits together, and sadly, I must agree with you that it falls flat. I suspect COVID made it harder to work together, so maybe that’s why this soufflé didn’t rise, but whatever the reason, I share your let down, especially as compared to the magic of season 1. Let us hope that season 3 returns to greatness.
I don’t get the Rupert/Nate connection, either. Rupert is, at his core, a snob. He would have been one of the people mocking Nate’s “wonder kid” comment and rolling his eyes at a nobody like Nate puffing himself up like that. If Rupert is going to the trouble of buying a whole new club, he’s going to buy himself the best. He’s going to show Rebecca up with his money, not by stealing a coach out from under her. Because Rupert doesn’t value people. He values things. And he uses people to collect those things.
Unless Rupert hired Nate specifically to hurt Ted, I think this is just one of those narrative choices we just have to accept. It does work schematically to have Nate become Ted’s nemesis, at least.
Yeah, I don’t have a huge problem with it, all things considered. There were far more substantive issues in S2 and in the finale that this minor plot contrivance doesn’t really matter.
Rupert hired Nate to fuck with Ted. He bought a London team to fuck with Rebecca, but he hired Nate to fuck with Ted.I will be very, VERY surprised if Nate manages to make it even a few games into the season as head manager of West Ham, because Rupert’s smart enough to cut a loss if he needs to and there’s no way Nate’s yet qualified to manage a major team. But for Rupert, the injury has already been done and Ted and Rebecca are letting Rupert live rent-free in their heads, which is all he really wants. Nate is but a means to an end.
Although Rupert’s purchase of West Ham obviously affects Rebecca, it could also be said that Rebecca and Ted are both living rent-free in Rupert’s head. He bought a team solely to spite Rebecca. And he hired a man who 14 months or so ago was a clubhouse attendant to manage his Premier League team (and who is not remotely equipped to manage a club), just to get back at Ted.He’s making really bad decisions based solely on his desire to tweak two people, one of whom really doesn’t care about him at all.
Like, are they giving Trent Crimm his own spinoff? I feel like there wasn’t nearly enough information to understand why he would purposefully burn Nate, resign from his job, and go off in search of himself.This possibility didn’t occur to me, but I’d totally watch a spinoff
I don’t understand your confusion re: Keely’s choice not to travel with Roy. She’s become the boss of her own firm for the first time in her life and is going to be under an enormous amount of pressure to prove she can do the job well. It would be completely unreasonable for her to leave her routine and base of operations under such circumstances especially during the start-up phase. If anything, I’m surprised that she and Roy didn’t get into a fight about his decision to unilaterally plan a vacation for them—while it was a sweet gesture, it was kind of misguided. Out of character for him, too, since he’s been shown to be generally considerate and thoughtful towards her.Generally I agree that this season was a lot weaker than the first, but I personally found Edwin’s breakdown to be hilarious, especially his threat of pooping in every room of Sam’s childhood home.Agree that the music choices in this show are weirdly obvious. They’re so on the nose they feel like they’re punching through your face.Also, Ted is terrible at his job. Like, really bad. I wonder if this is going to be addressed at any point of the third season. Like, okay, he may be a Coach Taylor-esque figure who wants to mold the character of his players, but it’s weird that he takes very little of a leadership role when it comes to planning strategy, especially after two years. I would think that even though his getting the job is improbable, he would’ve spent that time learning as much as possible about the game, especially since Beard seemingly managed to do it during the transcontinental flight.
First of Myles, thank you so much for the reviews and discussion this season. I know it hasn’t always been easy talking about this show, but I have always enjoyed your reviews, especially when it gives me a different perspective.
I do have to take a slight issue with one thing you said:And while Jamie being willing to give up the ball during a key moment is certainly related to his maturing as a player since his return to Richmond, it does nothing to connect with his relationship with his father, or his more recent self-insertion into Roy and Keeley’s relationship that causes some tension throughout the episode.Jamie’s dad’s entire thing is that Jamie should always be trying to score a goal. This is much more subtle than the extra pass at the end of the first season, mostly because the ‘selfish play’ element of Jamie’s game has been resolved — but this wasn’t about being selfish. Jamie has gone from being selfish to being selfless—he recognized that Danny needed to score that goal, and gave the opportunity to him. It was the thing that made Roy Kent go from forgiving Jamie, to actually (begrudgingly) liking Jamie — he recognized what had happened there and it allows their reference to ‘Major League’ (again) during the celebration.As for commentary on the Nate storyline, I’m going to point to a twitter thread I read that has more intelligent things to say about a storyline on television than anything I’ve ever written in my entire life: EDIT: Also, I am deeply invested in Trent Crimm’s character arc, and would watch a spin-off show. Especially if he ends up moving to a small fishing town in Scotland and has to deal with the locals. Have Denis Lawson play his dad. Would be great.
Haha, I forgot to mention the Major League homage, but I picked up on that too.
Which, I just realized, is a nice way to bring the first two seasons full circle, since the whole plot is kicked off with Rebecca’s Rachel Phelps plan to Major League the franchise.
That is indeed a smart thread, although again I feel like drawing a parallel to Jamie is hard when you consider how he disappeared from the narrative so often this season. I still think back to the Man City game where the show was like “This was particularly devastating for Jamie” and I realized that the game footage had done nothing to articulate why.
Which is why the attempt at presenting Jamie’s lack of selfishness here felt untethered: as I said, it’s not irrelevant to those stories, but it’s too imprecise to mean something in the way the parallelism is asking it to. You read it as a breakthrough for him and Roy, but I just read that as Roy’s excitement over the win, and nothing to do with that specific choice at all. It wasn’t like it was a terrible narrative choice: just one of many in the episode that would have been more effective if the journey to the moment had been more precise.
The why was because he left Richmond for Man U, then squandered his chance at Man U because of his problems, and then ended up back at Richmond (who signed him when no other team would), who he relegated with his goal when he was part of Man U.The “This was particularly devastating for Jamie” was a line, spoken by announcers, who don’t have insight into what we do. From their point of view, it was devastating for him in terms of sports and what they, the announcers as characters, know.
I think that’s a totally valid way to read that scene as well, I just read it differently, because up to that point we’ve not seen Roy have that level of forgiveness to Jamie.
I did think that there was going to be a callback to “the sign” earlier in the season during the final game, and I was a bit surprised there wasn’t (as it was one of the best moments of the entire season). Had I written it, it would have had the sign (to remind us that Jamie can be selfish still, but it’s something he can now control) and then give up the penalty shot to Danny. I think that might have hit the point just a bit more.
And yeah, Jamie did sort of disappear into the narrative — it’s weird that he’s billed as a main character but Sam is not, for example.
I listened to an interview with the actor who plays Sam and he said the only reason he’s not billed as a lead is that he’s a lead in another series, so there is a legal issue with that.
The Nate storyline should be recognizable for any human being, but especially for those whose professional lives see them serving as mentors. I have been a coach and teacher for over 20 years and try to reach out to others and coach them from a place of kindness and support, like Ted. (Though nowhere nearly as kindly, humorously, or successfully as Ted!). Some players/students respond almost immediately and begin that process of development/maturation to begin trying to become their best selves, like Jamie is doing on the show. Because of the nature of the job and human nature, though, sometimes the person is so early in the process that we see no change or actually see regression. Isaac and Roy, especially, are examples of characters that took some time to get that momentum going before really stepping up. And sometimes the person NEVER changes. Rupert is a perfect example of this – despite every opportunity, like in Nate’s case, to do the right thing or make the right choice, every choice he makes is selfish, spiteful, and mean-spirited. Ted sees this early on and knows there’s no changing Rupert’s path. Ted’s been coaching so long that he recognizes Nate’s as one of those cases where he did all he could but any change will have to come from Nate’s realizations, and there is nothing Ted can do at this point other than keep trying to be decent and hope Nate wakes up. Wisdom is as useful as ignorance right now if it’s falling on Nate’s deaf ears so he needs to just let Nate make his choices.The worst part about being a teacher or coach or any sort of mentor is that sometimes you “lose” someone and there’s nothing you can do about it. And sometimes you think you lost someone because it’s years down the road before that person makes the realization and changes. We’ll see what the case is with Nate. Or, sadly, maybe we won’t.
I suspect Trent is going to be Richmond’s new PR director.
My friends and I think it’s more likely that he’s going to be writing a book on the team’s comeback or Ted specifically and will be embedded with the team. It’s likely the team will just contract out to Keeley for PR.
Trent Crimm (Local Hero)
Glad someone got the reference there — also they look enough alike…. anyway.
I can’t really argue with how uneven this episode and this season is. This season ended basically where I thought it would, which is how these characters learn to let go. Or at least to open themselves up. In that way, I find it satisfying, even the path there is a mess. I will stick up for the Nate storyline, which I think ends where it needs to. Because it’s clear that Nate feels let down by Ted, and understandably so. But Nate isn’t just talking to or about Nate. He’s talking to his dad, who won’t acknowledge his son’s accomplishments. He’s talking to Roy, who respects Nate so little that a kiss between Nate and Keeley doesn’t register as any kind of threat. He’s talking to himself, and how, despite all that Nate is and does, he can’t just let what others think of him go. That definitely works for me.
Yeah, that’s especially interesting comparing it to Sam’s statement that he has to learn not to worry about what other people think. I just wish Nate had brought up his issues like that, that he thinks he never gets credit or respect, instead of making the whole speech about Ted specifically. Because I don’t think you’re wrong, but even if Nate isn’t consciously taking out all those frustrations on Ted, I think he could have expressed it in a way that both works as a clue to that and works better in the scene as a whole.
I think some people have a tendency to project all their frustrations onto one convenient target, and I’m very willing to believe that Nate is exactly that kind of person. Nate’s the guy who shouted at Will because he got upset over a social media post, after all.
I mean, I don’t disagree, I just still think it could’ve landed better the other way, on the whole. Even just a little something to that effect would’ve helped sell it for me.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here, insofar as the issue is the lack of unpacking of Nate’s speech. Less about believability and more about triggering a clearer understanding of how Ted perceives his relationship to his team and his job over the course of the season, which the Nate storyline ended up saying almost nothing about here despite being ostensibly about that all year.
Yeah, that’s it, even if Nate doesn’t do it himself. I feel like season 1 Ted Lasso— and Ted Lasso— would have interrogated himself on whether and how he failed Nate, whether this is indicative of other problems in the team he’s not noticing, what else he might have been neglecting, etc. (and probably talked about it with Beard). Here, it just… happens, then everybody moves on, more or less. I feel like that was one of the broader problems of the season compared to 1, that there were so many stories that were not only rushed in their development but rushed in exploring and unpacking the ramifications of the decisions the characters made (or skipping that step altogether), as well. In that regard, this season is significantly more surface-level than the first, by and large without the same level of self-reflection by the characters.
I appreciate your thoughts on this, but I have to disagree based on what Season 1 taught us about Ted. Ted is a coach who tries to put people in the place (emotionally and physically) where they can do the jobs they were destined to do. The gift of books, for example, was to help each player on his respective path. When Nate was getting teased in the locker room, Ted had a clear response to Beard about not intervening and why, leaving it to Roy to emerge as the leader he needed, and was destined, to become. Ted knows Nate’s issues with Ted are about more than Ted, and as painful as it is for him to listen to Nate say terrible things to him, Ted knows to listen silently (with one small comment) because it will serve neither of them for him to reply in that moment. Ted has already reflected on what’s happening and knows Nate is resentful and lashing out, and Ted needs to let Nate do that and wear himself out until he recognizes his need to look inward. This is Ted’s gift and one which I feel people are ignoring in stating there’s no response or self-reflection. Ted didn’t fail Nate. Nate is currently failing Nate and can only save himself when, and if, he gets to the place Ted has set him up to reach.
Ted knows Nate’s issues with Ted are about more than Ted, and as painful as it is for him to listen to Nate say terrible things to him, Ted knows to listen silently (with one small comment) because it will serve neither of them for him to reply in that moment. Ted has already reflected on what’s happening and knows Nate is resentful and lashing out, and Ted needs to let Nate do that and wear himself out until he recognizes his need to look inward. This is Ted’s gift and one which I feel people are ignoring in stating there’s no response or self-reflection. Ted didn’t fail Nate. I agree with some of this and disagree with some of this. Nate’s issues are about more than Ted, but they are also more than a little bit about Ted. And Ted hasn’t seen Nate’s behavior and its consequences all season, and that’s a big problem that, yes, Ted does have to respond to and reflect on. That response doesn’t have to be to Nate. It has to be something Ted grapples with internally and with his remaining staff. He needs to interrogate how and why this went unnoticed by someone who prides himself on culture and understanding how and why people work best. Ted didn’t necessarily fail Nate, but Ted failed his team and his staff. Big time. I think that’s the reckoning that Myles and others here are saying needed to happen and didn’t. That’s the central failure of Ted Lasso and Ted Lasso in season 2, for many of us, I think. The fact that he does all of this critical work to understand better how he relates to the world, and yet fails to see how his way of relating to his world has had very clear negative consequences. The show even walks right up to this issue on more than one occasion–most notably with the conversation that Beard and Ted have after the humiliating FA cup loss. And then the show backs away without ever really confronting what the fuck is going on with Ted the coach that he can’t see the problems in his own clubhouse. That was the reflection that many viewers expected to see when the inevitable Ted/Nate confrontation happened. And again the show walked up to the brink and then slowly backed away without doing or saying anything of substance. It feels like a real missed opportunity and like there is a real lack of will to have Ted deal with these weightier aspects of himself.
Like I said, though, I don’t think Ted needed to confront Nate about it— I think it’s something he would talk to Beard about, though, if he’d overlooked the signs that Nate was becoming a problem, if the problems with Nate were indicative of other cracks in the foundation of the team that he’s been overlooking, etc.
Yeah, I’m surprised how bothered people are by the Nate storyline. I think it’s been telegraphed pretty clearly since the beginning, and it’s the one storyline that actually makes sense so far and mostly feels earned, followed by Jamie growing up.
Roy-Keeley drama? What?
Anyone actually caring that Ted Lasso left the pitch in a hurry in one game? What?
Beard’s all-night adventure. What?
No fallout from Dubai Air. What?
Sam-Rebecca just kinda happening. What?
Rebecca being little more than lovelorn. What?
I’m confused as to why you would think it makes sense for Keeley to leave with Roy for six weeks when she has a) just become her own boss b) has apparently very rich and powerful backers to answer to c) is going to be under an enormous amount of pressure to get her firm up and running (I mean, the admin and logistics stuff alone about hiring assistants, setting up an office whether it’s virtual and/or getting a physical space, getting contracts with vendors signed, dealing with high-maintenance clients, etc.) — that is a tremendous amount of work and anyone who has started or run a business knows that you have to be physically present for all of it, especially if you are the head of the place. If anything, it’s weird that Roy thought she could leave and do the work remotely even though she’s nowhere near established. Also out-of-character, since he’s been shows as considerate and thoughtful towards her and pretty quick about learning where he’s messed up.While I’ve mostly enjoyed these reviews for their intelligence and attention to detail, I have to say there is something kind of strange about how they seem to take the show to task for not answering or wrapping up everything to the recap writer’s satisfaction. E.g., assuming that throwaway jokes mean more than they do (I mean, the Grindr thing—let it go, sir, seriously). From what I know of TV writers’ rooms (which is admittedly second-hand from friends who have worked on shows), they are working on the fly, rewriting material at the drop of a hat, and having to contend with enormous logistical challenges (i.e., COVID, actor changes, etc.). Not that I’m excusing Ted Lasso for what has admittedly been a weaker second season or some sloppy writing and execution, but some of these recaps have a certain…tone to them, as if they are almost disappointed in a childlike way that this show isn’t absolutely 100% perfect and haven’t sprung fully formed from their creators’ collective heads, like Athena from Zeus.It’s a TV show. Yes, examining it with a critical eye is absolutely fair. But maybe it’s too much to demand that it wrap up every single arc in a way that satisfies one person’s perceptions of how the show should work.
That’s a fair point on Keeley, but this is why the choice to suddenly drop all that in the epilogue makes no sense: Roy hadn’t been privy to any of these conversations/phone calls? Or her stress level? The nature of their conflict is really where my confusion lied, and to whether it was expressly necessary to throw their communication with one another under the bus in that moment. It was interesting watching people live-reacting on Twitter last night: it seemed like people were already reading the story as bittersweet before the epilogue pushed these buttons, and it—like the way the false love triangles were handled—seemed contrived as a result.As to your larger point, there’s something inherently slippery about criticism in this format, and so I understand where you’re coming from and take it constructively (albeit with followup questions about what we mean by tone). A show failing to meet expectation raises the question of whether those expectations were necessarily fair, and it’s not necessarily easy at times to distinguish between what a critic desires and what a critic feels best serves the story/characters/etc. All I can know personally is that I have drawn no hard lines in the sand about what this season of television “must do”: sure, I may have particular nits to pick, but it wasn’t as though the lack of follow-through on Colin was a dealbreaker (nor do I think I ever really framed it as one). It was a matter of what opportunities the story being told created, and what choices the show made that pulled them away from that opportunity.As always, those choices happened for a reason. There’s a Deadline interview with Bill Lawrence where the excuse for a journalist frames a question about the criticism of the second season as though it’s offensive to imply the writers failed to think about certain issues given they won a buttload of Emmys, but that’s not how this works. Obviously, the people who sat in that writer’s room every week would read these reviews—if they read these reviews—and get frustrated that I don’t see the logic underpinning certain decisions, whether it was COVID restrictions or cast scheduling or some other dimension that I can’t possibly see. But it feels pointless to me to constantly be saying “Now, I’m sure this happened for a reason” when at the end of the day what’s on screen is what matters, and what’s on screen didn’t connect for me.
Ultimately, I can only say that whether naively or not, I feel that Ted Lasso failed the expectations set by its first season on a level that goes beyond what I personally desired and pushed into some fundamental realities of serial television storytelling…which are, of course, still subjectively determined and evaluated by me, which is just unavoidable. Perhaps there’s a version of these reviews that tries to be more evasive and not even step close to the trap you’re identifying, but to me it’s more interesting to get close to the proverbial edge and explore my reactions in greater detail. For better or worse, these reviews exist as an exercise for me as much as they are for the reader, and this approach is most productive for understanding my own reactions and ambivalences than the alternative.
I ‘m seeing a pattern here that I’ve seen elsewhere (including on this site), and I’d like to draw attention to it:Critic: [something negative, maybe only partly]Response: “Well, that’s their artistic decision [”design choice” in games], so you can’t complain about it”— to which the (my) answer is “Criticism is identifying artistic decisions and describing if the reviewer thinks they worked.”Now, another part of the response, seen here as well, and quite valid, is something I associate with either Siskel or Ebert: “Review the thing that was made, not the thing you wish had been made”. And as I say, it’s valid! But that’s why you have to try to separate “what is the show trying to do, but failing (maybe only in part)“ from “what is the show not even trying to do”. And I think that’s the disagreement about the Dubai Air plot; the show seems to be about that kind of thing, and one episode very much was about it. If the followup seems logically lacking, “that’s not what the show is trying to do” will be unsatisfactory to some.
Yes, a lot of criticism, including a lot of Myles’s comments in the end here is about what people wish something was. But a lot of it, including Myles’s comments about Dubai Air, is fair. The show told us this was a big, conflict and that the characters risked something by doing the right thing. They made the hard choice even though they knew they might suffer…
Then nothing.
That is a failure of the show to deliver on the premise it set up.
No one struggled with new obstacles. No one faced consequences. Essentially, the choice didn’t matter, and was not hard (because it went as easily as the easy choice). The show deceived us in painting the choice as difficult / the characters as righteous for “doing the right thing.” Because their actions had no narrative consequences. (Not necessarily bad consequences, but no real affect on the narrative).
I’ve really appreciated Myles’ reviews because they have been, in my opinion, of a higher critical and analytical standard than much of the recent reviewing done here at AV Club. It hearkens back to the days when AV Club regularly recapped a lot of shows at a really high level. Perhaps it’s because I work and write in a similar academic field, but I’ve really appreciated his work and I can also see how it would draw the kind of criticism you note because it does dig a bit deeper than many readers might be looking for. It’s a complaint that professors in literature and pop culture studies get from students all the time: “You’re over analyzing. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s wrong—it was their artistic choice. You’re reading too much into things, etc. etc. You’re taking something that’s supposed to be fun and stripping it of the joy…” It’s always a process to explain to students that critical analysis isn’t just spouting your unfounded opinion, it’s about rooting your claims in a thorough reading of the text—in this case season 2 of Ted Lasso. (And there is joy to be found in digging into how and why a narrative works). And I think Myles has done an exemplary job in that regard. I’ve agreed with much of what he’s said, quibbled with a few things here or there, and by and large I’ve been impressed with the work he’s done. This season of Ted Lasso has not been an easy one to recap and review, I’m sure. I’ve also struggled at times to elaborate on what hasn’t been working for me within the narrative and thematic development of the season, and again, pop culture criticism is my field of study in academia. Season 2 had a lot of storylines and the integration of these storylines hasn’t been great, in my opinion, and that makes the recapping even more difficult because it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what isn’t working right away. So yeah, Myles if you read this, I say props to you and thanks for your work. I’ve appreciated it!
I feel like part of the toolkit of a reviewer should be an innate knowledge of the process – understanding why choices are made and what challenges shows face when writing butts up against logistics and other production challenges. Then review whether or not those choices connect, and thirdly asking “does it really matter?”.I feel like if you get to step 2 and then immediately write your own alternative to what should have happened and letting that turn into a fixation is a trap – both for your own enjoyment of the show and for the kind of review you are writing.
Other posters have remarked that they see a tendency toward fanfic and/or overanalysis in these recaps, which is pretty close to what I meant when I said there is a tone to these critiques that I find irksome.
Criticism is a valid and interesting body of work that I love to read because really well-written criticism brings me further insight and illuminates the art and pop culture I find meaningful or engaging that I otherwise might not have come to on my own.
The issue I have with some of these recaps is that they seem to come from the perspective of someone who is not just offering critiques of where the show has mis-stepped or even failed in its mission, but someone who would rather be writing the show than writing about it. And that underlying tone of, “well, I wouldn’t have written it that way” undermines your valid critiques of where the show needs work, in my opinion.
I think it makes perfect sense to present alternative ways a narrative could’ve gone that might have worked better. It helps a critic articulate more clearly where they see problems in the work, and it helps readers (including writers of fiction) understand alternative ways of telling a story that might work better.As someone who has done a lot of peer reviewing, one of the core tenants of that process is giving actionable feedback; what if instead of this, you tried this? What if you hit this point a little harder? What if you were a bit more subtle here? Those kinds of suggestions help people actually understand what you think the problem is and how it could be better. It’s weird to me that people object to these kinds of suggestions when they read them in criticism, as to me it shows that the critic is engaging with the work on a deeper level, and thinking about the craft of writing and how the writers have succeeded or failed.
I appreciate this, although it does make me realize that a core part of these objections is that they think I’m “Reviewer 2-ing” Ted Lasso.
Now, see, I completely disagree with that approach. I’ve been in many a creative writing workshop and giving “actionable feedback” usually amounts to a bunch of egotistical writers telling the poor sod who’s up for review how the story would fare much better if only said sod wrote it the way that the other, more brilliant writers would suggest. I tend to hate it when any kind of criticism takes this tack.
I had a one-of-a-kind, wonderful writing professor who ran his workshops differently and spoiled me for the process forever—after we read a piece, we had to do a careful write-up about what we thought the story/screenplay/poem/whatever was trying to achieve artistically, thematically, and plot-wise; then we were encouraged to discuss about whether or not said work actually met those goals, but we were strongly discouraged from providing prescriptive notes (i.e., “Give the main character a girlfriend.”) It’s a subtle difference but one that makes a real impact in terms of whether or not you’re trying to actually supply helpful critiques or just demonstrate how you would tackle this idea if it was yours, although it is in fact, not yours.
The difference here is that serialized television is structured around set up and payoff of multiple storylines, where as I do agree when I get feedback on my own work I’m quick to say “oh, interesting.” and dismiss it entirely. I don’t think Myles is saying “give Ted a girlfriend” as much as asking the very relevant question of why are these characters making these choices, and are these choices based on what you showed us before.
Like, are they giving Trent Crimm his own spinoff? I feel like there
wasn’t nearly enough information to understand why he would purposefully
burn Nate, resign from his job, and go off in search of himself.
Trent kind of feels like a guy who went to school for journalism hoping to do real hard-hitting capital J Journalism, but then got put on the sports beat and ended up being so good at it he couldn’t get away from it. But then having to write what amounted to a gossip piece about someone he liked and respected was a straw that broke him.
Any British person with two brain cells and that sort of idealism would spend every waking moment of their career trying to get hired abroad given the right wing reactionary dumpster fire that is the entirety of the British press.
Clearly you’ve never read the FT or the Economist.
Myles, I wish you could get out of your own head. You’re so painfully overthinking this show. And you know it. It’s a journey you have to take for yourself. We’re at a weird point in TV history. So many of the shows now are being created by people who have grown up creatively in the era of Peak TV. There’s so much remixing and experimenting going on, that it can be disorienting at times and you can get a completely different takeaway of you’re evaluating it based on common TV expectations. This was my mindset for the first few episodes of the season, when like much of the world I was becoming very frustrated and impatient with the show for not giving us the same feeling as last season. But I’ve come to realize that makers of Ted Lasso are fully aware of what each storytelling button they press will cause viewers to think. I also believe that the show is simply telling the story it wants to tell in the way it wants to tell it, regardless of what conventional TV storytelling leads you to believe is necessary. Things like Dubai Air, Rebecca’s ownership/management of the team, actually seeing football being played, are things the show is aware of and simply chooses not to worry about following those rabbit holes. Now that the season is over and you can really see what things were ultimately important and what things weren’t, you can see that the show is going to have no problem abandoning storylines, or allowing them to just be setup for something else.For so many of these types of storyline, we’ve seen them play out in endless endless TV shows, both good and bad. For a lot of these secondary or tertiary storylines, Ted Lasso seems to be saying “You’ve seen these stories before, you know how they go, just imagine them having played out in the background between the episodes.” Was there fallout from Dubai Air? Maybe. It’s not hard to fill in the blanks but maybe there was a little bit of fallout. But ultimately did we really need to see it? I don’t think so. That’s not the story the show was trying to tell this season.So I think we just have to let this show be its own unique sort of Storytelling Delivery System. The second half of this season Justified the seeming have haphazardness of the first half of the season. My condo rating for the season is a solid A. And I look forward to the unique brand of television that Ted Lasso will be delivering in the season 3.
The thing is, though, all the stuff you’re talking about skipping over that we can just fill in the blanks on? That’s the stuff that made the show great in season 1. It was great in how it didn’t skip over the process at all, and that made for steady and plausible plotting— it made Ted’s journey to winning over the team and bringing out the best in them plausible, it made the way he influenced other people plausible, it made their own journeys plausible, and that both made the journeys of the characters more engaging and the successes that much more triumphant (and the defeats that much more heartbreaking).I don’t really think it has anything to do with TV, specifically. Dramatic plausibility in the structure of events is an idea that’s been around since Aristotle wrote Poetics. If you sacrifice that structure, you sacrifice plausibility, and you sacrifice dramatic impact by skipping over the parts from the genesis of a plotline to the part where it climaxes and concludes, and your story suffers as a result.
“The thing is, though, all the stuff you’re talking about skipping over that we can just fill in the blanks on? That’s the stuff that made the show great in season 1. It was great in how it didn’t skip over the process at all, and that made for steady and plausible plotting— it made Ted’s journey to winning over the team and bringing out the best in them plausible, it made the way he influenced other people plausible, it made their own journeys plausible, and that both made the journeys of the characters more engaging and the successes that much more triumphant (and the defeats that much more heartbreaking).”I wonder if that’s one of the views which is said in hindsight as season 1 is held up compared to season 2. Otherwise we would likely read a lot of commentary about how Rebecca being forgiven by Ted needed more context and buildup, made the story pointless, etc.
Well, it was one of the fundamental reasons I called the show one of my favorites of last year, so it certainly wasn’t hindsight for me.https://www.the-solute.com/guys-have-underestimated-me-my-entire-life-ted-lasso/
You’re not wrong that writing criticism is a personal journey, but there’s no such thing as overthinking a show. Not everyone agrees with that: trust me, I’ve been living with this claim for over a decade now. But as someone whose literal job—and my second job—is to analyze media in a way that many would claim to be “overthinking,” the suggestion never sits well with me.Now, obviously, the personal nature of criticism means that you might not agree with this. But that’s the point! It’s part of the journey that you choose to read the show’s storytelling choices this season as unconventional and unique whereas I read them as failed ambition. You’re not wrong that the choices to drop/not engage with certain storylines suggests the show’s priorities, but my argument is that this fundamentally damaged the show’s ability to tell a coherent story and live up to the world set up by the first season. I now have a clearer understanding of what the writers thought was important and what they didn’t think was meaningful, but I don’t think it’s “overthinking” the show to disagree with their assessment. It’s a respectful disagreement on how the show prioritized its stories, and set the focus of a season that consistently felt like a missed opportunity.You’re not underthinking the show. I’m not overthinking it. We’re just thinking about it differently. That’s just how this works.
I think the problem is that a lot of the time it comes off as puffed-up fanfiction. I like your reviews but a lot of the time you aren’t engaging with the story that the show is telling, you’re saying “this is what I wish the show was doing and it’s not doing that and so I’m going to grade it based on the failure to be what I would write it to be.” See: the constant, wearying harping about the lack of fallout from Dubai Air or a one-off line about Grindr becoming a recurring feature of your reviews. You see these as failures rather than conscious choices about the narrative the show is trying to write. I don’t envy writing criticism for a living, but I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to the show a lot of the time because you’re frustrated it’s not telling the story you want it to tell. Ted Lasso isn’t the show that was ever going to deep-dive into the consequences of Sam taking a stand because that’s not the story it’s telling and the world it wants to build. Maybe you find that narratively dissatisfying, but I think that’s different altogether from it being a failure or a missed opportunity.Sometimes I think you’re absolutely spot on. The Roy/Keely drama coming fast and furious the last couple episodes was a really bizarre choice the show made, and I completely agree. But then you miss the point completely sometimes, like you seem to be doing with the bit with Phoebe’s teacher. It was never to present some kind of love quadrangle. It was to show that maybe Roy isn’t as invested in the relationship as he seems to be, and his way of coming to that realization.
“Ted Lasso isn’t the show that was ever going to deep-dive into the consequences of Sam taking a stand because that’s not the story it’s telling and the world it wants to build. Maybe you find that narratively dissatisfying, but I think that’s different altogether from it being a failure or a missed opportunity.”…how? If a show chooses to tell a ripped from the headlines story about protests in sports, and then has no desire to actually follow through on how that story would play out, that is a failure. It would be one thing if I was suggesting the show NEEDS to tell that kind of story when it wasn’t, but they’re the ones who introduced it and then ignored it.I get what you’re saying, truly, but I have to assert that expecting the show to live up to a story it introduced is very different from “fan fiction.” If I’m going to engage in that type of writing, it’s in “Colin Corner,” which I put in the stray observations for the precise reason that it was a stray observation and not a core criticism. But the other cases were all stories the show was telling, and then struggled to articulate clearly, and that’s not demanding the show be something it’s not. It’s expecting it to follow through on its own choices.(As for Phoebe’s teacher, that’s just part of the gig: they built it as a meet cute, left in the bit of the other teacher teasing her, and made a huge deal of the cliffhanger of them on the couch. Some things matter less than they seem to! It happens. But I don’t think it’s shocking that I’d read it that way after the Jamie choice the week before.)
“…how? If a show chooses to tell a ripped from the headlines story about protests in sports, and then has no desire to actually follow through on how that story would play out, that is a failure. It would be one thing if I was suggesting the show NEEDS to tell that kind of story when it wasn’t, but they’re the ones who introduced it and then ignored it.”No, given that you’ve talked about it every week since the storyline was introduced, you’re pretty clearly saying that the show needs to tell that kind of story. The show had it play out. Sam got a Big Hero moment, the team got to do something heartwarming and back him up, and then the money was covered by Bantr. Plot resolved. That’s certainly not realistic, but this show has never been overly concerned about realism. I really feel like you’ve taken something that wasn’t really meant to be a defining, watershed moment of the season and turned it into this narrative failure. The Dubai Air thing -wasn’t- meant to be a whole season-defining arc showing the consequences of doing good things. You can tell this because, well, it wasn’t really brought up again. The show is more interested in telling different stories than that and so they focused on different things and just kind of hand-waved it away in favor of smaller stories about Nate’s father issues and Ted having breakthroughs in therapy. They devoted objectively more time to Nate trying to get a nice table at a restaurant than they did the Dubai Air deal. One was handwaved away. One had like half an episode devoted to it. That’s not a storytelling failure, at that point, that’s a choice. If you think that’s a narrative failure, well, that’s why you’re the big city media critic and I’m just a simple country bumpkin, but I don’t think you’ve really articulated why this choice is bad or really engaged it on its merits aside from saying what boils down to “I wish they were telling the story I want them to tell.”Look, this wasn’t a perfect season of television. There was a weird shapelessness to it and there were certainly failures in its character-building, and I hate the manufactured Roy/Keely drama as much as anyone else, just as examples. But I think you’ve been far harsher on it than it deserves and it certainly seems like it’s because you think it’s not telling the stories you would rather it tell.
I guess there’s a fine line right between this “fanfiction” and valid criticism issue though, right? Like, I found Loki profoundly disappointing and tiresome because it seemed to be setting up such an interesting story in the first two episodes, and none of it paid off. Often, part of criticism is saying, “There is a much more interesting story here than the one you chose to tell.” But you’re not wrong that too often critics/viewers are so stuck on the story the writer chose not to tell that they don’t see the one they did tell. I don’t know.This season felt messy to me. Messier than the last season. I’m hoping that this was a sophmore hiccup and they’ll be more on track next season.
This season felt messier, because it was messier. If you watched the Goldstein/Hunt Vanity Fair interview they all but admitted that they were flying by their pants in writing Season 2. I’m all but certain that had everything to do with Covid complications and not about lacking a vision for this season however. Complications in production – shooting or actor availability can foil even the tightest planned out plotting and writing.If some things are left hanging, and some other things feel shoehorned in that might very well be blamed on production issues. Should the extra two episodes have worked more towards ironing out some of those kinks? Maybe. Is it likely that the needed cast or rewrites needed to work with other episodes were possible? I’d wager no.
I mean, for sure, there’s a fine line between between criticism and fanfiction. But I don’t think we’ve hit it here, and honestly your criticism of Loki is on the fanfiction end of it. The difference is you’re just having a conversation in the comments of a review and not writing a big review for a prominent media criticism site, right?It’s not like I have some hard and fast rule determining what’s what, I can just call ‘em as I see ‘em. But look. If I wrote a criticism of, say, the episode “Fly” of Breaking Bad and said that I really think it’s a disappointing episode of TV because the episode would’ve been way better if Walt and Jesse just got the damn fly right away and then went out for frosty chocolate milkshakes to talk about their feelings constructively, then that would be kind of offputting, wouldn’t it? Then imagine that for the rest of my reviews of the season I harped on how it was a missed opportunity for Walt and Jesse to have a bonding sesh and had a running feature where I talked about how the show never checked back in on the fly, that would be pretty wearisome, wouldn’t it? Even if you liked the rest of my writing?I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not a media critic, just a random dude on Kinja. I don’t envy the job. But at some point you have to engage with the text that’s -here- in front of you rather than -what you wish the text would be-. Maybe this is just the weakness of the “review each episode individually” structure of the site, which, hey, I can get that. I can even get the disappointment that people who have shown the capability to show something cool and tell stories with characters I like have chosen to go a different direction than my preference. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I also would get profoundly tired of hearing about it constantly and filtering everything through that lens.
Agreed with what moggett says about Loki 100%, but the dubai air issue is that it breaks the viewers trust in consequences in a show. I feel it is the same as “fast travel” in GOT. Does it really matter? No, if it is an overall good episode of an overall good season it does not matter. But if it is indicative of a show not maintaining it’s own rules and shows a deeper issue with the season as a whole, then perhaps it is worth bringing up again. And it is referenced in this episode by players wearing the dubai air jersey with tape over it and that being a pivotal decision in Sam deciding to stay.
In what sense did it not maintain its own rules? The show has not been big on showing the consequences that would happen in the real world in the past. It’s fundamentally different than GoT suddenly finding the Fast Travel option in the menu because Ted Lasso has never cared about what would happen in real life. The show simply doesn’t care about Dubai Air. It was a moment to give Sam a hero moment and show the team backed him and then the show moved on, because it doesn’t care about the actual logistics of being a professional football team. Again: There is -objectively- more air time dedicated to Nate getting a nice table at a restaurant for his dad than there is the entirety of the Dubai Air storyline. Hell, we had an -entire episode- dedicated to Coach Beard’s Wacky Vaguely Magical Adventure. The fallout of the Dubai Air thing is just not the kind of story the show wants to tell.
But the show used to care about the actual logistics of being a professional football team. Everything with Rebecca and Rupert, the role of the press, the charity gala, the Premier League and relegation, even how the barflies reacted, all of those made sense in S1. They were completely thrown out in S2.
“f a show chooses to tell a ripped from the headlines story about protests in sports, and then has no desire to actually follow through on how that story would play out, that is a failure.”Jesus Christ, stop responding to criticism with terrible, idiotic takes.
At some point these criticisms come off like the readers are just upset you aren’t validating their opinion.Even when I don’t have the same reactions as you, I often find that you point to real issues with how a show’s stories are told, and in the case of this one, pinpoint why so many of the plots are straining at the seams in a way they didn’t in season 1, even as I still enjoy the show.
I agree with you, Myles. Sometimes it’s a bit of a buzzkill reading your reviews after watching a half-baked episode that nevertheless made me feel warm and fuzzy, but I’m glad you’re doing the job of articulating the reservations most of us are registering. I honestly hope the Ted Lasso writers are reading your articles. Season 3 would be stronger for it!
I think there’s a difference between critic and commenter in AV Club in that the critic writes the headline, steers the discourse and grades the episode. I get that grades are by no means an objective barometer but that still count more than whatever those down here in the fray have to say.That said, and for what it’s worth, Thank You, Myles for not just your reviews, but your active and thoughtful discussion with those in the comments. Part of my joy of Ted Lasso recently has extended to not just the episodes, but these recaps and the thoughtful commentary that has entailed.
“but there’s no such thing as overthinking a show”Rreally? You spent have a season deeply invested in how Apple could possibly afford music on its big-budget, internationally-released show, as if TV shows havent employed popular music FOREVER.You absolutely can and you absolutely do overthink the show. Once you learn how very, DEEPLY incorrect you are, your reviews and your writing in general will improve.
“You’re not wrong that writing criticism is a personal journey, but there’s no such thing as overthinking a show.”I don’t think there’s such a thing as ever being wrong about subjecting a show to criticism – no show is above criticism – but I do think, especially with the advent of social media and many clickbait thinkpieces, some can twist themselves into knots over a show and then get upset when the show isn’t what they made up in their heads. This happened with WandaVision, and the Twin Peaks revival, among other shows.
I don’t believe in overthinking, really, and I appreciate you giving the show attention, but I don’t think it’s really deserving of your attention this way. It’s not trying to do the things you want it to do. It never was and it never will.
I don’t say that to defend the show but to indict it.
I think the argument to this would be that season 1 was, at least in terms of structure and originality, worthy of over thinking this way. As soon as Ted and Rebecca resolved their conflict last season, I knew this season was going to be an uphill battle of establishing motivations. I’m not saying S1 was perfection either, but it was consistently well plotted and rewarding even on a critical level.
I agree. Saying that to critique a show is to “overthink” it is actually a disservice to the writers of the show, because if they’re good writers then they certainly thought about every element of the writing when they wrote the season. To critique the writing is thus to engage in a conversation with them about all their intentional choices when writing the show. To say that to critique a show is to overthink it implies that the very writers of the show didn’t spent any time thinking about what they were making so you won’t gain anything by analyzing it either.
I disagree that writers surely thought of everything. Maybe good writers do, but the incredible need and short time frames allowed for content in this streaming age has thinned the talent pool. So much stuff is hack quality, inane ego productions (half of Nicole Kidman’s projects and most star projects) and/or strictly formulaic, like network TV. This second season is a mess from a writing standpoint. If it wasn’t for the superb cast and acting it would be written off as a mess, but the star power saves it. I think Myles has pretty much nailed it these two seasons.
I was coming back to this to look up something, and this reminded me how much I find the criticism that “You’re overthinking it” annoying. To me it’s like saying, “You’ll enjoy it a lot more if you just pretend to be stupid!” Is that supposed to be an endorsement of the story?
100% agree. The reviewer is clinging to personal bias and it shows every week. The want this show to be something else and seem mad the show isn’t changing for them.
Myles is mad that the show didn’t happen in season 2 exactly the way Myles wanted it to happen. Because of that, he has been very critical. That isn’t critical writing, it’s just lashing out. Nate would understand.
Criticism is a sign of respect and it is my lack of respect for Ted Lasso that has me thinking some critics (and fans) are overthinking the show. I like it fine, but it’s silly and frothy and not a reflection of anything resembling reality. Which is fine! it’s a comedy. But it’s strange people act like the show is the second coming or as if it’s twee positivity is somehow a new problem.
Miles, like many fans, doesn’t really seem to get the show. Of course there are no consequences. It’s Ted Lasso. Wishing for consequences is wishing for a different show.
For me, the show is meant to be about football. They could have made it about anything, that was their choice, but they chose football. It’s not overthinking to say that its utter disregard of everything to do with the reality of football (in S2, not S1) is, at the very least, worthy of criticism.
It’s literally not about football.
I can see your point and how that can be frustrating if you’re a football fan, but I think you’ve missed the mark a bit. That’s like saying that Parks and Recreation is meant to be a show about local government. They could have set it in any other type of organisation, but they chose a city council. I work at a city council, and can tell you that that show displayed an utter disregard of everything to do with the reality of local government. There’s a difference between subject and setting.
“So many of the shows now are being created by people who have grown up creatively in the era of Peak TV.”This is worthy of deep dive, tbh. Arguably more apparent in animation where simply put people have watched better TV shows than say, Matt Groening had.
I enjoyed Beard’s reaction when Ted uses the name “John Obi-Wan Gandalf” while making up an inspirational quote during his speech to the team.I don’t think that was made up; I think it was an actual quote from John Wooden, UCLA coaching basketball legend, whose nuggets of wisdom earned him the nickname “The Wizard of Westwood.” (He’s also the creator of the “Pyramid of Success” in the title and that we see Nate staring at.) I’m presuming Ted’s making a Ted joke about Wooden’s wisdom and/or wizardry.I think your review is pretty bang-on, and that’s why I’m more toward the optimistic side that the show can recapture the formula, because I think more than anything this season just needed another pass in the writer’s room: Use those extra episodes to develop the conflicts and stories further and deeper; make sure they’re paced in a plausible fashion; give us more dialogue that actually gets to what’s going on. There were just too many stories that felt half-baked, whether that’s rushed or only sketched in or seemingly dropped. (Dubai Air, of course, stands out as the latter; similarly, Dani taking the PK would have worked better if we hadn’t more or less dropped that story by episode, what, three?) And Nate’s story would have worked much better if his speech had gotten into his real issues: Everybody overlooks and infantilizes him and nobody respects him, even as he continually proves himself capable. (I get the feeling that Nate’s criticism is true in that Ted has been overlooking a lot of things, not just Nate, as he deals with his own issues, and I wish we’d really seen him confront that. I guess one of those things is how unhealthy Beard’s relationship is, but there seems to be a tacit agreement not to confront him on that. So I wonder if that’s going to come up in season 3; it could certainly be another way the Lasso philosophy fails, or that for some reason they think it doesn’t apply here and that’s not a good thing.)But there are so many stories like this— Roy/Keeley, Beard/Jane, Sam/Rebecca also come to mind— where something in the plotting felt off for one reason or another. Heck, even the actual team and sport stories got the short shrift, and I really enjoyed those in season 1 and wish we got more. (I also would’ve liked if Sam detailed the reasons you wrote for staying; even if he didn’t say “diaspora,” just something talking about the kids he saw and saying that he likes that, that it makes him feel like he’s having a positive impact here, would’ve been nice.)And I still like the show and it’s still capable of recapturing the magic and giving us incredible moments. (Two of my favorite moments of the TV year are Roy hugging Jamie in episode 8 and Ted’s “He quit.” in episode 10.) I just know that season 1 was also pitch-perfect on the plausibility of the plot because of the slow-and-steady pace of Ted’s effects on everyone around him, and even if you don’t have the fish-out-of-water element in season 2 that you did to the degree in season 1, the fact that they did what they did in terms of the dramatic plotting, and that we can see the ways the stories this season could have been paced and developed better, means it’s certainly possible that they can, too.Also, I’m glad we got Edwin’s meltdown because that really made it click why they cast Sam Richardson. I laughed my ass off.
Unfortunate for this episode that it aired the same day
Habs goalie Carey Price announced that he will not be participating in
the beginning of the NHL season to join a program to take care of his
mental heath and it was met with nothing but acclaim and praise in the media and among the fans. I agree
with Myles that trying to show the reaction to that news in that negative light
on the show is a bit unrealistic in 2021, the narrative would surely be
different.When Nate is ranting at him nonsensically I
wish he had an outburst and shown his human side. Even Gandhi would have
lost his cool in that moment. It is okay for Ted to drop his smile once
in a while and act human.I am really glad they left the Sam/Hannah stuff alone in the finale.
Even if we account for the British tabloid dimension of things, it seemed weird that Keeley wasn’t—for example—showing Ted some of the supportive tweets that were coming in, or something to make him feel like he wasn’t entirely alone in this. And the idea that none of the actual journalists in that press room hadn’t written some kind of story supportive of Ted really does ring false, in the grand scheme of things.I do feel like Ted’s choice to initially hide the incident would draw a bit more kneejerk reaction that what we saw with Price yesterday, but in the end it does seem like a case of the show consciously choosing not to ask the question of how this would realistically play out because it would be inconvenient to do so.
I did like the scene of the fan making the comment about Normandy, then, at the flip of a coin being supportive of Ted. I felt like that would be sort of the reaction, which is immediate anger following by understanding and compassion.
I wish we’d gotten a bit more of Ted’s talk to the media about mental health. I think that would have been a spot where the narrative could have allowed Ted to demonstrate how his perspective has changed through his dealings with Dr. Sharon. I feel like it was just another instance of the show in season 2 approaching a key moment and then, at the last minute hand waving it away and just telling the viewers to assume something great happened and it all went to plan. Viewers were expected to buy into a lot of things happening off camera this season, and that was a real narrative weakness for me.
Before I start and make it sound like I’m not appreciative, thank you for reviewing this show that I love so much. I always enjoyed reading them. I must however disagree with you on the Nate storyline. His problems were summed up in the episode after the Spurs match. Nate made sure to leave the papers out, and make mention of the back page to his dad in order to be praised in the way Nate felt he deserved.When not pestering his dad, Nate was perma-refreshing twitter, basking in the glory of a bunch of randos online singing his praises. Until he saw the first negative tweet. Then his demeanor changed.It has always been that he felt his greatness wasn’t recognized. Of course the person who would bear the brunt of the outburst we all knew was coming would be the person who made him feel the best about himself. Nick Mohammed was so good in that scene, when Nate finally let it all out. But the subtle physical recoil from Sudekis when Nate said something about “you should be back in Kansas…with your son…” was brutal.
Nick Mohammed has been giving a great heel turn as Nate that I’m afraid he’s gonna get harassed by randoms on Twitter. I truly hope not.Nate’s arc has been really personal for me this season. I’ve had friends who went through that arc. Hell, I’ve been through that arc. It’s the reality of the trauma of bullying and isolation. We too often see the underdog be the winner and get the happy ending in fiction, but it’s not often that way in the real world.
I don’t know that Nate is so much lashing out at the world for being the guy who got picked on as lashing out at Ted because Ted never really cared about him unless he was getting picked on.Ted likes to white knight for people. It seems like caring and compassion early on, but when he pretty much ignores people once they no longer need him and doesn’t particularly value what they can achieve on their own, it’s really just toxic and manipulative (albeit probably subconsciously in Ted’s case…he’s not an intentionally malicious person, and he probably believes he’s helping). Once people who are the subject of one of those fix-up projects figure it out, they’re often understandably bitter and angry at the “fixer”…because really it shows a lack of respect towards them and their abilities.
I think the failure of the Nate scene for me is the lack of reflection within the narrative to unpack what you’ve written here. Others in the comments have touched on this, but the choice to effectively deny Ted space to process Nate’s actions is where the problem lies: you’re right there’s evidence to support Nate’s Daddy Issues leaping to the foreground like they do, but it means his more legitimate reasons to be frustrated get muddled, and his heel turn is so complete that I can’t imagine feeling a shred of sympathy for someone who I honestly found myself relating to over the past few episodes as his frustrations with Ted’s disinterest in actually coaching football boiled over.In other words, Nate being delusional isn’t illogical, but if that was the choice the episode needed an epilogue scene with Ted—probably with Beard—to better understand his takeaway from that conversation, given that we get only the Rebecca and Trent Crimm scenes afterwards.
YES YES YES. There was way too much in that Nate and Ted scene that was just left hanging, and in ways that like you said undercuts much of the work that the season’s strongest arc (Ted) was trying to do. How can you devote so much time to Ted exploring the roots of his philosophy and how he interacts with the world and then have zero follow through on a conversation like this?This speaks to a larger problem that I think we’ve both had with this season—and that was the show’s seeming unwillingness to explore the ways that Ted isn’t a good coach or even a good friend sometimes because of his philosophy. There was such fertile ground to work with here, and it’s not like the writer’s didn’t see that. The season makes these shortcomings quite clear (so much so that even my friends who are the most uncritical consumers of pop culture noted it), and then does absolutely nothing to grapple with the implications or to even imply that there are consequences.The finale made me dislike “Beard After Dark” even more than I originally did because that time could have been much, much better spent giving these crucial storylines more time to breathe. We could have had more Jamie character development. We could have had a coherent Roy/Keeley arc that actually made their problems seem organic rather than manufactured so that Goldstein and Temple had screen time. And we could have had Ted working to reconcile his new understandings of himself with the culture he’s built at Richmond—taking the good with the bad. Glossing over Nate’s outburst negated any chance of that happening. It’s a bummer. (And I really liked your reviews all season long, Myles, btw. They were always thoughtful and well grounded. Thanks for your work.)
Thank YOU for reading/commenting.
Perhaps our paths will cross at an academic conference one of these days and I’ll get to express my appreciation in person! (I never thought I would be so deprived of travel and socializing that I would long for an academic conference, but here we are!).
But don’t you think that the reaction to Nate’s heel turn will form much of Season 3’s story? That is what I assume will be the case. I don’t need to see Ted and Beard’s reaction to Nate’s heel turn in the finale because I assume much of Season 3 will be dealing with What To Do About Nate. He’s now coaching another (and bigger) London team and Ted and Beard are left to wonder what went wrong and what their part in it is.If Season One is about Ted’s influence on the team, and Season Two has been about Ted’s father’s influence on him (and fathers in general – we’ve focused on Ted’s, Sam’s, Jamie’s, Rebecca’s and Nate’s) then Season Three seems likely to focus on Ted’s influence on those to whom he is the father figure. Which obviously includes Nate.Ted is realizing what he’s given up to be at Richmond and how his relationship with his own son is lacking now. I fully expect to see S3 visit Ted’s crisis of conscience in his parenting – both of his actual kid and those who look up to him.
What a ridiculous ending to an underwhelming season of television. Jamie giving up the shot was that last try for unearned heart they were chasing from the year before. And the stare into the camera was perfect end cap. Walking up and cutting immediatley would’ve almost been appropriate for the universe. Making it 4 seconds too long glaring at the audience may have made it the funniest thing they did this year.
I have to admit that, as I watched the opening where they went over the fallout of the story about Ted’s panic attacks, the stakes for this series never felt lower. There’s no danger of Ted losing his job, the team is getting promoted regardless of what an incompetent manager Ted is, nobody particularly cares about football (not even the fans, bizarrely enough), and everybody likes and sympathizes with Ted. Also nobody breaks up and Nate lands a better job without anyone having to deal with or even think about how most of the strife was caused by Ted’s complete neglect in managing his staff.Everyone fixed Ted’s problems for him and everything worked out. Now he goes to the Premier League again, after the most undeserved promotion of all time, and next season he’ll likely still understand nothing about football, he’ll toss off corny lines, and nothing will be at stake because nobody running or playing on the football team particularly cares about football…it’s all about the immersing themselves in high school drama about boyfriends, girlfriends, and how mean people suck. And of course next season they’ll probably hand them the Premier League title, because why not? It’s not like being good at your job matters or sucking at your job has negative consequences in Lassoworld. You just have to be likable and sympathetic and you’ll get handed everything you want, even when you’ve never really done the work.Good dramedy requires something to be at stake and a credible chance of catastrophic failure by the main characters. That was completely absent from this season…it was just a bunch of short-term problems with simple, often improbable, resolutions and actors trying to play as cutesy and endearing as possible for the audience (except for Nate, who was also rewarded and was also never in danger of failing this season). Hallmark Christmas movies have more tension than Ted Lasso this season…so I guess I’ll save myself a few bucks and let that free Apple+ subscription expire after this season, because this certainly wasn’t worth paying any amount of money for.
Also:1) Higgins describing Rebecca as terrifying and intimidating after she spent the entire season mooning over men and doing nothing else was the most unintentionally hilarious line in the episode.2) Sam would have to be the dumbest footballer in the history of football to take more than five minutes to say “Thanks, but no thanks” to leaving the Premier League to play in the Morocco league. That’s like giving up an MLB contract to sign with some semi-pro independent league team because you want to move back in with your parents. Nobody does that unless nobody in the EPL will sign them.3) So Sam’s dad is rich from Bitcoin. I guess that’s why he never cared about the consequences of the oil company leaving. I wonder how many of his friends and neighbors who didn’t invest in Bitcoin lost their jobs when that happened. Guess he doesn’t have to care…plot armor is a nice thing to have.4) Literally all of the other storylines in this episode were too low-stakes to care about.Grade: F…for complete lack of effort by the writers.
Yeah, that’s killed Parks and Recreation for me.
Same. I loved that show, but it jumped the shark once Leslie ran for office.
Just in general, it lost me once it became clear that everything would be alright. I needed to actually believe that Leslie could fail to invest in her successes.
Thank you, so much. I could not possibly agree with you more. I think it comes down to this: for a lot of people in Europe, South America, etc, the performance of their football club is genuinely the most important thing in their lives. I know USians like sport, but they don’t get what football means to people. This season made light of the football. The football is what is important.
Agreed. In fairness, it’s because our professional sports are based on the franchise model, they’re not clubs that grew organically from local communities and that have specific, unbreakable ties to the community. I grew up rooting for the Kansas City Royals. But the Royals weren’t the first MLB team in KC…the Athletics moved there and then dumped the city right as they were getting good. The Royals have occasionally floated that threat as well to get a better stadium deal. So my affection for them is tempered by the reality that the team can dump the fans at any time…in England, Liverpool and Everton aren’t moving to London, they’re staying in Merseyside. Man City and Man U aren’t moving to Newcastle. They’re not even going to change leagues…as the light-speed collapse of the Super League showed. They are stuck where they are and the fans generally stick with them. You’re a fan of your team in the States but you’re married to your team in England. I don’t know that I would have appreciated that if I hadn’t lived there for six years. So far there’s only one character on Richmond who really gets that, Dani (“Football is life”), and they barely paid attention to him this year. Nobody else particularly cared…and if the characters don’t care about the team, why should the viewers care about the team? This season the stories mainly just followed the gossip about the personal lives of players, and not particularly credibly or well. The characters last year were excellent…this year they were inauthentic.
It’s not a show about football.
Jason Sudekis said this was the Empire Strikes Back season. Mission accomplished. Everything is a mess, the Empire is winning, and no one knows what to do next. I loved this season. I’m going to go back and binge it like I did season one and see if not having to wait between episodes ties things together more. I feel like the days between bring a natural disconnect to the through line that didn’t do the season any favors.
TESB ends with everyone barely having survived except the one guy who got frozen in a block. Unless Nate’s really supposed to be a football Wunderkind after all, seeing him at West Ham didn’t fill me with dread, just “k, bye”.
Strongly disagree. Absolutely every character retains use of both hands, nobody is frozen in carbonite and while the greyhound puppies were absolutely adorable they made for pretty shit AT-AT substitutes.
Nate is such an annoying character now. I’d rather he was missing from season 3, but assume that won’t be the case.
There’s one aspect of the Roy/Keeley conversation that I wanted to add my voice to and that I believe it’s totally plausible that Roy would misread Keeley’s needs as she gears up for her new job. The previous episode with his inability to give her space alluded to a certain tone deafness of Roy Kent (nay, even a slight co-dependence) that reads true when Keeley has to let him down gently for (quite rightly) needing to stay in London to set up her new life. Its obvi a bit of a cliffhanger to draw us out to S3 but reads perfectly fine for me. As for the Nate storyline, I thought it played exceedingly well. Watching Nate choke up and tell Ted just how much it was Ted’s building up of him that made him lash out at Ted specifically was a note that rang true for me. I appreciate the want for some acknowledgment of their conversation but feel it’s been deliberately left up in the air. S3 is clearly being setup to wrest Nate’s soul back to Richmond, which is, again, totally plausible and I am totally here for. Rupert on the other hand clearly is the devil and is fully irredeemable, but Nate has hope for when he and Ted can see how so much of their pain comes from their Daddy Issues (which, as a massive Lost fan, I am also totally here for).
Overall, loved how Ted Lasso dug deeper this season. I agree, it’s been a slightly messier affair, but has not detracted from my overall enjoyment.
You’re right. Roy has a habit of mistaking/assuming that what he wants is what Keeley wants. Or that how he would interpret a situation is how Keeley would interpret a situation. We see that in the playlist episode, and in the funeral episode. So in that light, yeah, I think Roy’s vacation gesture makes a bit more sense (although six weeks pushes the bounds of credulity).In the mind of Roy Kent, he’s just completed something stressful and achieved something positive. He’s completed a really stressful transition from player to coach, and there has been a payoff in victory. His response is to feel like he can let go of himself for the first time ever (ie: be lazy and get really fat). It is plausible that he sees Keeley undergoing a similar series of events. She forged a new professional identity, navigated her meteoric rise, and secured the capital needed to realize her dream. That is stressful and deserving of a break. But what Roy doesn’t realize is that the funding is only the beginning, and her real stress starts now as she actually has to build the company. Roy doesn’t see that. Keeley celebrates with him, but she takes her concerns and her stress to Higgins. Like you, I don’t think this foreshadowed massive relationship problems for them next season, but I do think it illustrates some of the ways that the overall writing of the second season has been weaker because so much of their conflict felt manufactured.
I think it also illustrates how much Roy needs to grow as a person. He’s remarkably grounded and confident and empathetic, so it’s not like he’s a mess, but since he was a child his whole identity has been wrapped up in being a footballer. Now he’s made a transition from player to coach, but he’s still in football, so that’s still the framework of his life.He’s also apparently never had a serious long term romantic relationship before, so he’s just learning that he needs to balance being present and committed to Keeley while also being his own person, with his own interests and agenda.I think these six weeks could be pivotal in Roy’s life, because he doesn’t have any football stuff to do, he doesn’t have any Mr. Keeley Jones stuff to do, so… what now?
I agree; I’m hoping we’re going to see some Roy Kent Learns About His Feeling next season. Roy is, god bless him, pretty damn co-dependent, at least in his relationship with Keeley. (Actually, they both are to a degree. Keeley’s first thought upon seeing a small overnight bag is that they were breaking up.) He has never had a break from being Roy Kent, Footballer. Even when he tried to stay out of football at the beginning of the season, he was lost and had no idea what to do with himself.Keeley has found herself this season, but Roy hasn’t had quite the same journey yet. It will be interesting to see who Roy is when he comes back from Marbella. (Also, if he isn’t going to go, can he send those paper tickets my way? Six weeks on my own in a villa, speaking to no one and doing no work, sounds like heaven.
I think he will, and wind up exploring lots of different things which make him feel weird or dumb until he finds something he likes. My wild guess for the off season is that he winds up hanging out with Jamie.
I don’t know if anyone has written this yet. But the Keeley/Roy ending scene’s dialogue was probably meant to mirror Diane’s farewell scene in Season 5 of Cheers.“I’ll see you in six weeks.”Wasnt Diane’s line, “I’ll see you in six months”? Then she never returned.
Shit, I hadn’t thought of that. Good catch.
We may not see a lot of the actual football, but when we do they really capture something special, watching the game against Brentford felt like i was watching my team playing in a big match, I reacted to the goals as if they were real, as it goes my team are Arsenal who recently got beaten by Brentford who in the real world got promoted themselvesI wonder is it deliberate that Nate appears increasingly like Jose Mourinho as he goes to the dark side
ICYMI, Nick Mohammed posted on social media confirming that was, in fact, deliberate.
The Chosen One homage is indeed deliberate. Which is always a fun detail about Ted Lasso that I appreciate – for a show being created for a primarily American and definitely not sports-obsessed audience (being that it’s hardly ever mentioning the actual sport), it does love to drop in these little nods to real world teams/coaches/players. Does an average non-Premier League audience recognize Thierry Henry? Probably not, but the joke of him being Beard’s inner critical voice still lands.
“making up an inspirational quote”how dare you. Dumbledore might forgive you , but i will never forget.
“Essentially, the only way Nate’s story really works for me is if it forces self-reflection from Ted, Beard, and the rest of the coaching staff about their responsibility for Nate’s heel turn. However, that never materializes here.”But the reach of the coaching staff isn’t responsible for Nate’s heel turn. That was all him. His heel turn isn’t supposed to be an indictment of the Lasso way, it’s an indictment of the fact that some people take the earliest opportunity to treat people badly as they were treated. Some underdogs aren’t good people, they’re just underdogs.The connection to Lasso and the rest of the team is really about fathers. Nate continues to let his father live rent-free in his head, while Jamie and Ted finally vent their frustration and are able to move forward. Really it turns out Nate’s advice to Roy back in season 1 could be turned around back at him—he kept a lot of feelings bottled up, and look what they ended up doing to him.
It is 100% the head coach’s responsibility to know that one of his coaches is bullying players and employees, and it became Beard’s responsibility once he saw it happening and failed to recognize when it wasn’t stopping.That isn’t to say that they could have stopped it outright, but the idea that Beard’s reaction to Nate doing what he did doesn’t involve telling Ted what he saw with him and Colin and starting a larger conversation about what Nate might have been engaged with is 100% a discredit to his character and a sign that whatever philosophy they’re using to run this team needs to be reevaluated.
I have to second this, Myles. I actually posted last week that I couldn’t understand why Beard never mentioned anything to Ted about Nate. I don’t know if there’s some sort of code going on here or some adherence with regard to hierarchy, but Beard has never been one to keep his opinions to himself with Ted. I know Beard confronted Nate with the whole Colin thing but we’ve SEEN Beard noticing Nate’s behavior a few times this season and it has baffled me that he never brought it up to Ted.
Yep. Beard has a lot to answer for, and his reckoning doesn’t come in the finale just like it doesn’t really come for Ted, either. For someone who is supposedly fervently loyal to Ted, he isn’t actually a very good assistant coach in the ways that matter. The first assistant (and I have been this person at the college level) is the person who mediates the HC’s relationship to the team and to the rest of the staff. The best HC I ever worked for explained it this way: “You’re the gatekeeper. I trust to you decide what rises to the level of shit I need to know about and to handle the rest.” Beard does neither of these things. He doesn’t handle Nate and he doesn’t report up to Ted. And he doesn’t confront Ted about his failings as a head coach, and that is one of the most jarring things because Beard cared deeply about that in the first season. His confrontation with Ted about how winning matters is one of the best, most-defining moments of the first season. To have the second season almost totally ignore this part of Beard’s character was a real misstep, in my opinion, because having that Beard around would have facilitated a lot of the key moments that Myles rightly notes were either thematically undercut or outright missing from this season.
I’d have to rewatch it to remember specifics, but I think they were maybe careful about having the “worst” of things he said to others be when the coaches weren’t around, so that their shared glances noticing his bad behavior were kind of an unspoken “wow, his ego is getting out of control…but I’m sure he’ll figure things out.” Beard should’ve talked about the incident with Colin, but I’m thinking there was kind of assumption that things were handled so he didn’t need to burden Ted more with it.It does seem telling that Ted wasn’t prompted to talk to Nate until this episode, and that was supposed to be so Ted felt better about what happened (so of course he was pretty blindsided by hearing Nate’s side). Ideally things would’ve played out differently so that they were more cognizant of what was happening, got to the root of his bullying, and stopped it. I’m curious if Will might still come forward somehow. I think it’s a safe bet Nate will have some kind of redemptive arc, and I can see Will maybe saying something to the press as Nate’s start continues to rise. I can’t imagine Ted reaching out to Nate at all like he did with Jamie, though it could maybe be a do-over in a way if he only does so in a way that supports Will and the others Nate bullied since Ted deciding to focus his attention and help on Jamie this season inadvertently hurt Nate (and Sam).
I agree “It is 100% the head coach’s responsibility to know that one of his coaches is bullying players and employees, and it became Beard’s responsibility once he saw it happening and failed to recognize when it wasn’t stopping” but that’s not the same thing as Ted and Beard being responsible for Nate’s heel turn, is it?Makes sense to hold them responsible for failing to prevent Nate’s anger from impacting other ppl negatively in the workplace, but how is Ted responsible for Nate’s heel turn in the first place? Seems like that ugliness was there long before Ted was kind to Nate. And yeah Ted put Nate in a position where he suddenly had enough power to externalising his inner pain onto others, and should have maintained their professional relationship and personal friendship better, but Ted isn’t the source or the fuel of Nate’s pain and behaviour, as far as I can tell from the show.Maybe having dealt with some of his own father related pain this season with Dr Sharon, Ted will be in a better position to help Nate with his stuff next season.
No, I think Nate is fair in his assessment of Ted, and he’s right. He is more competent than Ted, who doesn’t even know the rules to the game he is coaching! He absolutely deserves a spot more than Ted does.
He says other stuff that is unfair, but he is right. Ted promised him an emotionally safe place and attention and while I may not think that matters at work, Ted Lasso (the person and the show) does (do?). So it is a totally fair in universe criticism.
Someone can be right and still be a jerk.
No matter the team sport, tactics and locker-room management are equally important to creating a winning culture. Even with the most talent in the world, if you don’t have a coach who the team supports and who plays a system that puts players in position to succeed, you won’t get very far.Nate has the game-planning chops, but he couldn’t lead a team of grown men out of a paper bag (as evidenced by him immediately blaming the players for not executing his false 9 system). And Ted might not know a lick about soccer, but the team would run through a brick wall for him. Nate has the classic toxic combination of genius, terrible people skills, and zero self-awareness, so of course he has an exaggerated sense of self-importance and doesn’t understand why people gravitate towards Ted.As for promising Nate a safe space and attention…Ted gave that to him. Promoting the equipment manager to assistant coach is unheard of, not to mention Nate’s status as an OG Diamond Dog. Nate heard Ted setting him up for failure with “Nate’s false 9,” even though Ted has never thrown anyone under the bus like that. And Ted keeps that pic of Nate on his dresser, right by a picture of his son! All those perceived slights Nate calls out are just that: perceived. But because Nate has a huge ego without any genuine self-confidence, anything short of complete adulation feels like an insult.I used to be a lot like Nate, to be honest: a people-pleasing doormat who constantly sought others’ approval or gratitude, never felt appreciated or even good enough, and resented them for it. The difference is he has a massive ego and a blind spot for his own shortcomings, and he’ll need a massive reality check before he can even begin doing the necessary self-work to build healthy levels of self-confidence and internal validation.
As a counterpoint: a coach needs to know both strategy and people. Nate’s constant frustration with “incompetent” players being unable to execute his strategic designs is an indictment of him as a coach. He is obviously more competent than Ted on the strategy side, but as a cruel bully, he is utterly incompetent in the “leading by example/mentorship/motivational” side of coaching.
Exactly this! I think people who don’t see this perhaps haven’t met that kind of person, or they haven’t really SEEN them, you know? The coaches should have noticed his issues and bad behaviour earlier, but then… he doesn’t take criticism well, so I don’t think confronting him would have saved him in any way. It usually doesn’t with that type of personality. Maybe it would have moved up the timeline on him exploding and leaving. He definitely needs more help and more changes than a couple of honest conversations with his coworkers can manage.
I’m going to go in the opposite direction and say that not only is Ted Lasso in large part responsible for Nate’s attitude, and not only is it an indictment of Lasso’s management style, but I think it’s actually got fairly little to do with Nate’s father and almost everything to do with Ted’s approach to relationships in general.Others have said that Nate’s rant at Ted rang false. I disagree…it was probably the most real thing in the episode to me, if you look at Nate’s journey. He’s a guy who wasn’t appreciated for a long time as kit man, but he put in the time and effort to learn a lot about the game. He’s a very solid tactician (as evidenced in the few games shown). He’s a smart coach (if not the best people person). He’s capable of running a team. He thought that Ted was promoting him because Ted saw that in Nate…and Nate desperately wanted to validate Ted’s faith in him, which is what a lot of the competitiveness and jealousy were really about, pleasing Ted. He wanted Ted to tell him, “You have been every bit as good a coach as I thought you’d be and you’ve done great work.”But the thing is, Ted didn’t promote him for his ability. He didn’t see anything in Nate in terms of talent. He promoted Nate mostly because he felt sorry for him and thought it would be a nice thing to do. Ted doesn’t value merit or achievement or accomplishment…he values people who need to be fixed so Ted can feel good about himself for fixing them. When they aren’t dysfunctional, he doesn’t care…he dumps them and looks for another source of emotional supply. If Nate does well as a coach or does nothing, Ted just moves on because he “doesn’t care about wins and losses”. He just cares about being needed…like some creepy co-dependent misery vampire. He literally doesn’t care if Nate did a great job or just sat around reading books or drinking and going walkabout like Beard. And once Nate realized that, it was inevitable that he’d resent Ted for it. Because he’s right…Ted is a joke. He’s a terrible manager who barely works at his actual job, he’s self-absorbed, and he doesn’t really value people. He’d be fine if they stayed dependent on him to fix them. If he behaved in his marriage like he did towards Nate, it’s little wonder his wife had enough and ended things…a relationship like that is toxic to your self-respect.
I’ll just say I think this reading is just way, way off-base. He didn’t get Nate a job because he felt sorry for him, he saw he had useful insight to bring to the team.Nate’s basically the “nice guy” incarnate who treats niceness as a transactional action rather than a way of being. In short, he’s a piece of shit. It might fall on the rest of the coaches for not reining him in, but he’s got no one to blame for being a loser.Knowing the rules of the games is certainly important (and Ted without Beard would not be a great coach.) But there’s more to it than that, and Ted knows that and Nate really, really doesn’t. Berating your players doesn’t usually lead them to greatness.
I took Nate’s rant against Ted as one of those things where he’s not mad at Ted, exactly, but he’s scapegoating Ted so Ted bears the brunt of the attack. Ted has always been nice to Nate. He remembered Nate’s name (!) and when Trent Crimm came to do the profile, he said Nate knew more about soccer than Ted ever would. I think Nate’s promotion was deserved, at least from Ted’s point of view.I think part of Nate’s problem is that there will never be enough. Even if Ted admitted in front of everyone that yes, he’s not qualified, and handed it all over to Nate, that wouldn’t be enough. Nate will always find something that ruins his good fortune, like he did with the random mean tweet. Ted was not perfect, by any means, and this season was obviously distracted by his own mental health issues. And I agree that IRL, Beard would have said something to Ted because Nate’s attitude would be a cancer in any locker room. However, maybe Ted has to learn the hard way that letting the cat come to him isn’t the right move here.
Counterpoint. Fuck Nate with a fucking cactus.
He lost me when he ran to the media to blab about Ted’s mental health issues. Just because he got his wittle fee fees hurt because Ted didn’t burp him regularly or give him his binkie or whatever the fuck his problem was.
One word from Ted and Nate is literally in physical danger from that locker room. One word from Rebecca and Nate never works in football again.
The only reason Nate isn’t in whatever hole Roy can bury him in is because Ted won’t allow it.
So yeah, miss me with this shit. Nate is a grown ass man.
I think maybe Rupert orchestrated the whole thing
Always appreciated these reviews, even when I find myself disagreeing with certain aspects. Definitely feel like this season was really there to broaden the ensemble a bit more, but it loses focus in my mind. The back half of the season really seems to forget it’s still called “Ted Lasso.” Not sure how they’ll introduce new plots and resolve these arcs in a single season, but I BELIEVE.
Like, are they giving Trent Crimm his own spinoff? I feel like there wasn’t nearly enough information to understand why he would purposefully burn Nate, resign from his job, and go off in search of himselfSadly, much as I enjoy Crimm’s all too infrequent appearances and have become envious of the actor’s voluminous head of hair, I think it would be more realistic to speculate that Trent Crimm (The Independent) will become Trent Crimm (Daily Planet).
This episode is a mess. The season is a mess. None of it should work.And I can’t get enough.If I’m really going to counter-critic, I’ll throw up T.S. Elliot’s “objective correlative” from his “Hamlet” essay:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion;
such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.It’s not about logic, but a series of emotional set pieces that take the viewer on a journey that is about feelings and not logic.
Best not to think of a kit boy becoming the head coach in a single season (plus). If you accept the conceit (Lasso hired to coach soccer in the UK) all else just is.
While a lot of the events aren’t the most realistic, it really captures the feelings, of working through your issues, and of how it feels to follow a football team
If Ted Lasso is shooting for the objective correlative (and given the tight plotting of season 1 I don’t think that it is), then the question becomes whether it has succeeded. Eliot’s essay argues that Hamlet fails in this regard, while Macbeth succeeds because it establishes that vital connective tissue wherein the accumulating images and patterns establish the objective correlative that give emotional responses authenticity and weight. Hamlet, meanwhile, doesn’t build sufficient evidence through these images and actions to justify the enormity of Hamlet’s emotional responses. Works that fail to establish the objective correlative, Eliot argues, leave readers feeling unconvinced of the reality of characters’ emotions and motivations. I would argue that this is where Ted Lasso’s second season falls for a lot of the viewers who are being critical of S2’s structure and development. It is difficult to accept a journey of feelings if those feelings do not feel authentic and rooted in the logic of the world and the situations that they spring from.
I don’t understand Nate’s hair. Was he dyeing it until now, and stopped because he wanted to move on from the ‘WonderKid’ thing? Are we supposed to believe he went naturally grey in a year? From stress? It’s obviously thematically related to his heel turn but without an explanation it’s all a bit magical realism.
The actor was dying his hair to cover his greys last season, but this season they let his grey hair show and then started adding to it. It’s supposed to be mimicking the look of Jose Mourinho, a very famous football manager.Now, how are we supposed to interpret the rapidity of Nate’s hair going grey? Maybe stress. Maybe Nate’s been dying it himself in a bid to be taken more seriously?
So, the pivotal narrative moment with respect to actual gameplay, and Tart gets a PK of a play where he started a mile offsides?
Shh. Pretend there was a defender just out of frame.
Happens all the time in the Scottish Premier League. He just needs to be playing for Rangers.
I was yelping “offside! offside!” when he got that ball. But then when the defender comes in from out of frame, it does look like he was closer to the goal than Jamie. But the wider shot shows Jamie clearly offside!Though maybe that was a little joking reference to Ted’s confusion as to what constitutes offside. (Or, for that matter, my own. Just pick one rule and go with it! Why are there so many exceptions!)
Please hand this assignment off to someone else next season. K thnx byeee
One small nit to pick from above, Ted isn’t sipping champagne with Rebecca. She’s having champagne, he sticks to still water.
good review. this wasn’t a great finale. i think the 40-50mins runtimes have been more of a negative than positive. The Nate reveal should have been better, plus i was expecting him to spit into the camera at the end, a nod to the last season finale. The reveal did give me Star Wars vibes though.I’m guessing the series finale last image will be Ted’s face.
What’s really odd is that they had so many longer runtimes, and yet, so many of the stories felt rushed or incomplete.
i liked, didn’t love the first season, but it at least felt like it had a POV and momentum. to me, every episode of this season felt like b plots from other stories pushed together without a main plot. surely covid effected things (and as time goes on this whole ‘pretending covid doesn’t exist in this universe’ thing is getting harder for me to take in new fiction), but between the ENDLESS references, the extended runtimes and very little jason sudeikis this season really soured me on the show as a whole.if i watch season 3 i’m going to wait until it’s done airing, at the very least.
Alright, I am one of many who came to Ted Lasso comparatively late in the game, finally diving in after all the Emmy wins. Having binged the entire show over the past week or so, leading right up to this finale, I can definitively say Season 1 was vastly superior to Season 2.
I’ll mostly be curious about fan reaction. Everyone lauded Ted Lasso for being positive, uplifting, etc., but I found very little of that in Season 2. I don’t mind dark storylines in the least, but S2 just didn’t seem to know where it was headed, for many of the reasons outlined by Myles. Hardly any would-be payoffs felt earned.
I continue believing Ted Lasso walking off the pitch mid-game, mid-season wouldn’t be a story anyone cared about in the moment, let alone months later. Why the writers have hitched to this horse is beyond me.Apparently Jason Sudeikis called this season the “Empire Strikes Back” season which… because it’s grimmer? Narratively, it hardly follows anything related to ESB.And Keeley is a bad PR person. She went from being a model to securing endorsement deals for the players and now she’s a PR guru who let multiple potential PR crises slip right past her view all season long?
Anyway, I like the show. It’s got some fun characters, but if this really is only a three-season deal, I hope they right the ship next year.
Keeley’s story has been undercooked all season 2. Really, I’m growing a bit concerned about the show’s inability to develop meaningful storylines for either of its main female characters. Rebecca is much more interesting when she’s exploring the perils of being a boss ass bitch in the ownership world. When the show teases her growing pains in this area (Dubai Air, not taking a strong position on Sam going or staying), it leaves them hanging, tantalizingly, for the viewer and then runs immediately back to Rebecca the lovelorn. Yawn.Likewise, Keeley’s venture capital windfall came out of nowhere. The season hasn’t at all built up to her launching a PR firm. Like ever. That felt so tacked on just to give her something to do and to gin up trouble in her relationship. Again, it goes back to Myles’ repeated assessment throughout the season that many outcomes feel unearned. This didn’t feel earned. The one place where the show succeeds in S2 with Keeley and Rebecca is the instances where the two play scenes together. Waddingham and Temple have great chemistry, and the show does write female friendship really well. It does not write female professionalism very well.
Mostly just here to say, I liked it.I rewatched and binged the whole show this week. And while I can see being having problems with the absurdist whimsy of the Xmas and Rom-Com episodes back to back, I just laughed a lot during this season.I can see why critically this show am be an issue. The first season is a pretty excellently plotted out season that’s almost anti-critical. Not against criticism but the theme of the season pretty much is”it’s about the journey, not the destination”. Hence why they lose but they’re all pretty much in a better place and the person that won (Tartt) was unhappy.And this season has a lot of more plot to it, but, inherently is a show about being better day to day and the bigger picture works out in the background. It’s like the opposite of what you want to approach as a critic. But I think the character stuff works and it definitely feels like a Bill Lawrence show if you’ve watched Scrubs, Cougar Town etc.Aside, to Myles if you see this, just finished a rewatch of GoT, and I think your mostly B reviews of the final season hold up. Barring that they probably should have edited episodes 4&5 into 3 45-50 minute episodes, I think it’s good and the character stuff works.
I don’t know if the first season is anti-critical, but there’s a cleanliness to the storytelling that feels incredibly satisfying, with everything in its right place. What I think we’ve discovered in the second season is how much our respective responses to the show were or were not rooted to that plotting, as opposed to the show’s general vibe/sensibility.To your point about Lawrence’s other shows, the truth is that 22-episode a season sitcoms are in a better position to be shaggier because there’s less pressure of serialization, and more room for experimentation. Attempting that in 10 episodes—plus the diversions—is a tall order, and comes with compromise, but I think the core of my issue with the season is that the nature of those compromises felt unfocused, haphazard. The season was consistently messy, but the philosophy for why/how never settled into a point-of-view, right up until this finale. And when the clearest “why”—the setup for S3—appeared, it really did nothing to justify a majority of the questionable choices to that point.(And yeah, I’ve never fully grasped the full-scale suggestion that the last season of GOT is terrible. It doesn’t fully sell its biggest turn, but a lot of what happens around it more or less rings true, and as someone who had to write a book where every storyline had to be wrapped up in 800 words, there was really only a couple of characters whose arcs threw a wrench into it. But again, it’s a case where people were used to the pace of the show from early seasons and rejected when the show accelerated and the compromises that required.)
I don’t know if the first season is anti-critical, but there’s a cleanliness to the storytelling that feels incredibly satisfying, with everything in its right place. What I think we’ve discovered in the second season is how much our respective responses to the show were or were not rooted to that plotting, as opposed to the show’s general vibe/sensibility.Indeed. I think we still have a show full of great characters here, and I quite enjoy it, but the plotting was not nearly as tight and precise as it was in season 1, and that attention to the finer details of storytelling made everything work so much better.
(Glad to see you didn’t hate that last GOT season, I have felt like the lone outlier in the middle of people screaming about how terrible it was. I mostly enjoyed it, didn’t feel like the quality dipped that much, and felt like it mostly suffered from, as you said, trying to wrap up too much plot in too little time. I even thought some of the last episode stuff around the crowning of Bran was pretty good, especially Tyrion’s speech which basically made him the storyteller of their new reality. It didn’t matter if it was true, he just had to make everyone believe that it was. Anyway, off to huddle in my cave and mutter “It really wasn’t that bad, you guys,” to myself….)
I thought the Bran speech was a great example of what went wrong with the final season; namely, that there were good and plausible motivations for characters to do things, but the writers didn’t bother to develop them and half-assed their way through checking off the plot points. (It’s very arguable whether Bran has the best story among them. You know what’s not arguable? That he’s the Three-Eyed Raven and has all the fucking wisdom of all of human history, which is the actual reason they should choose him.)
One thing I noticed in the finale (and the whole season) was the focus on text messages as a storytelling device. At first I thought it was a cool way to let scenes play out silently with the actors’ faces doing all the heavy lifting… but then I remembered who pays the bills for this show.
Ha, I ranted a few episodes back about how annoying I found it when the show refused to follow the emerging tv/movie convention of showing an easy-to-read graphic with the text message instead of just the phone screen. Now I realize why they might not want to distract the viewers from those pixel-perfect Retina(tm) displays…
My annoyance at that particular choice knows no bounds. I’ve got great vision, but my parents, sadly, do not. When shows use the phone screen rather than a graphic, it is virtually impossible for them to read. Most of the time, they have to pause the show, and one of them gets up, walks to the TV, and reads the phone screen. Using a graphic is really a much more accessible and viewer-friendly choice.
I was mostly onboard with this episode as a reasonably satisfying conclusion to what was IMO a patchy season, but I thought those three jumps were just awkward? Almost like they couldn’t think of a smooth way to wrap things up, so they just bludgeoned in three separate epilogues. Roy and Keeley’s relationship has been badly written in the last few, manufacturing fake drama by having the characters act like idiots. While the Nate going to West Ham twist was solid, it was revealed in the cheesiest way possible, and I think it would have been more interesting had Nate’s criticisms had some merit, rather than him just being a whiny snivelling coward who hated everything and everyone.Overall, I thought this season was a huge stepdown from season one. Season One had actual stakes, drama, enjoyable supporting characters, and a protagonist who was incredibly lovable because he had to overcome the initial resentment/hostility of everyone around him. Season Two started off a little too cosy, where all the characters now love each other and there’s very little conflict. Which would have been okay if they figured out decent storylines that kept the club in trouble, but instead the show entered a magical fantasy world where all problems are solved with an easy decision and nobody ever has to struggle too much.Ted was the only character who really kept that up with his relationship with Dr Sharon and his anxiety problems, and that’s probably why he remains the most compelling character. I really hope they can address the balance next series and create some actual stakes.
I dunno. I’ve tried to keep pace with your issues with this season of Ted Lasso but I think you’ve lost me with this review. I’m not sure that this season has been the smoothest and there’s definitely some withdrawal pangs generally after the extreme high of season one, but I do fear that – like the AV Club’s Lost coverage back in the day – criticism could easily curdle into navel-gazing. But I guess the fact that I disagree with or can’t meet you on your level of dissatisfaction with S2 shouldn’t invalidate how you feel.(That sounded really Ted-ish. Or Sharon-ish.)Anyway, there was lots to love about this episode. Hannah Waddingham killed it again, as usual – her short exhalation after Sam revealed he was staying communicated novels’ worth of pent-up and released emotion, for instance. Sam Richardson gave Hannah a run for her facial expression money when Sam told him he was turning Edwin down – the way his whole face stayed frozen in place except for the area around his eyes, which went from confusion to shock to fury in the space of about two seconds was startling and just great.Nate’s Dorian Gray hair has been a great touch all season, and the fact that it’s nearly white when we see him on the West Ham pitch was a great capper for that little detail.Roy’s “FUCK!” after he decides to forgive Jamie is an all-timer.Trent Crimm basically directly addressing the entire “A REAL JOURNALIST WOULD GET FIRED FOR BURNING A SOURCE” in basically two sentences was great. But I hope that’s not the last we see of Trent. Hell, doesn’t Richmond have a new opening for someone to handle team PR?And – goddammit – when Dani said, “Football is life,” I cried like a retiring Roy Kent.
While I admittedly don’t mind SOME company, the idea that the goal of criticism is to convince everyone I’m right and that they should all be as frustrated as I am really baffles me. It only makes sense that a finale would sever your understanding of my point-of-view. That’s how this works!
I said, “Barbecue Sauce,” to myself right before he said, “Football is life,” and took the kick. That was a nice touch having his mantra mirror Ted’s from season one.
I didn’t even recognize Richardson last week; it’s the closest I’ve seen to a dramatic role for him, and he was great.
Honestly, Trent as the new Richmond comms guy would be an awesome turn.
Yeah, I agree with you in that, so far, I’ve at least been able to see where Myles is coming from, even if I don’t agree with everything and have, overall, been happy with the season. But here it just feels as if he’s expecting a lot of connections, filling out of plot, and (I don’t mean to be condescending; I just can’t think of another term to describe it) hand-holding that I just don’t need. As to Nate: as someone who has some training in psychology, Nate’s arc feels very authentic to me. He was so beaten down when he met Ted, so in need of a validating parental figure, that he couldn’t feel or express any anger. Ted gave him some validation and he developed just enough confidence, at least in one area of his life, to start feeling in touch with a lifetime of rage that he never allowed himself to feel before. And when that happens, that rage often gets released on the first easy target you find—which is anyone who disappoints you and who isn’t the actual parent who wounded you. Ted fits the bill perfectly. Did Ted fail to be the kind of boss/mentor he promised to be? Absolutely. But the overreaction from Nate is because of his Dad issues. The show is not sidestepping his problems—that’s getting to the core.
Yes, Nate is a type; nothing Ted could have done would have filled that hole.
I don’t think it’s “hand-holding”; I think it’s more that important steps in many of the stories were skipped over, which makes their resolutions feel less satisfying, or potential consequences or downsides were left unexplored, which makes their resolutions feel less realistic. Season 1 was terrific about this, which is why season 2 stands out in the areas where it’s not.
I’m glad I chose to rewatch this before commenting, as it helped me rethink a few thoughts I had after my first viewing that I realized didn’t make sense.I have to imagine Sam still has a few feelings for Rebecca, but ultimately he still wants to focus on trying to make the world a better place. The idea of him bringing a piece of his birth home to his new home is awesome to see, and Toheeb Jimoh definitely needs to enter the “Best Supporting Actor” conversation for his work this season.I swear to Christ Roy is trying to find some excuse to end his relationship with Keeley. Just let that woman love you, for fuck’s sake! Although I have to say, for a show that basically spent season 1 as “British Major League”, Roy headbutting Jamie after they won promotion was a hilarious callback.Speaking of promotion, the show did a terrible job actually giving any sense of the EFL Championship promotion structure. As noted in the article, they treated this like it was “do-or-die”, but even on the calendar in the coaches office, you could see there were dates marked “Playoff?” and “Playoff Final?”. I understand trying to build tension but it’s 2021, anyone who wants to develop more than a passing relationship with the show can poke the flaws there.Finally, there’s the Nate situation. I was firmly a Nate fan in Season 1, but going back looking at his moments from the first season (from “introducing” himself to Ted and Beard by yelling at them to the roast at Everton) were signs of the anger buried underneath. While I can understand Nate’s frustration (as someone who enjoys getting respect for his work), there comes a time where you have to just suck it up. Nate chose to burn the bridges with Richmond down, and while I imagine Ted still cares for Nate, he’s deeply in the minority. Those West Ham-Richmond matches will be something else (and, assuming the series goes to the three season structure it set up, with Richmond going for the Premier League title in Season 3, I’d bet the odds on West Ham being the “final opponent” are looking quite good).
From my perspective, it was a fine season. Not nearly as good as season 1, but not bad. I wish they had developed Rebecca more, I wish they had focused on Keely and Roy less, and I agree with your assessment that Nate’s shift could have been a little less clunky in the end. Still, good times. I personally think that they might have been setting up Trent to take Keely’s job. That might be fun to see his stony professionalism fill the gap that used to be filled by her bubbly positivity. But again, every time I have a thought on how the show should go, it goes a different way.
It feels like the way the show is constructed with in the writing could be a deliberate stylistically. It leaves the show with these giant narrative cracks that the viewer is left to connect with and weave together with their own experiences. Or it’s as you say a shortfall in the writers room /shrug
-The Beard/Jane relationship is a throwaway gag meant to give mystery to a character whose entire identity is wrapped in “mystery”. Why is it that it just makes her look like the unstable, irrational person responsible for their erratic relationship? Higgins asked Beard once if Jane makes him better and not only did he not answer, his demeanor alluded to the fact that he didn’t believe she did, but also showed him compromising who he is a few minutes later because she wanted him to wear a different hat that he may not have liked.-With Nate, his last conversation with Ted is completely on point. He has been marginalized his entire life from parents, to peers, to coworkers. Ted elevated him, made him part of the team, then laughed at him when he tried to reach the potential Ted made him believe he had. Whether it was his own issues or bringing in Roy, Ted ignored and alienated Nate. Maybe i have a bit of Nate in myself, but i was never confused by his storyline.-It’s weird to criticize the exclusion of Colins potential queerness, but also criticize the inclusion of the lesbian dog breeder. It’s unlikely that either lead to something next season, but the show has shown it can be subtle (ie: Ted’s panic attack warning signs in S1)-The whole Edwin Akufo “heel” turn was bizarre. The only funny bit was the fake handshake. The angry rant was fine, indicative of a spoiled rich kid vowing to ruin someone that dared to tell him No, but the rest of the schtick wasn’t even worth a smile.-Some Pundits are wankers, disgruntled former coaches that have platform to criticize their successors are absolutely wankers. That’s the point of having the short shorts wearing former Richmond coach put Ted on Blast. Roy constantly called him on his BS takes the whole time he was with them, so the point of it is, he’s a wanker.It’s weird. I think back on Scrubs and Cougar Town and I can see the same imprint on Ted lasso. There’s a ton of characters that roll around in this show that offer less continuity and more filler. Ted Lasso seems to have built a world where we want all the characters to be main characters.
It’s weird to criticize the exclusion of Colins potential queerness, but also criticize the inclusion of the lesbian dog breeder.Colin actually being queer and existing in this world is meaningful representation. A bizarre, no context predatory lesbian hitting on Keeley is just a joke. Not all queer representation is equal.
I get it, it just made me chuckle. I also don’t think it was funny, if it was indeed an attempt at humor.
I thought it was just another way to emphasize why Roy is feeling insecure. Seemingly, everyone wants Keeley, either in a romantic/sexual way or as an up-and-coming business person. Besides, Keeley has shown some interest (maybe even experience) in women, particularly Rebecca in season 1.
Right, but Roy wasn’t there.
It didn’t come off as a joke. Either representation matters or it doesn’t. You can’t pick and choose, unless you’re the type who just makes it up as you go along.
“then laughed at him when he tried to reach the potential Ted made him believe he had”This is an odd summary of Ted’s relationship with Nate. Ted made a kit man an assistant coach. He listened to him and was kind to him. We suspend disbelief so wave this through. But it very very rarely happens. Nate should be forever grateful for this – as he will discover when he does poorly without support at the Hammers. That Ted (and others) don’t consider Nate a “big dog” could perhaps have been dealt with more sensitively, but it’s correct. In what world is a kit man in his second season of being an assistant coach, the “big dog” you want to speak to your players. Particularly when you have their old captain whom they respect and fear nearby?The review put it better – if Nate needs Ted to constantly pay him attention and to make him feel good about himself then Nate needs something that no non-family member can or should ever be expected to provide. That’s not friendship. Did Nate help Ted with his mental health issues? Quite the opposite; he exploited them for gain and betrayed a confidence.
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but Nate’s last conversation with Ted was on point.Nate is damaged, from birth by his father, probably though school by peers and then by athletes he worked with (or for if you want to go that route). He has a need to be loved that will never be satiated by constant praise. Consider in an earlier episode, he spent days basking in Wonder Kid praise. As soon as he saw a single negative tweet, he lashed out at the new kit man.You’re right, Ted elevated him from Kit Man to Asst Coach. He didn’t do it out of pity or to be nice to the guy the players picked on, he did it because Nate deserved it. Ted praised Nate for his ideas, routinely used his plays and even had him give the pre game pep talk resulting in one of their biggest wins. He’s not some kit man turned coach charity case. He earned the job and he is good at it.On the flip side, Ted built him up, made him believe he was great and laughed at him when he tried to step up and show he was a “Big Dog”. Beard called him out on his treatment of the players, which right or wrong, was probably a blow to his confidence. Roy doesn’t consider him a threat (not that he should) but as Nate said, he actually made a move, not just talked like Jaime. From Nate’s perspective, the 3 people he is closest to don’t respect him.Nate is damaged. He didn’t feel supported. In his mind, Ted treated him the same way his father, the players and his peers have always treated him.
As a person who finds Ted Lasso okay, I’ve watched the season two discourse with wonder. It really surprises me that people are just now realizing Ted Lasso is a saccharin show where no one suffers real consequences. That’s been the show all along!
I think season two suffered more from a lack of conflict and clear goals. In season one, Ted wants to win everyone over. In season two, no one seems to want anything.
Myles, I think you’re right about the show promising to unpack some of Ted’s philosophy than backing off it. They kept teasing deeper conflicts and real issues then swerving away from them.
I think you’re wrong about the Rebecca/ Sam power dynamics, because this is Ted Lasso, and everyone on the show is pure and good and none of the main characters would ever abuse their power. That is a strength or a weakness of the show depending on your POV.
I’ve found the fan reaction to this arc really strange. Suddenly, when an older woman is getting hers, people want consequences, but they’re very happy with the stakes free state of the show everywhere else. It’s gross and icky and really underscores that the fantastical toxic masculinity free world of Ted Lasso is a fantasy.
I think season two suffered more from a lack of conflict and clear goals. In season one, Ted wants to win everyone over. In season two, no one seems to want anything.Myles, I think you’re right about the show promising to unpack some of Ted’s philosophy than backing off it. They kept teasing deeper conflicts and real issues then swerving away from them.Yeah, here we go, this is the good stuff. Ted Lasso season 1 worked for me not because it was a saccharine show but because Ted having a clear goal and putting in the steady and consistent work to achieve it and not giving up in the face of all that hostility drove the plotting, and it was steadily paced not only in Ted’s gradual winning people over and the effects he had on them, but in the other characters’ own stories as well. When you lose that kind of deliberate and plausible plotting, you end up with a show that feels like nothing bad could possibly happen and all the characters get what they want— which is something I grew to hate about latter-day Parks and Rec, for example— and it’s why, say, the final match felt so off— I didn’t feel at any time there was any possibility other than them getting promoted again, and I didn’t feel like we really saw the work they put into achieving that goal. So it was a lot less engaging and impactful than the match of the season 1 finale.
Absolutely. I would disagree that the first season was saccharine (which implies it was insincere or inauthentic). It wasn’t…they had pathos and sweetness, but they earned it with their storylines. They developed characters, made them relatively plausible, and earned the praise. It was one of the biggest surprises for me in my history as a television viewer, how good that season was…because my impression was that it was going to be cheesy and awful.Instead they saved cheesy and awful for season 2, because nobody had any stakes, the outcome of promotion was preordained (they even rewrote how the Championship works to accommodate it), and there was no point to most of their stories. It was just actors doing things and mugging for the camera for cute points…basically the show I didn’t want to see when I avoided Ted Lasso originally.It’s a pity, because this season had the potential for a lot more, and the writers squandered it.
I think Myles mentioned in a comment elsewhere that he thinks season two really helped easily sort out what people liked about season 1 of Ted Lasso, and that viewers generally fell into two camps: People who appreciated the tight plotting and well-constructed storytelling of S1, and people who appreciated the optimistic brand of comedy (saccharine isn’t the exact word I would use, but it works well enough). How one reacted to season 2 then in many ways depended on which of these two groups you fell into. I think I agree with that. In general, my friends who enjoyed the good-natured comedy have had a much easier time accepting and enjoying Season 2. There is still enough of that comedy for them to stay invested. Meanwhile, those of us who were really hooked by the narrative construction have been really let down because the plotting took a dive and the overall plot lacked tension and structure. There were elements of the comedy that I still really enjoyed this season, but my level of frustration at the overall execution was, to put it mildly, quite high.
Yeah, that became starker as the season went alone. And to be clear, I don’t consider those other people philistines. I get it! It’s just not what drew me to the show.(Thanks for your contributions throughout the thread, much appreciated).
I definitely don’t think they’re philistines, either. I don’t yuck someone else’s yum when it comes to pop culture (except people who watch the Kardashians. I’ll never get that). I personally gravitate more toward sincere comedy than cynical comedy, so I get the appeal of the nice comedy in Ted Lasso. I just felt like the show really shined in season one because the tight plotting allowed the sincere comedy to work, and in season two when the plotting fell apart, it felt more to me like the humor was being used as a bandage for the plot problems. A lot of the pop culture references felt really forced to me in S2. Thanks for your kind words! That’s nice of you to say.
BTW, I published my writeup of season 2 this week. I’ve really enjoyed reading your thoughts here and I think a lot of them are similar to mine, so I thought you might want to read it or even comment on it. Thanks in advance, whether or not you do.
https://www.the-solute.com/ted-lasso-season-two/
Heh, I don’t know if you or anyone else will still see it three days (almost four) after the episode aired, but I actually wrote another article comparing why Ted Lasso (season 1)’s brand of optimism and kindness worked for me, where something like the saccharine wish-fulfillment of latter-day Parks and Rec didn’t:https://www.the-solute.com/true-optimism-vs-hopepunk/
Yeah, I will say that I enjoyed a lot of season 2, but that tight plotting and well-constructed storytelling you mention wasn’t there like it was in season 1. And I realized, season 1 was so rewarding in part because of that storytelling, and because close study revealed how well-constructed the show was. It’s hard not to take the same close-reading approach to season 2, but doing so often reveals where the plotting is shoddier or elements don’t make sense.As you may have gathered if you read that link I shared, I’m not really a fan of optimistic comedy, because a lot of it mistakes niceness for kindness and things like “unearned wish fulfillment” for being funny and having good vibes. So season 1 surprised me, and it was because of the storytelling. Ted’s slow-and-steady version of optimism takes a lot of effort and makes his success more plausible. And I actually find that far more optimistic and aspirational than most Nice TV shows, because it means Ted’s not a superhero: He just works harder at being kind than anyone else, and working to be a little kinder is something anyone can do, no matter who they are.
Essentially, the only way Nate’s story really works for me is if it forces self-reflection from Ted, Beard, and the rest of the coaching staff about their responsibility for Nate’s heel turn.Sorry but I disagree. I don’t believe that anyone is responsible for Nate’s behavior other than him. Nate is a typical toxic incel type. We see him all over the internet every day. Nothing is ever his fault. Everybody else is scheming to embarrass him or deny his greatness. No amount of praise or compliments are ever enough. He’s vicious, petty, and full of rage. The image of him on the sidelines in his black suit, all sullen and miserable, while everyone else was celebrating, is Nate in a nutshell. I especially wanted to punch him when he was whining about how Ted doesn’t have the picture he gave him in his office. It’s on his dresser at home. We saw it when Ted had his pre-funeral panic attack. But of course, Nate being the inadequate needy emotional vampire he is, wants more.Dude’s got “workplace mass shooter” written all over him. I hope Rupert crushes him.
To clarify, “responsibility” for doesn’t mean “they are at fault,” but they SAW it happening and did nothing to protect other people like Will from facing its consequences, which means that share responsibility for his actions within their workplace environment.
I understand where you’re coming from and I respect it. I just…disagree.That said, maybe it’s just the times we’re living in but I’m just increasingly sensitive to having the behavior of toxic people laid at the feet of others. When I look at Ted’s expressions during Nate’s ugly little diatribe, I see shock. He simply had no idea that Nate was full of this kind of ugliness and why would he?Ted was lifting Nate up by giving him credit for the False 9 strategy. He was doing exactly what Nate claimed to want. Remember how Nate resented that Ted “took credit” for other’s ideas? Now he’s claiming that Ted is giving him credit as a trap.
He should’ve known because the two of them were close, and because Ted is his superior and the way his coaching staff behaves is his responsibility. Ted put blind trust in Nate without paying any attention to the many, many red flags he kept presenting. Nate’s shittiness is his own fault, 100%. He’s an entitled jackass. But Ted, Beard, and Keeley all should have known something was going on with him and confronted him about it. They ignored it because he was their friend, so they excused his behavior and assumed the best of him, which is exactly how bullies thrive and survive. When Jamie was an asshole, people acknowledged it, but when Nate was, everyone just turned a blind eye because they thought he was a good guy.Ted and Beard taking responsibility for what happened isn’t about absolving Nate of guilt, or saying that they’re partially responsible for the kind of person Nate turned into. But they are responsible for their inability to take Nate’s toxic personality seriously and do something about it.
Yes, exactly. It’s not that Ted is responsible for Nate’s behavior, but he’s the leader of the whole damn team, and he is responsible for confronting it and how it’s affecting the team, nipping it in the bud. And Beard is responsible for not reporting what he witnessed to Ted and nudging him to do something about it.
I think this comment clarifies that it’s not one thing or the other. It’s both: It’s 100% on Nate to confront his own toxic behaviours, and it’s also a downfall on Ted and Beard that it was not acknowledged and confronted by the Diamond Dogs/team.And I think the season has shown that Ted was too much in his own head to pay attention to all the things that needed to be addressed. At least he was able to perform his technical duties in making the team succeed on the pitch.
Thank you. So well put. Nate sucks.
That comment about the picture spoke volumes to me about Nate. The picture in an of itself was a gift driven by ego. Nate gave it not out of selflessness or because he thought Ted would like it, but because he wanted to elevate himself. He literally writes over Beard, removing him from the picture and centering himself. When Beard points that out, Nate shrugs him off with a halfhearted, “Sorry.” When Ted receives the picture, he admires it and passes around for his friends to see. He expressed appreciation. That should have been the end of it, transactionally speaking. The gift was given and received and appreciated. But to Nate it’s always about continued adulation and ever-increasing praise, so it becomes a slight that eats at him. Nate doesn’t see that Ted took it home and has it in a place that makes clear how much he values it (showing the photo on his dresser before the funeral was a nice touch). And really it doesn’t matter that Nate doesn’t see that, because Nate is looking for reasons to be pissed. If not the photo, it would have been something else. Because it turns out he’s not a Nice Guy or an underdog. He’s a toxic jerk and always has been, he just was not in a position of power to be able to act on his toxicity before (the roots of that personality are there in season 1 if you go back and look for them).
Something that the show was handling relatively subtly, and I suspect will be the core of next season, is Nate’s misunderstanding of what makes a great leader. It’s not just the ideas and the tactics but the decision making of when to use and not use tactics, willingness to be honest, to inspire, to take blame etc. This is clearly flagged when Nate is blaming the team for the false 9 not working and wants to abandon it but Ted listens to everyone’s thoughts and decides to push on. This probably is the thing that pushed Nate over the edge, had he been the decision maker they would have abandoned it and in all likelihood not won the game.
Yeah, I put Nate on Nate… There was the whole talk with Ted, but when Richmond won and that pissed Nate off – he complained that Ted was giving Nate credit for a scheme to set him up to fail but everyone wanted to stick with and won (so, success for Nate), but that just made him madder… that was the moment for me he was irredeemable.
I see it from my perspective professionally as a chef… you have to work your way up, and there will be the “face” of the operation, the big boss, who gets credit. You’re an up-and-coming cook with a dish idea that you present the boss and they love… if they put it on the menu and it’s successful, it is that restaurant’s, that chef’s dish to the public. And you have to accept that as part of your growth and as part of the business. There may be a-hole chefs who bask in all the glory, and there are those who, when you do something like that, look out for you, give you more opportunities, suggest you for a higher position when a colleague says they’re looking for someone….
Ted would clearly be the later, and Nate could grow and be successful and be promoted to a coach when he was fully ready because Ted recommended him… instead, he’s grabbing it first chance he gets because he can’t see the full pitch, and I suspect he’ll fail.
This! And another thing (sorry to pile on Nate, but not really), he has no idea what it means to be good manager. He thinks managing the team is solely about developing game strategy. But look what he did with the False 9.Even though he came up with it, he was ready to abandon it at half time, and he wasn’t taking any responsibility for its shortcomings. It was Roy who made the coaching decision to put it to a player vote, not Nate. And perhaps the announcers were correct that it wasn’t wise to have such a big strategic pivot in that game… But Nate would never admit that, he just blamed the fucking players (let’s remember, they only got a draw out of it, even if that’s all they needed).And pivoting in this comment:Aaron Rodgers just had a great quote while conspicuously commenting about the whole Urban Meyer debacle (and it pains me to give any credit to A.R. as a bears fan):“In College You Call Your Coaches Coach, and in the NFL, You Call Them by Their Name.”The meaning is clear, one forum is about development and one is about money and careers…. But also, at the professional level, there needs to be mutual respect between the coaches and players. The coach needs to understand that in many ways the players are the bosses. It would be nice to see that concept explored in Season 3 with Nate. I don’t want them to just turn Nate into a Darth Vader “wonder kid” whose team steamrolls the competition because of his brilliant coaching. While coaching is important, at the professional level it’s always “a player’s game.”
This! And another thing (sorry to pile on Nate, but not really), he has no idea what it means to be good manager. He thinks managing the team is solely about developing game strategy. But look what he did with the False 9.This reminds me of something I really loved in the episode: Ted’s speech coming clean to the team about his panic attack. That’s when you could really see his work with Fieldstone coming through. His willingness to be vulnerable even after such a betrayal and to do it in front of Nate was brave. It gave him a chance to get the support of his team and it had the added benefit of giving Nate a preview of what awaits him when the news of his betrayal gets out.
This season was kind of a mess, but Trent’s comment on the surprise he can’t ride a bike “because of my hair and whole vibe?” made me laugh.
That was such a perfect little character moment.
Myles, your reviews of this show are incisively brilliant and your writing is both lithe and lively. I honestly have enjoyed reading your reviews. But why do I get the niggling feeling that you’re the journalistic equivalent of Nate the Great/Grate? Perhaps you should write more feasible fantasy football fare to compete with it. Let’s call the show “False Nein”. In sum, Nate’s character was a delight in the first season and who devolved into insufferable sod in the second. Please don’t let your writing arc follow Nate’s trajectory; that is unless you intend to be the foil of a series that you suspect is flattering to deceive.
This season had many flaws, but the confusion about Nate and Ted’s interactions is odd to me. Everything Nate said in that last conversation made complete sense to me. Not because it seemed like an accurate description of what happened, or even of Nate’s own reactions and behaviour, but because it makes sense as an emotional truth combined with some self-delusion that makes sense for Nate the way we’ve come to know him this season. Something he would believe, even if it’s not the actual reason for his choices. It tracks for his kind of person. Of course Ted can’t win! This is about Nate’s issues much more than Ted’s leadership. The other coaches aren’t actually responsible for Nate’s heel turn.
The only thing about S2 I really didn’t care for – but especially in the finale – is that this is a show that does not require a villain. But particularly not one created in such a shoddy fashion. The coaching staff bears no responsibility for Nate’s inability to behave like an adult and not a petulant child. The hair and the walking into the frame at the end were just silly and wrong-headed.The only other issue (I hate to even call it that) was Keeley allowing Roy to get all the way through his spiel before explaining she had to stay and work. It felt colder than Keeley has been built up to be.
Otherwise, I think the show holds up incredibly well compared to what might have seemed like an unrepeatably strong S1.On to FOUNDATION…
Nick Mohammed just shared some interesting thoughts about Nate’s arc on his twitter. The detail about where Ted keeps the pic Nate gave him for Christmas was nice/sad to know. Also seems to validate a lot of what violasmart4 said in the thread mentioned in earlier comments.I agree with her about Nate’s story being one “many people (esp women) needed to see told”. God in this episode watching Nate just full of this seething, contempt and growing fury at Ted and basically everyone around him, and the tension he creates with it, really took me back to my childhood. I feel bad for him cause he’s hurting himself too and it comes from his own sad experiences, but watching the cruelty bubble to surface and be hurled at ppl he’s decided he can get away with treating poorly, that deserve to be treated poorly, it’s all so familiar. Nate is such a fascinating character to me, in a way that’s a little similar to how Don Draper and Bojack Horseman are for me. I can’t figure out how to articulate how I see them as similar, just… the realistic ugliness of it all.
Nate is almost every single guy I was friends with in college, only to find out their real personality after I turned down their romantic overtures.These guys (and I hate to stereotype, but I haven’t seen this particular type of behavior in women or nonbinary people) all seem to have the same MO – befriend/look up to someone, make themselves into someone reliable that the person can trust, and then absolutely flip the fuck out when their overtures (whether that be romantic or job-related or what have you) are rebuffed.
They weren’t joking about this being the Empire Strikes Back season hey.As a football fan I really felt the emotion of promotion first time around. All the feels without actually winning the title. Dramatically it works and realistically bouncing back immediately is worth as much as winning a title for a club.“You Yoruba trash!” ahahah wow I hear that line so much around here I almost died with that line delivery. I loved this season. And really, really despise Nate. Should have known when I realised I could rhyme his name with hate, too. Not always agreed with you but you’ve been a great reviewer! Hope to see you return for the next season.
Ted’s gonna go off that he thinks therapists are “bullshit” (I really disliked that scene) but when Nate leaks his mental health issues for the world to know, he won’t say a word. I can’t square this. The public reaction was also…really?? I’d been a defender of the Nate storyline, because I thought it was really nuanced, but when he lashes out at Ted, the truth is, all along it was something alot more shallow. I was ready for either a redemption or a downfall, but we only get there with a reckoning of accountability, and there isnt any. To just have him fuck off and join the bad guys is lame to me. Under all the team’s positive wank, there was a culture of bullying that was happening right under the coaches’ noses, and they never really reconcile with it. Nate’s behavior gets off scott free before he leaves, and that frustrates me. (And I know they won’t address it next year, because they kind of don’t address anything) For the most part, I’m in agreement with this review. Ted Lasso will always be an enjoyable show, but it’s clunky stuff now. Why is Roy wanting to take Keely on vacation when she’s about to start a new business? And when she points this out, why does he immediately assume this means they’re breaking up? I don’t mind a bookend for Dani’s penalty kick, or that not everything Jamie does has to be about his dad. But I do mind what Rebecca’s arc was this season. Not much to do with the club, and everything to do with being flustered over finding a man. And when she does, the issues surrounding their relationship dynamics never come into play. Sam gets to open a restaurant though. Because that’s where this was all leading to? I appreciate that Ted Lasso is a feel good show, but it doesn’t doesn’t amount to much for me if it comes at the expense of meaningful conflicts. Too many plotlines were either brushed over, or resolved too easily. Super weird season.
Great review. I don’t agree with every point but do agree with most. This season has been far less focused and paid far less attention to detail.I’m surprised there so much push back in the comments section. I think you’re spot on and people haven’t dug into that feeling that the show is a bit off.Re: the sponsor protest. It’s not expecting too much or being over critical to expect events in a largely realistic show to have largely realistic consequences. For all of Ted’s optimism in season one the show stayed the right side of true to life. Players weren’t instantly won over, Rebecca took a long time to stop compartmentalizing her bad acts. It nailed the repercussions. In season two, time and time again the show didn’t put enough thought into showing the real life consequences/results e.g. the obvious power dynamics criticisms of Rebecca and Sam.For me season one kept things more focused and realistic by centering its conflicts around the fortunes of team (especially in so much as it relates to playing well): an owner working against the team/Ted, drama between the players effecting their playing, the drama/desire to win on the pitch and therefore not to be relegated, and the dramatic clash of what the fans want in a manager Vs what they get including the losses suffered. And into this the show drops an optimistic soul capable of influencing these situations. This season without that focus the show has slightly unraveled.To this, while I expected Rupert would return as a serious antagonist (& that he had Nate onside) I hoped he would have manoeuvred himself into a position of influence inside the club e.g. representing a large slice of minority owners. Enough of an influence inside the club that it effects the board room, coaching office and pitch.
My guess, Trent Crimm plans to write a book about AFC Richmond, centered around Ted. This keeps him around regularly with the excuse that he is doing interviews and background work
One thing that disappointed me about this episode is that Ted didn’t reach out to anybody for help processing whatever feelings he may have had about Nate’s betrayal. Sharon and Rebecca both offered their help, but Ted didn’t take it. I guess I feel like Ted is supposed to have learned “it’s okay if you need help” this season, but in the last episode, he doesn’t use that lesson. And maybe you could argue he didn’t need help, but surely after seeing his face and horrible headlines all over, he could have used someone to vent to.
I keep waiting for the Lasso-Beard relationship to finally revealed beyond the taciturn, aphorism-based stage, and I think this would have been a good episode for it to happen.
I don’t think they have that kind of relationship. In season one, Beard’s rant to Ted about “winning does matter” was clearly something that built up over time, meaning he probably avoided saying it for years even though it apparently bothered him. Beard likes Ted, playing second fiddle to Ted is a good, low-key, and relatively lucrative gig, so I think Beard just goes with the flow with Ted. But I’ve never gotten the impression that they have much of a relationship beyond what we’ve seen depicted on-screen or that they really talk that much.
Brendan Hunt’s interviews about how he conceived Beard suggest someone very loyal to Ted— Beard was in a bad way at some point and Ted helped him out of it and helped him get his life together, so Beard will stick by him and follow him anywhere. I think his relationship with Ted is closer than you suggest.That said, it’s not hard to see how these stories could have played out better— Ted’s wrapped up in dealing with his personal issues, so he doesn’t notice the stuff with Nate; Beard’s emotional energy is spent on this toxic relationship, so he doesn’t bring up the Nate stuff to Ted; Ted doesn’t notice Beard’s not doing that or how unhealthy his relationship with Jane is for the same reasons he doesn’t notice Nate’s behavior; and they all have to confront this some point after Nate finally snaps. Then it just didn’t happen.
Gotta agree with you wholeheartedly here. Many of the choices to pick up potential juicy storylines just to drop them later (or immediately) have irked me this season. Granted, this does feel like “real life” in a way but definitely not like an ensemble show where actions have consequences.
I think the writers need to decide whether the players are more of Greek chorus providing color and context to the main characters, or actual human beings with their own stories, because this middle ground is spreading everything too thin.
I like a lot of the characters but I agree the show needs a lot of work on the supporting cast. I think there is too much slackness, as if they brought in writers used to working with casts of four or five who aren’t used to bigger ensembles.
In an office based show you could pretty easily shift focus to a subset of characters, but a soccer team just doesn’t allow that. It’s hard juggling so many balls, no doubt, and I think the game plan needed more thought.
I personally never thought Ted had any responsibility for Nate’s increasing dickishness. Nate can be expected to be professional, and he never received anything but goodwill and opportunity from Ted. That he stewed in petty resentment of Roy being added to the team, etc. just makes him look immature.
I don’t think Ted is really responsuble for Nate’s reaction to their broken relationship, but I think he absolutely bears a lot of fault for the relationship being broken.Where I disagree with the review is that I don’t think Ted’s coming to terms with what happened belonged in this episode — doing it right would take more time than they had and I think would have felt draggy in context. I just want see it addressed next season and not forgotten.
I feel like that’s how I spent most of season two—telling myself, “Don’t worry, they’ll actually grapple with the very real issues on Ted’s coaching staff next episode.” And it never happened. And now to foist it off on the next season just seems like bad structuring of the overall narrative arc. It didn’t have to be resolved by the end of the finale, but to not even broach it in any substantive way throughout the entire season is poor form, in my opinion, because it goes hand-in-hand with the work that Ted did with Dr. Sharon. Ted doesn’t exhibit much growth if he can’t be reflective about this very real byproduct of his philosophy being put into practice.
That’s fair, and maybe the structural solution would have been to have the Nate-Ted break happen earlier in the season. It potentially could have been a major contributing factor to Ted’s anxiety attack and something Dr. F helped him address. As it was, we didn’t see a lot of Ted’s present state as factors in his struggle, and this could have been a piece for the writers to consider tying in.
I think Ted’s struggles with his mental health were an interesting way to go, but the Nate storyline is an example of the overall lack of consequences for anyone this season. Ted has panic attacks and is overall much less invested in the team than he was in season 1, and yet somehow they go on an incredible winning streak in the background to set up promotion in the finale.Is that because of Roy? Nate? Besides the “false 9″ thing (which only got them a draw) it’s never really explained, and it seems like it should be prime fodder for Nate’s resentment. None of Nate’s stated motivations for being angry at Ted — the guy who promoted him from kit guy to assistant coach — make all that much sense, and I can’t quite tell if that’s intentional.
I realize that British tabloids are trash, but in this day and age there would be a strong counter-narrative about mental health—particularly for men—that would emerge immediately after hogwash like the Soccer Saturday rant from Ted’s predecessor, and so it was weird for the show to pretend as though there was no discourse on that level until Ted’s press conference after the match the next day.As kind of a comparison, Montreal Canadiens goaltender/centerpiece player Carey Price announced that he will miss at least the first month of the new NHL reason earlier this week because he’s entering the player assistance program for unspecified mental health struggles, and the response from both fans and the media was a huge outpouring of support (including statements of support from both the Prime Minister of Canada and the Premier of Quebec). Hockey is basically the state religion in Canada, so this story was absolutely everywhere, and griping of the sort we see in the show with regard to Ted was firmly on the margins.
I think we need to ask ourselves whether the response would have been the same if he did this after Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Semifinals. Would it have been “good for him for taking care of himself” or would it have been “he’s quitting on his team”?See also: Simone Biles at the Tokyo Olympics.
One thing I very much agree with the review is that the Sam-Rebecca relationship was a mess. The spectre of the tabloids exposing it should have loomed over it like Godzilla. She was shown to be a target of the papparazzi from the first scene of the first episode, and press gossips are a force throughout both seasons. That alone should have given them pause, and the power issues referred to in this and other reviews should have too.I think it was a big mistake to turn Rebecca into an absentee owner — she was a much better character in the first season pulling strings, and I’m not sure why they thought it made sense to focus on her love life so muchm except maybe someone running the show thought it would be an expedient way to get more screentime for her and Sam, nevermind the implausibility.
I agree with some others that the Roy Keeley ending was fine. Keeley and Roy literally said both knew she had already started work, and I think Roy’s surprise had all of the hallmarks of someone making a desperation play to stop a train he knew had already left the station but was worried where it was headed.I can’t say I thought this season was as clean as the first, but I admire the willingness to try new things and not repeat the formula. Not everything worked, but a surprising number did for me.
I liked the finale a lot more than Myles, but it’s fair to say this season represents a sophomore slump. Too much pointless relationship drama, too many weird narrative tangents that didn’t pay off, and, yeah, not enough football. Still laugh-out-loud funny and immensely likable, but season 2 doesn’t feel anywhere near as satisfying as season 1 felt.*Really hoping this was the capper for Rebecca/Sam, and really hoping they find something better to with Rebecca besides fretting over whether she can find or keep a man. *Don’t spring a surprise vacation on somebody. Especially don’t spring a surprise six-week vacation on somebody. Especially especially don’t spring a surprise six-week vacation on somebody who literally just started a new job. Keeley is 100% in the right here, and Roy’s gesture was just bizarre.
*I don’t really see why this episode needed Ted to do some explicit soul-searching over whether or how he did Nate wrong, considering that it seems clear that’s what the next season will be about. *Mostly I just wish Ted didn’t feel so peripheral in his own show this season. I get that this season was “about” Ted finally embracing therapy and confronting his own issues rather than trying to sort everyone else’s, but that came at the cost of him seeming completely checked out in terms of his relationships and professional responsibilities. It would be one thing if this season genuinely did set out to criticize Ted and explore the limits of Lasso-ism, but it seems clear at this point that that’s not what they were going for. I think the show still wants us to believe Ted is a good coach and has a positive impact on the team, but unlike season 1, season 2 neglects to provide any evidence of his leadership. He’s an avuncular presence who says goofy things at practice and then just disappears, as far as the other characters are concerned. There’s not really any thematic payoff for Ted’s journey this season. He doesn’t apply any lessons he’s learned to helping the team or his friends. Instead, the team wins and he’s just kinda…there.
Ted is quoting a speech Dumbledore gives to Harry Potter (“It is our choices, Harry, far more than our abilities…”). That’s why it’s so funny that the made-up name includes every fantasy mentor BUT Dumbledore.
I’m late to your reviews of this season, but they really resonate. I’m as attached as ever to Ted Lasso’s characters and really great moments, but there were sooo many odd characterization and narrative choices this season.I really do think the inability to deal with the CO protest fallout is a major problem with this season that follows it through the end. The issue is less that the show creates an imaginary world where protesting a powerful sponsor creates no negative consequences, but more that the world Ted Lasso creates doesn’t have a consistent set of rules that the narrative can operate within. The protest is enough of a problem that it’s a one-episode arc, but not enough a problem to be a series-long arc (I guess?). The audience has no reason to guess that based on the way the real world works, so we spend the entire season waiting for it to come back. With so many plot-lines and no consistent rules, we’re left guessing which moments early on in the season will actually matter to the narrative arc of the season. When the ones that seem like they matter don’t, the result is at least a little unsatisfying.
Obviously I concur with this, but for some context: I wrote these reviews one-by-one using screeners, stopping after each episode to write the review and move on. This was done in isolation, before the season premiered. As a result, I knew very quickly that my presumption that the third episode would be earth-shaking for the show and its characters was fundamentally wrong, and I could have gone back and downplayed it.But looking back on the episode, I realized that—to your point—I wasn’t crazy. The show treated it and presented it like it was a huge deal, which was a recurring pattern with a range of conflicts that feel like they’re escalating rapidly and then peter out off-screen. It’s basically a form of narrative gaslighting, useful for creating episodic conflict but very much a failure in creating coherent season-long arcs.In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s TV Top 5 podcast, Bill Lawrence says a lot of very thoughtful things (as he always does), and when he’s asked about the power dynamics of Sam and Rebecca’s relationship he basically asks us to trust that the writers think of all of the dimensions of these stories and if we’re thinking about it, then chances are it will matter in the future. But the reality is that the Dubai Air storyline broke that trust. Even if it somehow has ramifications in season three, the fact it didn’t have immediate ones is the problem, and shows some serious blind spots in how the show is approaching this type of storytelling. And as much as I respect Lawrence and remain attached to these characters, I was hoping for a bit more self-reflection on how the season struggled to thread these stories together in an effective way.
Wouldn’t the trent crimm scene this episode go at least a little ways to reestablishing trust though? Everyone called out how unethical that was, and he didn’t get away with it. I would actually say most things we commenters were annoyed by played out the way we thought they should have if this show has a basis in reality (although the specifics of these resolutions did lead to some head scratching moments, admittedly)
So you’re right that this is a hopeful thing (although I wasn’t too bothered by that, because it didn’t really have broader ramifications and the lack of public knowledge meant that a lack of accountability only impacted Trent’s character, not the world of then show).But I guess the breaking of trust is the idea they would be willing to generate so many head-scratching moments and wave them away.
What a sloppy ending to a sloppy season. The first season felt like a novel, with a single storyline broken up into 10 chapters. This season felt like an anthology, with each short story being told with no knowledge about what’s happening in the other short stories. The first season is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with each episode doing the groundwork to build up to the big moments. The second season is the DC Universe, with each “big moment” feeling empty and unsatisfying because no groundwork was done to get the audience there.
There are so many good elements in this season, but they’re either left unexplored or they missed the mark entirely. Sam’s protest with DubaiAir should have lasted longer than 2 scenes. I mean, he says that he doesn’t want to be a part of the ad campaign, and everyone is like, “Ok, cool.” Then Sam puts some black duct tape on his shirt, and…that’s it. Suddenly oil spills are being cleaned up in Nigeria. WTF? There should have been several episodes detailing Sam’s protest and the personal blowback he received. If you want to tell a Colin Kaepernick story, then go full Colin Kaepernick. There should have been scenes where Sam was being attacked in the media, on the Internet, maybe even have some fans lash out at him on the streets. They have an old guy calling Ted a wanker on the street a couple of times this season, so I’m guessing they could have had a few extras yell at Sam to just leave the politics at home and play football. Then you could have had scenes where Sam is discussing this stuff with Keeley and Rebecca, and Rebecca starts respecting Sam for his bravery, and Sam appreciates how Rebecca is standing behind him, etc., which then leads more organically to them having a relationship.Keeley’s odd out-of-nowhere business loan from the venture capitalists to start a P.R. firm should have happened earlier in the season, like right after Bantr became the team’s sponsor. That storyline would have been a better way to force tension between Roy and Keeley, with Keeley working hard to build her business and Roy feeling sidelined in his relationship, which in turn would organically make him more insecure and want to defend his relationship from Jamie.
I feel sorry for Will. I mean, Beard steps right in and makes Nate apologize to Colin, but Will just continually gets berated. Does Beard only care about the players? There were at least a few tense interactions between Nate and Will that played out in front of Beard. After the Colin incident, Beard should have been telling Ted about Nate’s behavior, but I guess that would have sidelined the Ted/Sharon story somewhat.
When Nate turned toward the camera in that final scene at West Ham, I fully expected him to be wearing a darkest timeline goatee. I mean, the writers aren’t exactly subtle about his turn to the dark side. He wears an entirely black suit to the match? Why not just slap a Darth Vader helmet on him, you hacks? Is Nate tearing the “Believe” sign apart symbolically equivalent to Darth Vader cutting off Luke’s hand? Is Rupert playing the role of the Emperor, turning Nate to the dark side? Now we get to see the light side of Ted’s upbeat philosophy play against the dark side of Nate’s coaching prowess.Just a poorly planned and executed season, with entire plot points popping into and out of existence in the blink of an eye. But I will give credit to the show for having that damn puppy wearing a helmet as Danny is about to kick the penalty. That was a nice touch.
pretty sure the lesbian bit was just a treat for queers. my friends and I loved it, cause we all crush on Keeley. Just a little treat for us, like when u get the classic rock jokes
Not that I’m so plugged in to soccer to really care about it that much but this season just did not care about it at all. We have the streak of draws at the beginning, we have “park the bus,” the FA Cup thing for a minute, and… this game? Maybe I’m forgetting something but… they just in the background won a bunch, it’s fine. And we didn’t really see much coaching or anything like that to justify any turnaround. They’re losing or drawing in some episodes because that’s the story for that particular episode, and they’re doing fine at the end because they’re supposed to get promoted. I guess it was all just really good sports psychology, so good that we don’t even need to see it.Speaking of promotion: why did we even bother with relegation? They lost zero players (in fact they re-added Jamie), nobody has to be convinced to stay, they kept their sponsor until they wanted to sort of have a story about dumping them and then they got a new one instantly without anybody doing anything, money is never a problem, facilities, etc. There’s never really any pressure of “uh oh, if we stay down this will be devastating for the club.” And now they’re back. So relegation was just a Rocky/Friday-Night-Lights-movie ending for season 1 and nothing else.
This is why I don’t understand why they even brought up the financial stakes of relegation in the third episode if they were just…not going to have it matter, at all. I’m admittedly not someone who takes well to blatant ignorance of fundamental realities of the actual sport you claim to present, but there would at least be plausible deniability that this doesn’t exist in this world if they hadn’t actually included it themselves to just toss it aside afterwards.
It’s not a sports show.
Well it’s about a sports team. It’s like having a hospital drama where sick people don’t matter and no one ever dies, even after they’ve been pointed out to have been diagnosed with Stage 22 cancer. After awhile you stop giving a shit about anything they present to you. Staring blankly at a screen waiting for forced, allegorical jokes that usually fell flat in Season 2, is not that entertaining. And I really enjoyed most of Season 1, so I’m not just ragging on the show.
The sports team is the setting, not a character. Even hospital dramas are not about the hospital. The hospital is the setting.
You can say that, but season 1 was about the football. From actually showing how AFC Richmond works on both the field level and the ownership level, from showing the work the team put in training, to showing how that training showed up in matches, to all of it connecting to how Ted’s ways do work to bring out the best in his players, even if they don’t achieve the club success that was their goal. But it was also about football in the ways that it portrayed the culture around football, the fandoms, the regulars at the pub, etc. Football wasn’t just an excuse for quirky jokes and relationship stories; it was essential to the stories being told that season and it was essential to the setting.Seaosn 1 wasn’t entirely about football, but it was about football enough that it created a detailed world of verisimilitude and was able to meaningfully connect character journeys to the results of the team. Season 2 suffers for that lack of focus, because losing the first half makes the show feel less grounded, and losing the second half makes the victories feel unearned and the character journeys feel disconnected from the work on the pitch.
Just on the financial impact of relegation- The probably couldn’t have added a player of Jamie’s caliber if Jamie had been radioactive to every other team. I’m sure they got him for pennies on the dollar of his true worth.That said, if it were the real Premiere League, a half dozen other teams would’ve taken a shot on Jamie as soon as he was booted from Lust Island.
Also worth pointing out (sort of)- Even if they lost that last game and didn’t get automatically promoted, they would’ve entered the 4-team tournament for the final promotion spot. Though as others have pointed out, they don’t really seem to care that much about the soccer aspect and shooting in Wembley/CGI-ing Wembley again was probably too expensive to consider it anyway.
Also worth pointing out (sort of)- Even if they lost that last game and didn’t get automatically promoted, they would’ve entered the 4-team tournament for the final promotion spot.There was the slightest of acknowledgements of that by the announcers saying ‘control their destiny’ (as opposed to entering the playoff tournament) but too easily missable.
Nate appears to have an introverted narcissistic personality. Such people have a low self esteem but make up for it with an inflated sense of self. They are envious of those they admire, cannot take criticism, and when they fail they go into a shame spiral. They never take the blame and point the finger at others. When they are at the bottom of the totem pole they tend to be diffident, sycophantic, and eager to please. Once promoted then their true features emerge. Nate exemplified these characteristics. He basked in the praise on social media but was infuriated at one negative comment. When his false nine strategy looked to be failing he disowned it and blamed the team. When he ranted against Ted, he didn’t even think that it was Ted’s recent spells of anxiety that led to him not paying attention. For Nate, he was abandoned, and that was unforgivable. Narcissists also tend to envy those they admire. Nate had always admired Roy, and because Roy is an athlete and out of his league, Nate never clashes with Roy. (Nate also acts the same with the top players Jamie and Dani.) His obvious admiration for Keeley notwithstanding, when Nate kissed her he saw himself as a rival to Roy. That Roy dismissed this showed that Nate is not a threat. Interestingly Nate teamed up with another narcissist, Rupert. (Rupert also comes off as a charming psychopath.) Whereas Nate is new to success and adulation, Rupert has always been on top and can regulate his narcissistic rage, tending to do his battles and sabotages below the surface. Initially these two will work well together, boosting each other’s ego, but once Nate starts to underperform, Rupert will devalue him and eventually discard him. I hope Nate is not beyond redemption. It takes in-depth self-reflection for a narcissist to change their ways and it happens only once they’ve hit rock bottom. Nate needs to hit rock bottom.
The “introverted narcissist” and your description made me think of Orson Welles’ comments about Woody Allen.
Lots of great analysis here, but the discourse around the show here is just bumming me out. Criticisms get hammered again and again and again (and again) but the positives, like the consistently strong performances, are barely mentioned. The review is very well considered and written, but due to the relentlessly critical tone it reads like the grade should be much, much lower than a B-.
I appreciate this comment, and I’ve been thinking how to respond to it all day beyond “please ignore the grades, I only do them because I have to.”
First, I encourage you to go read some of my writing about the final seasons of Shameless to hear what it sounds like when I actually hate something.But second, you’re not wrong that there is a tendency when reviewing a show week-to-week to emphasize criticism, at least from my point of view. For a finale, as the weight of all of the season’s serialization comes down on a show, it’s sort of impossible now to dwell on those things more than an average review. But even in general, to me the point of a review like this is to track the modulations in a show’s effectiveness, and that usually means we skip the things that aren’t necessarily variables on a week to week level.Thus, things like strong performances just aren’t interesting to me? Like, we get it. Almost the entire cast got Emmy nominations. You’re watching the same show I’m watching. To spend time on that each week is not something that fits how I engage with television. There are still brief moments where I talk about performances—like here with Mohammed—but to me that’s something more befitting a pre-air review of an entire season than a reaction to an episode.I get that others see this differently, and I have no doubt that some might read these reviews as less harsh if I were to try to devote equal time to “pros” and “cons.” But to me, performances are more likely to be a contributing factor in my general reaction than something I would ever foreground in a review, but that does mean it may be taken for granted (and thus I’m always happy to see you or others using the comments to reflect on it).
The whole grading concept is weird. Is it an “A” based on the most perfect of shows being an “A”, or is it an “A” based on the limited expectations for THIS show? Grading anything in the fine arts is weird in general IMO. I hated “Battles of the Bands” when I was in amateur music. It would turn a rocking evening in to one with several pissed off people and infighting.
The series hasn’t emphasised what makes Ted Lasso a competent coach.Ted’s strength is his focus on team unity and character development, but these do not make up for a lack of fundamental knowledge about the game. Richmond only started winning when Nate started strategising their plays, and Roy brought out the strengths of the individual players. The final episode showed that Ted is most effective when the team needs an inspirational boost. However, he still used Nate’s play because his strength is not as a strategist.Next season they will need a new strategist. It would be interesting if they hired a female co-coach. Ted has a knack of recognising talent, so maybe he’ll discover someone.I imagine a scenario where someone sends in plays which are ingenious. They contact this person only to find out it’s a she – a University student who’s a savant at strategy. Or, it could be a no-nonsense female coach who makes Rebecca feel insecure as she’s no longer the girl boss. Either way, it might be interesting.
The stuff about mental health among athletes was pretty prescient given what just happened this week with the goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, Carey Price. (For those who don’t know, he’s stepping away from the team for help with mental health issues, just as his teammate, Jonathan Drouin, did last season).
This show sucks and I wish light Yagami could just write Ted lasso
AV Club always seems to have critics critique shows that they obviously don’t like. It’s an interesting approach. You would think people would want to read reviews from people that actually like these shows. I must admit though, I do look forward to seeing how Myles will find new and creative ways to shit on episodes that the majority of people like. If you just read Myles’ reviews with no other context, you’d think Ted Lasso was 1 of the worst shows on tv.
Myles called it his favorite show of last year and I think there’s been one review below a B-? I guess some things in the commentariat never change.
If you just read Myles’ reviews with no other contextWhy would you do that?
Just want to chime in to note that while Nate’s look is absolutely Jose Mourinho, the character is not at all the same. Mourinho, first and foremost, is a charming guy, and there’s never been any hint that he’s driven by rage or anger or daddy issues. He thinks he’s awesome, and that’s the beginning and the end of his story, pretty much.
I am interested to see if they have Nate adopt Mourinho’s management style. Mourinho — who, mind you, is almost as good a manager as he thinks he is — is tactically strong, and has a knack for getting the hand of players he’s been dealt (when arriving at a club) to play better immediately. But he can be very rigid and inflexible, especially if his tactics/methods are challenged, and he can play favorites, and his man management skills are… less than ideal. (His results at building a club through the transfer market have been mixed as well.) So typically, he comes into a club, has immediate success, then the rest of the league catches up to what he’s doing, he refuses to change his ways, he inevitably alienates one of his superstars, the players get sick of his shit, and he gets fired. But then he gets a new job, because he’s Jose Mourinho. p.s. For those who don’t follow club football, Mourinho’s nickname is “The Special One”. Which he basically gave himself. That pretty much tells you the whole story.
Oh. My. GOD! This review is a perfect example of a critic IN LOVE with the sound of his own prose! Paragraph after endless paragraph of nitpicking with nary a side note about the high level of acting and ensemble work. Honestly, is there any better way to suck the joy and poignancy out of lovely finale??
“I realize that British tabloids are trash, but in this day and age there
would be a strong counter-narrative about mental health—particularly
for men—that would emerge immediately after hogwash like the Soccer
Saturday rant from Ted’s predecessor, and so it was weird for the show
to pretend as though there was no discourse on that level until Ted’s
press conference after the match the next day.”This is the thing that strikes me as odd about much of season two. Parts of this show seems to have been written 10-15 years ago rather than in the last few years. And it’s not just the mental health angle; it’s also the Rebecca/Sam relationship. It’s like the writers were living under a rock when debates over mental health and sexual harassment began evolving in recent times. Both of these story lines make little sense in a show that is ostensibly set in 2021…
I don’t know that I fully buy Nate’s heel turn because it is so out of character with the guy we met in Season 1, but I think there’s a lot of truth in the idea that some people who feel lonely and insecure, when they are finally given the love, dignity, and acceptance that they’ve always wanted, spurn it and lash out at the people who give it to them because their self-loathing has curdled into something so nasty that they can’t accept kindness as anything other than some kind of Trojan horse from people who just want to hurt them. I think it’s potentially a way of exploring the limits of Ted’s positive thinking and “treat people kindly and they’ll come around eventually” approach to life, though mostly watching Nate’s arc this season I kept just thinking “what a selfish, small-minded little prick.”
Rewatch Season 1. It is 100% in character with the guy we met in Season 1. Much like Ted did, you just missed it.
I was really hoping that Nate had an evil Nate goatee at the ending.
Alright, first time commenter here, so please bear with me—*JAMIE IS KEELEY’S EX BOYFRIEND. NATE IS NOT. PERIOD.*I am utterly stunned that nobody has mentioned this major detail when discussing the last 2 episodes.“the Nate kiss is honestly most justified as a way to escalate his anger that no one takes him seriously during the Diamond Dogs meeting, which is very effective”Unless it is used as a warped justification for anger in Nate’s mind, and ONLY Nate’s mind, then sure. Otherwise, nope, and Nate seriously needs to get over himself. Bc in this very specific instance, involving “Jamie, aka Keeley’s ex-boyfriend”? No Nate, you are absolutely not as important, and/or threatening. Sorry, bud. Everyone is talking about how Roy not being mad about the kiss is just another micro-aggression toward Nate/not seeing Nate as a threat. But the emotional weight of Nate kissing Keeley due to some sort of lapse is NOWHERE NEAR THE SAME as Jamie telling her he loves her bc she makes him want to be a better man. Jamie Tartt. Keeley’s *actual ex* who she had real, romantic feelings for a year ago, still cares for as a person, and who Roy has had direct issues with since the Pilot. It’s not even close.For Nate (or anyone, really) to realistically think that Roy is more threatened by Jamie than Nate, *purely* because “it’s only Nate” is ridiculous, imo. Roy is more threatened by Jamie, because it’s “Jamie, aka Keeley’s ex-boyfriend” more than anything else.Does Roy not consider Nate a threat bc he doesn’t take Nate seriously (or whatever weak excuse we’re giving Nate to be even more upset about everything)?? Sure. Keeley is so far out of Nate’s league, they’re not even in the same galaxy. That tracks. Nate can be offended by that all he wants— he’s chosen to be offended by everything that doesn’t pass flawlessly through his own lense of warped perception all season. He’s *looking* for reasons to be angry at this point. But Roy not headbutting him for trying to kiss Keeley is still not *realistically justifiable for him to be upset about— bc it’s not a personal affront when it’s being compared to Jamie. And I’m flummoxed by how many people are acting as if it is. As well as by those leaving that major detail out. Dani Rojas could try to kiss Keeley, and Roy would still be more threatened by Jamie’s “I Love You”. Isaac could “oops innit” a kiss right on Keeley’s mouth, and Jamie would still be DEFCON 1. Jamie and Keeley’s past relationship truly changes the entire dynamic, thus the implications and threat levels are completely different. They actually mean something.I have read hundreds of reviews on this site, followed by their respective comment sections. I have wanted to “like” or “star” comments, reply in all caps, even yell at the screen in agreement, but never once broke and made an account on here to do so. This is def not personal toward your take on it, bc I’ve seen this completely neglected everywhere. But this is the one where I could no longer stay silent was killing me!
I love your “I could no longer stay silent” energy on the Keeley/Jaime/Roy/Nate situation. I agree with your stance!
My sympathies go to any arts critic who hears “you’re overthinking this” or “it’s just a television show.” Your goal is to think deeply and carefully about what you’re reviewing and to get readers to do the same. “I love this show and you should too” has never made for very interesting reading for me.What I find interesting is that at least some of the viewers who love the show because, they say, it teaches us how to be a better person in real life also don’t seem to mind that the show isn’t grounded in reality in many ways. And, as others have mentioned, the show asks us to accept that a lot of things have happened in the background — it tells us rather than shows us.Ted is, we’re told, a good coach, even though he hasn’t bothered to learn the game he’s coaching and, indeed, revels in his ignorance. (Query whether he would be held up as a role model if he were a woman who left her child to take an overseas job she wasn’t qualified for, tried to ingratiate herself with her boss by baking cookies for her every day, had her team learn dance routines instead of training for a major match, and constantly made herself the center of attention with “live, love, laugh” interjections.) Rebecca is, we’re told, a “boss ass bitch,” even though we haven’t seen her make any tough decisions that a team owner would have to make, such as strategizing with her leadership about how to keep a star player from leaving her team. Keeley is, we’re told, an up-and-coming PR executive even though we’ve seen her do little more than get free coffee machines for the players. Indeed, she seems to have been very much not out in front of the news about Ted’s panic attacks, when I would have thought that one of Ted’s first calls after getting the text from Trent would have been to call Keeley and figure out how to deal with it. (And a savvy PR advisor would probably have told him, “Tell Trent to pull the story and we’ll promise him an exclusive.”) I wish we saw more showing and less telling.
The other aspect of “Ted teaches us how to be a good person” I find striking is that it seems to ignore where all that relentless positivity comes from — a place of deep pain and insecurity. It’s why he doesn’t realize when things aren’t working and, in fact, are causing harm. In that sense, Ted isn’t all that different from Nate, and why their scene together deserved more than it was given. Hurt people can hurt people.
What I liked about season 1 was that it did show, not tell. Particularly, of course, when it came to the work of Ted just showing up and trying to be kind and positive every day, and that that does take real effort, especially in an environment as hostile as this one. In season 2, you’re absolutely right, we’re told about how good characters are at certain things and what they’ve achieved without ever seeing them work for it.
Ok, after years of reading AV Club, I’ve finally caved and created an account today, specifically to float this comment/ discussion. And please note, this is definitely not personal whatsoever, bc I love reading the reviews! 🙂 But I haven’t seen this talked about anywhere, and I’m wondering if I’m alone here, just screaming into the void—
*JAMIE IS KEELEY’S EX BOYFRIEND. NATE IS NOT.* PERIOD. I am utterly confounded that nobody has mentioned this major detail when discussing the last 2 episodes.“…the Nate kiss is honestly most justified as a way to escalate his anger that no one takes him seriously during the Diamond Dogs meeting, which is very effective”. Unless it is used as a warped justification for anger in Nate’s mind, and ONLY Nate’s mind, then sure. Otherwise, nope, and Nate seriously needs to get over himself. Bc in this very specific instance, involving “Jamie, aka Keeley’s ex-boyfriend”? No Nate, you are absolutely not as important, and/or threatening. Sorry, bud.Everyone is talking about how Roy not being mad about the kiss is just another micro-aggression toward Nate/not seeing Nate as a threat. But the emotional weight of Nate kissing Keeley due to some sort of lapse is NOWHERE NEAR THE SAME as Jamie telling her he loves her bc she makes him want to be a better man. Jamie Tartt. Keeley’s *actual ex* who she had real, romantic feelings for a year ago, still cares for as a person, and who Roy has had direct issues with since the Pilot. It’s not even close.For Nate (or anyone, really) to realistically think that Roy is more threatened by Jamie than Nate, *purely* because “it’s only Nate” is ridiculous, imo. Roy is more threatened by Jamie, because it’s “Jamie, aka Keeley’s ex-boyfriend” more than anything else. Does Roy not consider Nate a threat bc he doesn’t take Nate seriously (or whatever weak excuse we’re giving Nate to be even more upset about everything)?? Sure. Keeley is so far out of Nate’s league, they’re not even in the same galaxy. That tracks. Nate can be offended by that all he wants— he’s chosen to be offended by everything that doesn’t pass flawlessly through his own lense of warped perception all season. He’s *looking* for reasons to be angry at this point. But Roy not headbutting him for trying to kiss Keeley is still not *realistically justifiable for him to be upset about— bc it’s not a personal affront when it’s being compared to Jamie.And I’m flummoxed by how many people are acting as if it is. As well as by those leaving that major detail out, bc (even in real life) that changes *everything. Dani Rojas could try to kiss Keeley, and Roy would still be more threatened by Jamie’s “I Love You”. Isaac could “oops innit” a kiss right on Keeley’s mouth, and Jamie would still be Roy’s DEFCON 1. Jamie and Keeley’s past relationship truly changes the entire dynamic, thus the implications and threat levels are always going to be completely different. They actually mean something.In my humble, void-screaming opinion, at least haha
I mean, I think the truth is somewhere in between. You’re right that Jamie’s history with Keeley is why Roy is more upset with him than with Nate, but I’m also not sure if another player tried to kiss Keeley, actually crossed a physical line like that, that that wouldn’t be a problem for Roy. In any case, from Nate’s perspective, it seems like further validation that everyone infantilizes him and doesn’t respect him or take him seriously as a man.
Keeley’s promise to Roy — “I’ll see you in 6 weeks” — was no doubt a reference to Cheers when Diane said those same exact words to Sam before she took off for Los Angeles and never returned (until Shelley Long’s guest appearance at the end of the show’s final season). Given that the show’s creator is a huge fan of Cheers and Jason Sudakis is George Wendt’s nephew (I think that’s his name…. the guy who played Norm?), I’m sure that Keeley’s words were an intentional callback to Diane’s final scene in Cheers.
Which doesn’t bode well for the future of Keeley and Roy’s relationship. Also, am I the only one who enjoyed the After Hours Beard episode? Granted, it was a bit jarring, but I really enjoyed getting to see more of this elusive character and I thought the actor’s performance was hilarious. When his phone dies at the worst possible moment, his howl of frustration, followed by that weird Charlie-Chaplin-like shuffle he did in those wacky bell bottoms had me laughing out loud.I’m also not ashamed to admit that I watched the rave scene twice — why am I not surprised that Beard is great with a hula-hoop?As for the Christmas special, that was a total waste of an episode that the writers could’ve used to fill in some of the gaps in the main storylines of the season (i.e. show a few more scenes from Nate’s perspective, delve a bit more into Jamie’s transformation as a team player, explore Dr. Sharon’s backstory, or even film some actual soccer scenes from all the games the team supposedly won during the season, etc).
re: Trent Crimm (The Independent) – I think he’s going to approach Ted about doing a book on him next season. Just a hunch.
Absolutely. I’m surprised that didn’t happen this season.
Longtime reader, first-time commenter. I liked Season 2 more than you, but I agree with the overall thrust: that the show lost its way at times. I think that’s partly because Season 1 was a more obvious arc full of archetypes: fish out of water has to win over a skeptical crew: the young jerk star (who learns to be a team player); the former star (who has to accept his mortality); the pained divorcee (who learns to overcome her wounds); the callow genius (who gains respect and is accepted by the rest of the crew).
Season 2, on the other hand, tried to make these characters three-dimensional and give them their own stories, with varying degrees of success.I do have high hopes for Season 3, but maybe “Ted Lasso” will be like that band who puts out an amazing debut that catches everybody by surprise and then a couple good, but not great, follow-ups. You can only be a novelty once.
“Advice for being a boss: hire your best friend”That’s the Bartlett way:
Re: The dog breeder. I felt the intent there to be the show giving us (and Keeley herself) an idea of the impact of Keeley’s rising status. We, and the characters, know Keeley is a woman on the move, but we have had no sense of the public reaction to her – we don’t even really see that as beloved Roy Kent’s girlfriend. Again, it’s an awkward stab at it in an overstuffed season, but that’s how I took it.
I have a lot of disagreements with some of the harsher assessments in this article, but the one thing I have to debate is that Edwin Akufo’s purile temper tantrum was an exhalation I’d awaited for since his introduction. A rich man who claims not to believe in billionaires and then abandons a helicopter on a field, or fills an entire museum with actors, is more than a walking contradiction, he’s a walking hypocrisy.His passive-aggressive, over-smiling, obsequious nature towards Sam (especially contrasted with Sam’s good-hearted, sincere, reserved, earnestness) set the stage for a man who has never had someone say “no” to him in his entire life, and has thus never learned how to manage such disappointment with tact.
I think I resist this development in part because it sells out all of the characters on the show, none of whom expressed any legitimate skepticism or hesitancy around Edwin before that point. This is especially true for Sam, who is swindled by the situation. It just strikes me as a story that would have been more effective if it didn’t basically turn into a joke, in terms of the story points it was trying to address.
… would have been more effective if it didn’t basically turn into a joke…Respectfully, I think you’ve just exemplified your shortcoming in understanding the show: it’s a sitcom, not a drama. It has more in common with the “funny & feel-good” tones of The Office, Community, or Parks and Rec than it does with any “hard-hitting” TV. That doesn’t mean it can’t comment on real-world issues in a thoughtful way. But it does mean that it will occasionally place more emphasis on being funny that it will on being a grittily realistic narrative.
This is NOT my first rodeo with the suggestion I am taking a comedy too seriously, so we’re clear. But in this case, I think it’s the bait and switch that’s the problem. To present Edwin as this story development everyone is taking seriously and then retroactively turning it into a joke undercuts the experience we had in the previous episode. It’s a recurring problem with the season where they gesture to the more serious issues but then abandon them, rather than simply trying to tell both pieces of that story. There’s sort of replacement theory in place that makes for a deeply unsatisfying experience not because it’s “not serious enough” but because the seriousness the show does engage in feels tossed aside so readily.
I see where you’re coming from, but it didn’t fail too much for me (other than it made abundantly clear that Sam made the right decision). One reason is that I fully buy a billionaire heir having a huge temper tantrum over not getting something he wants. I don’t think it undercuts the seriousness of the situation because he has the money and means to actually buy Sam, so the threat is legitimate, no matter how he acts in private. The other reason is that Sam Richardson having a childish meltdown is hilarious, and being that hilarious alone justifies it for me.I say this as someone who doesn’t think you can “overthink” a show if you’re a critic, and the more I’ve been thinking about it, indeed, the more I realize the reason it’s easy to “overthink” this show is that season 1 was so rewarding of a close study. Season 2 occasionally is, but it also has its fair share of moments where that close study reveals where the seams in the plotting are stretching.
I am coming in very, very, very late, but having just watched this episode, some six months after Elon Musk took over Twitter … Afuko’s gigantic temper tantrum looks right to me. *chef’s kiss* on the ethnic insults.
I loved the Akufa scene such a great rich guy rant:“I’ll buy your childhood home and take a shit in every room then burn it down and poop on the ashes”
I too created an account to respond, and though I really do appreciate the quality of analysis and writing in these reviews, I do disagree strongly with your take on a big part of season two:“The core truth of the season of television I’ve been writing about is that AFC Richmond was promoted in spite of—and not because of—Ted Lasso’s leadership”
This is the exact *opposite* of what the show’s core truth is, from where I’m sitting. And true to my username, it requires a dive into the philosophies of arguably the greatest coach of all time, UCLA’s John Wooden. He’s featured, as you mention, in this episode, and episodes prior. His famous “Pyramid of Success” is shown at least twice previously, and Nate is staring at it at one point in the episode, prior to his lashing out.
The point of John Wooden’s coaching philosophy, is it’s a lot like Ted’s. Like Ted, he believed that making his athletes good people was far more important than making them great players. He believed that making them great people and play the best they could was far more important than wins or losses. Ted even quotes him in the show, “make each day our masterpiece.” The “base” of Wooden’s Pyramid, the thing that holds everything else up, are five characteristics of a great athlete and person: Enthusiasm, Cooperation, Loyalty, Friendship, and Industriousness/Hard Work. That’s Ted. That’s the sea he swims in, the air he breathes. That shit is his bread and butter. He practices those things every episode. He encourages those things basically every episode. Ted wants everybody to get along, be happy, work hard, and he believes that everything else will work itself out. Ted doesn’t have a lot of mastery of soccer, if any. It’s a running joke. It’s implied he didn’t have a ton of mastery of football either, but he won. More on that in a moment.Then at the top of the pyramid, the *least* important thing in Wooden’s mind, is competitive greatness. That’s Nate. Nate cares about one thing, and one thing only, competitive greatness. He wants to win, and he wants everyone to know he won, *especially the people he hates*. He revels in every opportunity to rub mistakes in others faces. It was his first act as a “coach”. At the time, it probably felt to the staff and players like he was coming into his own, and just standing up and telling truths, but rewatch that episode. He’s cruel, and he enjoys it, because he got one up on people that wronged him, and most importantly, because he gets to be smarter than everyone in the room.Both of these approaches, on their own, are flawed. And on other parts of the pyramid are fleshed out aspects of competitive greatness that balance things out (skill, confidence, initiative, conditioning, etc). But Ted did something interesting, he surrounded himself with coaches who make up for his flaws. Beard knows far more about soccer and football than Ted did, and Beard isn’t afraid to bring Ted back down to earth when necessary. Roy knows soccer, but more importantly he has the player’s perspective, and he can be a hardass when needed, something Ted literally has to hypnotize himself to do. And Nate. Nate is a tactician, who sees the flaws others can’t, and can see how to exploit them. By surrounding himself with these coaches, Ted mitigates his weaknesses. By harnessing their strengths, he could make up all the parts of Wooden’s pyramid. So to the game that got them promoted back to the Prem: It was a complete validation of Ted’s philosophy, of John Wooden’s philosophy. Yes, it was Nate’s tactic that he used, but Nate was ready to abandon his tactic *at the drop of a hat* the minute he saw it wasn’t working. And worse, he wasn’t ready to accept responsibility for why the tactic isn’t working, as Ted/Roy/Beard do by admitting they don’t have an answer. Nate immediately blames the players for it not working, despite the tactic *being Nate’s idea in the first place*, implying he believes the players could execute it. The show took great pains to tell us that Nate understands, fundamentally, the team’s strengths and weaknesses, so much so that he’s promoted from kit man to assistant coach in a flash. And he has the gall to blame the players for not executing *his plan*, despite him advocating for it prior to the game. It reveals the fundamental flaw with Nate’s philosophy: great plans face adversity, and sometimes fighting through that adversity reveals how great a plan was.Three of the key parts of Wooden’s pyramid are “self control”, “patience”, and “fight”. Ted possesses both in spades. Nate, in that moment, reveals he has none of them. If he had self control and patience, he’d realize that it’s only halftime, there’s plenty of match to play, and his tactic was a good one (that’s why he recommended it in the first place). But he doesn’t. If he had fight, he’d fight for his tactic, whether or not it was good, and live with the result. But he doesn’t.
Then there’s Ted. Ted built a team of players around his five core tenets of John Wooden’s pyramid, and he trusts them. Yes, there is a good argument they wouldn’t be in position to win without Nate’s strategy, but they wouldn’t have won without Ted asking the players what they wanted, allowing the players to capitalize on their friendships, their cooperation, and trust in the plan. Nate would have abandoned the strategy if he were the coach, and they would likely have lost (the show seems to heavily imply so). Ted didn’t, he stuck to the strategy, trusted his process, and the team worked together to come out on top. It was a validation of Ted’s philosophy: a less cooperative and friendly team might have fought, as they did in season 1. A less loyal team would have not trusted their coaches. A less hardworking team would have given up.
But more to the point, it’s the team, coaching staff included, that Ted put together that was validated, even Nate’s skill. Nate can’t accept anything other than his own greatness, much like Jaime in Season 1. That’s why he doesn’t celebrate with the team when they score either goal, or win the match. That’s why he rips down the sign. Because he wasn’t the person to put the win together, and he can’t accept that. He eats up the praise of the Tottenham win, because that was *his.* But he can’t celebrate the team’s biggest moment, because he knew he would have given up where Ted and the players didn’t. The core conflict of next season is clearly going to be Ted’s relationship with Nate. Nate is the “one that got away.” It was two short episodes ago that Ted said, in his moment of greatest vulnerability, that he knew the moment he found his father dead by suicide that he “was never going to let anyone get by him without knowing they were hurting inside.” Nate’s monologue makes it clear he was very much hurting inside, misguided though his response may be. I’ve been bullied. I’ve had a father like Nate’s. I *know* exactly how it feels to be ignored, marginalized, passed by. I also know how it feels to be brought into the light, given the keys to the kingdom, let my talents shine and be praised for them. And I also know what it’s like to let that praise, or criticism, get to my head. I’m not Nate, thankfully, but I understand him. His philosophy is bankrupt. Winning and being seen as “great” isn’t worth shit if nobody around you likes you for you. It’s just a number on a scoreboard, and eventually those bulbs are going to die, and that stadium is going to rust. And that’s John Wooden’s whole deal: be the best version of yourself, and the best your capable of will follow, and if it’s not greatness, that’s ok, it was only the very top of the pyramid anyway, and would have fallen down long ago without all those other things holding it up.So Ted’s (and John’s) philosophy worked, for Richmond. They *were promoted*, thanks to the efforts of Ted, the team, Roy, Beard, and even Nate. But Ted did fail, in his core promise to himself, that he would never letting a hurting person get by him. And Ted also said, right before he said he wouldn’t let anyone hurting get by him, that he was frustrated his dad was always working, or out with his friends, and then left him. Ted hated him for that. Ted is Nate. That breakdown is a mirror image of Nate’s tear-filled rage that closed the season. Nate felt forgotten and cast aside, and left behind far too quickly. Ted was also bullied, as he revealed in the famous darts scene. But Ted overcame his demons, seemingly, with understanding and empathy. Nate tries and fails to overcome his with rage, cruelty, and vengeance. So to me, Ted’s coaching philosophy is clearly a success, interestingly as that philosophy is built out of a coping mechanism for Ted’s pain. But Ted’s personal philosophy, far closer to the core of who Ted really is, failed. So I’d argue you’re right in a sense, in that Ted’s leadership of Nate as part of his coaching staff the show makes clear he fails. I think next season will really highlight that Nate is a younger version of Ted, with the same anger, the same But his leadership extends far wider than Nate, to Richmond and its community, and there Ted soars.
First of all, thank you for signing up and diving into this with such depth and purpose.Second, I guess part of where my resistance to this lies is that the end of the first season actively draws a line in the sand regarding the limits of this philosophy in a professional context: Wooden is notably a college coach, and as they’re facing the risk of relegation Beard very forcibly reminds Ted that Richmond is not a bunch of kids, and their professional careers depends on this. Now, I’m not saying that this is necessarily true, but the show raised the issue, and so it was a bit strange when the second season sort of hand-waved that concern away and had the team be promoted without much clarity on how those dots connected (especially later in the season, when the team went on a magical off-screen winning streak with no real justification from Ted’s coaching).I get that this is an idealistic show, despite its darker themes, and thus it believes that Ted’s philosophy (and by extension Wooden’s) is the right way to approach this. But after the opening collection of ties, and the Man City embarrassment, I find it hard not to read the season through the lens that maybe there are limits to this approach. Essentially, I would argue that the coherency of Ted’s coaching philosophy was lost in the season’s ambition, and I was left with a narrative through-line that I don’t think I’m unfairly reading as a probing set of questions into its effectiveness.Which is to say that if it wins the Premier League next year, I have a lot of questions.(I’ll also say that some of my “in spite of” is due less to on-field performance/teambuilding, and more to how Ted failed to register Nate’s behavior and its impact on people like Colin/Will. Frankly, as I suggest in the review, I don’t think he could have done anything to actually address Nate’s concerns, given how deeply embedded they were in his insecurities and divorced from reality.)
Terrific comment; I love how you’ve broken this down.My only real pushback is something I’ve had an issue with most of the season, that we see so little football work (training or matches) compared to season 1 that it doesn’t really resonate with me how Richmond got there. It felt a lot this season like we were just being caught up on the team’s recent fortunes right before a match, rather than seeing how they work toward improving as a team (which we did in a few spots, but they felt more isolated this season compared to season 1).
What a tremendous comment (as as first timer, no less!). Agree with everything you wrote. Besides John Wooden, I would point to two other championship coaches who could have been models for Ted Lasso: (1) John Gagliardi (the winningest college football coach of all time at St John’s in Minnesota): and (2) Frosty Westering, a former Marine squad leader, who coached several national champions at Pacific Lutheran. Both men went by their first names and not coach; both men believed in making their players better men. Gagliardi famously would hold up a dime to the sun and tell his players that the dime was football and the sun was life. To read about these two men will give you faith in humanity.“I remember learning about Gagliardi the first
time back in the ‘90s, when he was the subject of a College GameDay human
interest story, one of those segments where ESPN would send Steve Cyphers—who
was Tom Rinaldi before Tom Rinaldi was Tom Rinaldi—out into the field to do a
soft-focus piece of reportage from parcels of the college football landscape
that were usually too small or obscure to get regular notice. St. John’s, which
has an enrollment of under 2,000 students, very much qualified for such
treatment.Gagliardi was already a legend back then, both
for his gaudy record and for the unorthodox manner in which he piled up all
those wins. Gagliardi famously had no playbook. He never used a whistle. He
never recruited. He insisted on being called “John” instead of coach. He banned
tackling from practice (the next time a Gruden or a Harbaugh bitches about
being hamstrung by practice restrictions, point them to Gagliardi’s record). He
held no meetings. Team stretches were strictly a parody of OTHER team’s
stretching routines, with players doing the “Head Shoulders Knees & Toes”
dance instead of barking out calf stretches at one another. Every senior on the
team was named captain. He famously kept a running list of to adhere to, one of which—No Slogans—I
would like printed out and stapled to Mike Lombardi’s fucking head.
Oh, and he never yelled. That’s the thing that
threw me when I first saw that Cyphers report. Cyphers asked Gagliardi about
yelling at players and Gagliardi responded, “No no no, that’s insanity.” When I
was growing up, all of my coaches yelled. It didn’t even occur to me that they
might NOT yell. Yelling was coaching, as far as I was concerned.
And yet here was one of the most decorated men in the sport, laughing at
its uselessness. Calling it outright crazy. It
took me a very long time to understand just how right he was about that.”
https://deadspin.com/john-gagliardi-was-the-only-good-coach-1829662008
That there are (or were) coaches like these two, like the fictional Ted Lasso, is a great inspiration.“Westering does not recruit. He has no training rules. He
never punishes or insults a player, and he has yet to kick anybody off his
team. There are full-contact drills only twice before the season starts, and
the exercises are friendly. Westering’s practices include Popsicle breaks,
interludes for watching the sunset and cheers for the snowy flanks of Mount
Rainier, which looms large to the east. (“Hey, Mount Rainier! Go, Mount
Rainier! Attaway! Attaway!”) During the last practice before the 1993
championship contest, Lute linemen kicked field goals; quarterbacks ran wide
receivers’ patterns; and linebackers tried to throw deep.
Games are even more unorthodox. The Lutes didn’t even put
on their pads until minutes before the kickoff for the championship. During
timeouts, when the situation permitted, instead of talking strategy, Westering
played paper, rock, scissors with his squad. In huddles his players held hands,
and on the sideline they sat together in a semicircle, like kids around a
campfire. Afterward they gathered for two hours in the locker room, weeping,
hugging and giving each other what they call bouquets. (“I just want to
say, Mike, I love you so much. You played a great game today.”)
If all of this sounds absolutely ridiculous, consider that
the Lutes won the championship game by a score of 50-20.”
https://vault.si.com/vault/1994/10/31/frosty-the-showman-pacific-lutheran-coach-frosty-westering-proves-you-can-have-fun-and-win
I’d like to write out an extremely unsatisfying take, which will fail because it doesn’t cite enough, does not refer back to the text enough (like you would in high-octane academic criticism), but I think that’s exactly the point of the show’s philosophy or morality— that eventually a single code, morality, or philosophy collapses because it cannot stand on its own and it needs both. Both is two true things existing at the same time (Ted abandoned Nate/Nate being cruel and not-objective about his own flaws). All this just means that the show is trying to create characters who are really human. It’s the way we work— we’ll say or think a thing and then do another. We’ll say and do two things which contradict one another and one might be true one minute (Jamie telling Keeley he loves her) and then realizing it happened in a particular circumstance (it was a funeral; dead people make him feel weird). Both things about Jamie are still true. This can be particularly annoying for writing and craft in general, because it eliminates the dependence on the math of dramatic narratives (if I were an awful person, I’d start talking about Aristotle here, but I’m only half-awful, so I’ll only half refer to him/dramatic unities which don’t have to be the bible on drama but wind up being true often enough). I think of this math as that which exists on one side of the equation has to equal the other side. That’s what we usually get for narrative, causality as a result of some character trait (she did this because it was in her nature to, the rules established by the writers, which lead us to predict and understand who might do what in a story), but I’m making an argument for Ted Lasso’s writers breaking open that paradigm and making human causality more expansive. This can lead to extreme messiness! Nate or Ted or any of the other characters could be just as capable of Action A as they would be of Action B, so I’d guess the writers have to rein this in as much as they can, but in a soft sort of way. Make it messy and allow for contradiction, but too much messiness and chaos will lose an audience as it did for some here. And I’d agree with the idea that the tight plotting was so, so satisfying for the first season, along with extremely clear material and emotional goals— the sports narrative lends itself well to this, what does the team have to do? Win. Goal set. At the same time, I can appreciate extremely tight plotting for Act 1 and then accept the shagginess of Act 2, because I think what these writers are doing is really truthful, and really exciting. It’s also really difficult to suss out, because we’ve been trained to read for direct causality everywhere.If I can pull any examples which show this disruption of causality, I’ll try this— Higgins’s initial inability to help Keeley with her problems, until he lands on something which might help. This isn’t done just for the comic effect of Higgins being incorrect, but it’s like every situation where you try to help a friend, and you come at it from your perspective of fixing, which might totally miss the motivation of someone who is not you. Rebecca admitting to Ted, about her affair with Sam. Ted gives her Option A for advice, then the opposite Option B, until settling on her needing it to figure it out on her own, trusting her gut. That Sam’s decision, which we do not have insight into because it’s private, ultimately has more to do with his personal journey (which is mysterious, maybe even mystical and secret, more than Option A (Edwin, let’s say) or Option B (Rebecca, maybe, just to show two publicly visible/understandable options). What a fake out that is (and how maddening for some, if you want answers)! Maybe we’ll find out in Season 3, but what I got is that Sam is choosing neither Edwin nor Rebecca, and we may never know what his personal journey is, apart from the nod to the Obisanya jersey he sees a kid wearing in the park. A writing teacher of mine once said that fiction allows a writer to create “a moral universe.” Saccharine or not, we got a moral universe with Season 1, either for the people who dug the morality of the writing math or for the people who dug the morality of morality. Season 2 is a tearing down, that morality just can’t always hold because people contain multitudes and might do any number of things. But that’s okay— therapy and philosophy, religion would tell us that acceptance, maybe accepting this chaos is a large part of feeling all right with the world. Have clearly gotten on and am now getting off a high horse. If anyone is hiring for a class on the philosophy and non-philosophy of Ted Lasso, I’m available. And Myles, all of the writing you’ve done on this shows that you care. Like Ted would say, I appreciate you.
I always appreciate any insights that remind us that humans are complex and contradictory and contain multitudes.
First off, Myles, I appreciate the interrogation of this show. I don’t need all my opinions ratified, only something to reflect on. I am still confused why Roy and Keely cannot be together? Positing a famous athlete and up and coming PR exec as people from different worlds is odd. Those lifestyles could not be more compatible. One big thing missing from season 1: I miss Ted playing soccer each day with that young woman. I truly expected her to somehow end up on the team or in some other way contribute to Ted’s journey. Instead it seems she was just a fun detail? The thing I missed most from S1 was the lack of group scenes — the office, the pitch, game day. Like Gilmore Girls’ festivals or Parks & Rec’s parties, these scenarios are the lifeblood of great character interactions AND plot advancement. Really missed that this year with everyone spun off in their solo directions. Finally, what a criminal underuse of Sam Richardson. Gonna go rewatch Detroiters and Champaign IL.
Agree largely with the review.I feel like the warning signs were already there at the end of season 1 – Ted letting Rebecca off the hook without any follow-up or consequence to her actions felt like it side skirted a big plot point, and I was peevish about starting and watching the 2nd season (though still glad I did – the show still delivers on entertainment value and laughs even with all its faults).Mostly, I feel this is a show that wants to deliver a wholesome viewing experience but is too enthusiastic about doing so for its own good. Regularly I feel the show likes to pat itself on the back for showing how nice and redeemable the whole cast of characters is and that everyone is one big family that sees eye-to-eye (except for the ones that don’t which are villainized). Like Ted Lasso the show lives in this kind of fairy world where everything needs to work out for the majority of the cast and I feel in that it sacrifices genuine conflict and true stakes to do so and in the end nothing really manages to truly land.I still think the show is fun – and I do feel it delivers on the laughs. But the lack of any real consistency and willingness to invest deeper kind of negates the message the whole show is trying to say about being positive and loving and accepting and understanding of each other. It comes of more as naïve and (ironically) short-sighted in a way instead of a reflection on wholesome values which I think the show is going for. For instance – even though seeing Roy and Jamie Tartt hug was nice I wonder if it wouldn’t do the show a favor by just letting these guys be at the very least indifferent to each other given that everything we know about these characters is that they hate each other. But instead, watching every character literally embrace each other and be friends lessens the impact of these relations considerably, and I feel like this goes for many situations and scenes and characters across the series.Having said that, still love seeing most of the cast and chars and the way they interact and so I’ll probably tune in for the 3rd season – expecting considerably less in terms of overarching plot development. Makes me think this show could’ve been truly awesome if it was just scrutinized a bit more during the writing stage. But I’ll take it as it is for the most part. Fair review ratings though, agree largely with them (most of the time).
I feel like the warning signs were already there at the end of season 1 – Ted letting Rebecca off the hook without any follow-up or consequence to her actions felt like it side skirted a big plot pointI actually liked that moment quite a bit, and I’ll explain why. One of my friends who occasionally writes criticism has written (about another show) that “sometimes the power of drama is not that it reveals something new but that it confirms something old.” Ted, first and foremost, is someone who’s committed to being kind and empathetic, to understanding others and doing what he can to bring the best out of them. This moment with Rebecca is that conviction and philosophy being put to its hardest test yet, the highest stakes it’s been tested at yet, and Ted never wavers, because that is the core of who he is. His commitment to those values is so strong and essential to him that even Rebecca’s betrayal, and how much it may have hurt him personally and hurt the work he’s trying to do, doesn’t shake him into abandoning those principles.It would be very human to be angry and lash out, and I don’t think anyone would blame Ted for being angry. But Ted always tries a little harder to be better than that, to be kind and understanding, to help other people through their pain without taking it personally. And it’s because that’s so ingrained in him, because he’s strong in those convictions, he’s able to be understanding and forgiving here.
Trent Crimm (The Independent). Never let this go.
I really appreciate what you wrote. I realize that all the negativity from people who like this show can be a lot to deal with. I think the first season is amazing, and when I started the second I was worried it wouldn’t be as good, I desperately wanted it to be good, but there was something that felt hollow, and so I appreciate you explaining why somethings worked and others didn’t and that’s really hard to deal with sometimes cause it’s a show you love and you want it to be at its best. Thank you for writing these reviews and and for what you wrote at the end of the stray observations. That’s why I read reviews sometimes, to have a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn’t. See you for season 3.
In general these new serial productions seem hell bent on destroying the narrative value behind Chekov’s Gun. In an effort to drag stories and increasingly incoherent plots out to ten or more weeks of television, writers have abandoned and abused this important principle. Now we are routinely seeing red herrings and dropped plot points, and in the case of murder mysteries – absolutely inane finales. In the case of Ted Lasso’s second season, it has been rife with underdeveloped plot lines or “Chekovian” nuggets amounting to nothing. Too many things have happened off screen, or happened as a culmination of feelings or events that went unexplored on the show, while we were treated to inanities like Coach Beard’s Fantastic Journey, or IMO, the Cousin Oliver episode with the goddaughter, or the mishandling of their efforts to get promoted back to Premier. It ends up destroying your investment in the story arcs and narrative. Maybe you end up liking it just because you like the cast or you’re happy to just stare at something benign and escapist, but I can get benign and escapist by staring at YouTube videos. I expect writers at this level to be better than what Season 2 delivered, and they have the cast to make it happen.
Myles, thanks for the thoughtful critiques and the interaction with us posters. A housekeeping question for you; are they ever going to fix the commentary section so we can track responses to our posts? Thanks.