Ted Lasso‘s biggest failure? Sidelining Keeley Jones
In season three, the Apple TV Plus series seems to have forgotten what made Juno Temple’s character so remarkable
TV Features Keeley Jones
Can the real Keeley Jones please stand up? Several times during Ted Lasso’s third season, I’ve wondered if Juno Temple’s Keeley needs to blink twice for help. Because who the hell is the bumbling version we witness this time around? Over 11 episodes—pending the season (or series?) finale on May 30, but can one more mere outing undo the damage?—Ted Lasso has relinquished almost everything it built for her in favor of a character who now barely resembles the Keeley we know and love. And it’s a damn shame.
It’s not like her bumpy journey is the only disservice of a lengthy season three. Each uneven, self-indulgent episode (several crossing the hourlong mark) has struggled with other characters. A drawn-out redemption arc for Nate (Nick Mohammed) now feels rushed as the season closes. An early emphasis on Rebecca’s (Hannah Waddingham) desire for a family has petered out. Regulars like Higgins (Jeremy Swift) and Dr. Sharon (Sarah Niles) went to the back burner—the latter hasn’t made a single appearance after the premiere—to make way for newcomers like Zava (Maximilian Osinski) and Shandy (Ambreen Razia), who barely made a dent in the show’s legacy. Ted himself doesn’t feel like the central focus, possibly to make way for Sudeikis’ exit.
So, yes, it’s safe to say Ted Lasso is all over the place, but its failure toward Keeley hits hardest. It’s because of how she subverted expectations over the first two seasons. She was introduced as a seemingly ditzy fashion model dating a football superstar. A cliché of the highest order, right? That’s why it was remarkable when the show expertly laid its cards for her on the table as it went on. Keeley revealed herself as ambitious and winsome. She helps U.K. newcomer Ted (Jason Sudeikis) settle in, stands up to her then-douchebag boyfriend Jamie (Phil Dunster), starts dating Roy (Brett Goldstein) and attempts to break down his walls (her interactions with Phoebe are priceless), confronts Rebecca about the paparazzi, becoming her best friend in the process, and launches her PR career because she has a real knack for it.
Missed opportunities and disappointing arcs
Keeley exudes natural affability, talent, and charm, partly because Temple plays her with the perfect balance of sensitivity and whimsy, with fanciful outfits to match her personality. While those qualities remained on the surface as she faced heartbreak and other losses, Ted Lasso couldn’t shape Keeley’s trajectories into a cohesive, sensible arc. Despite promising beginnings, the show glossed over potential personal or professional development. The season three premiere established that Keeley is now running KJPR, complete with her own office and staff. Great, perhaps it’s an opportunity for her to learn from fellow “girl boss” Rebecca about being a mentor, especially once she brings messy old friend Shandy aboard. That arc fizzled out in a few outings, much like Zava’s unhelpful time at Richmond.
Keeley learned how to be a leader and fire someone. But what then? She rarely interacts with employees except for Barbara (Stath Lets Flats’ Katy Wix) or does actual work. Who are KJPR’s clients? We knew more about Keeley’s skills when she worked partly with the football club, creating brand partnerships for the players or promoting the dating app Bantr. It’s a disservice to her that her work life capsized into a fledgling story about a sudden romance with the woman who invested in her business. Speaking of: Keeley’s relationship with Roy might’ve randomly ended, but by episode four, sparks fly between her and wealthy venture capitalist Jack, played by For All Mankind’s Jodi Balfour.
It’s an exciting opportunity for Ted Lasso to explore Keeley’s bisexuality. Instead, she turns unrecognizably scatterbrained (unsure how to turn the blinds on or off while making out with Jack in the office). Her responses to Jack can appear as early stage nerves, but Ted Lasso continues to let Keeley flail around instead of using this plotline for growth. Most of their romantic development happens off-screen, like Jack whisking Keeley away in “Sunflowers,” taking her out of a super-crammed episode. We don’t get to see their romantic build-up; all we get is Ted Lasso dealing with an eyebrow-raising “love bomb” storyline, Keeley’s nude photos leaking (with Jack and Roy’s terrible reactions), followed by a convenient breakup. It’s hard to care about her relationship with Jack starting or ending because we don’t see most of it.
Ted Lasso season three’s strangest crime is to confusingly leaving crucial updates off-screen, like Nate quitting West Ham, the Richmond players voting to bring him back, Roy and Keeley hooking up after he gives her a letter, Ted’s therapy sessions, and whatever went down with Rebecca and the man she met in Amsterdam. Who knows if we’ll even see Ted tell Rebecca he’s leaving London, as teased by the ending of episode 11, “Mom City.”
How Keeley was reduced to a prop
By the end of this hour, at least Ted Lasso hints at a proper Roy and Keeley reunion as they settle into a respectively comfortable friendship with Jamie (a stark contrast to when the show began). While Jamie’s consistently terrific arc in season three stands out, Keeley feels like a prop in “Mom City.” She bolsters Jamie and Roy’s dynamic here, but we learn nothing about how she feels about getting back together with Roy. He brings it up to her, but Jamie interrupts them before she can say anything, so TL will probably save this development for behind the camera as well, huh?
If you squint hard enough, you can see Ted Lasso striving to comment on Keeley’s abandonment issues through her love life. Roy and Jack leave her during life-altering moments, like starting a major job and facing public humiliation. But the overlong, overwrought, displaced storylines throughout season three means Ted Lasso couldn’t focus on saying anything insightful about this subject. There wasn’t even enough Keeley and Rebecca to make up for it because, much like Nate, she was sequestered on her own.
All this left Temple with surprisingly weak material to work with. She persevered and her performance lifts the storylines; she remains enjoyable and a ray of sunshine even as Keeley is heart-bent (not heartbroken). Temple’s Keeley might’ve saved the show, but Ted Lasso completely failed her this time around.
52 Comments
Eh, sidelining her was the right call. The plan was more or less that it was going to be a short series and her story is done. The only thing that her and Roy’s storylines did this season was to show that Jamie’s ending the series as a better person than he started. And most of that was wasted time that could have been spent on other characters. It’s kind of like they know where all the characters end up, but they didn’t put too much thought into making how they got there interesting.
And Keely had an interesting storyline, imo.Her character found something she was good at and was thrown into a bigger position without her friends to support her. And as it’s failing she throws herself into a a relationship that further takes her away from what she’s good at it. Instead of giving up, she goes back to her friends, scales down her portfolio, and puts herself in a position to succeed.
She bolsters Jamie and Roy’s dynamic here, but we learn nothing about how she feels about getting back together with Roy.She’s trying to figure out how to finagle a throuple out of it, duh.But yes, generally everything with Keeley this season has been a misfire, which is sad.
“Ted Lasso’s biggest failure? Sidelining Keeley Jones”They didn’t sideline her in any way, shape or form, they gave her her own storylines.
The fact that you don’t like her storyline doesn’t change anything.
I don’t know. I think Keeley’s storyline has been fine this season. She’s been at sea the whole time because Roy dumped her out of the blue and her company isn’t exactly what she pictured for herself. But there’s nothing wrong with that.She jumped into the relationship with Jack even though she knew it was the wrong thing for her. (She even said as much right before she and Jack kissed the first time.) It was a bad, messy rebound. Who hasn’t been there? And her company not only survived its funding being cut, but it’s now a more streamlined operation that includes someone Keeley can actually trust. That’s mostly down to Keeley’s own acts of kindness during the course of the season.I’m interested to see what Keeley has to say about her life in the final episode because so much for her is still unresolved. Not to mention that her story arc is probably the closest mirror to Ted’s on the show: getting dumped by someone she’s still in love with, starting a new job that’s an uncomfortable fit, learning the ropes, possibly reconciling. I don’t think the show will let those parallels just sit there at the very end.
Well Jack turned out to be a total manipulative, dishonest asshole. Jamie is terrific now but I am somewhat creeped out by him having a poster of Keeley on his childhood bedroom wall. It almost feels like Keeley & Roy will end up together by default & I like them together but think I want better for them than that. Maybe Keeley should choose herself
I presume Keeley and Jamie are close to the same age, and she looked like an adult in the poster so that may have been a later addition to the room.
Although Juno Temple is only two years older than Phil Dunster in real life (33 to 31), on the show I think his character Jamie is supposed to be younger than that
I think Keeley is about six years older than Jamie. (See my other comment.)
15 year old Jamie/21 year old Keeley tracks pretty well, haha.
Keeley is definitely older. In season 1 Keeley tells Rebecca “When I was 18 I dated a 23-year-old footballer. Now I’m… almost 30, and I’m still dating a 23-year-old footballer.”
It seems like Roy was winding up to ask her for a commitment, and she was going to let him down gently. Could be wrong, though.
I have to say, as soon as they brought in Jack as a romantic interest, I went “ick!”If Jack was a man, it would’ve been an obvious case of power-sex imbalance, but I feel they ignored the impropriety of Keeley getting involved with her boss.She knew better, yet she did it anyway. It was always going to end badly and I lost a little bit of respect for the writers for portraying her character as so shallow/needy that she broached the ethical barrier.As for her and Roy, I was hoping for more sparks between Roy and the teacher. They seemed more “compatible”. The Roy-Keeley relationship seems too easy and contrived, as does a Jamie-Keeley redux.
It undermines how much I care about Keeley’s romantic relationships a bit that Juno Temple’s chemistry with Hannah Waddingham is so electric. Holy smokeshows
As the show gets longer and duller, their scenes together remain a bright spot.
It’s hard to imagine Hannah Waddingham not having chemistry with anyone.
Ted Lasso season three’s strangest crime is to confusingly leaving crucial updates off-screen…
None of these things were confusing. You and everyone else watching understood what had happened. In most of these instances, showing the actual thing happening would have been far less interesting than showing the results (or aftermath, or consequences, etc.).
this!!!
Agreed. None of what happened off screen was all that interesting. The only disappointment I have was less Keeley/Rebecca awesomeness than previous seasons, because they make incredible friends.
Depends how the scenes were written.
It’s almost funny that even with the longer episodes they decided to make certain scenes longer or more dramatic/emotional, and not even try to make the stuff off-screen an interesting or funny scene in its own right.
Like, they gave themselves more time per episode for their comedy/feel-good show, and then chose not to have as many laughs per minute and less feel-good moments.
Yeah the people complaining about it are just looking for something to complain about.
Whether Nate quit or got fired was unclear. It wouldn’t have taken up much time to make it clear.
This particular interaction, I have a feeling we might see. It’s all tied up with Rupert and the ‘inappropriate conduct’ rumors that Trent said were swirling around. Plus, Bex showing up with his former assistant makes me think that somewhere in there we’ll learn a lot more happened than Nate quitting (or being fired, could still pan out either way).
It wasn’t confusing but Nate quitting in particular was abrupt and made me think I had missed an episode at first. I really don’t think they have handled his redemption story well.
Incorrect. The writer is correct that huge developments happen off-screen. The entire team, for example, forgives Nate and sends an envoy of three people who bullied, and then WERE bullied, by Nate to Taste of Athens to tell him they had a discussion and want him back now.Really?That seems like a rather huge decision to make for a team on a 15-game win streak and going into the finals against Nate’s club that he just recently quit (also happened offscreen). Keely’s “relationship” with Jack progressing more offscreen in “Sunflowers” was also brought up.For me, I wish the show would formally address and condemn the weird fixation it has with fucking your boss.
I disagree. I would’ve been much more interested to see things like Rebecca’s reaction to the news that Ted is leaving, Nate quitting his West Ham job and the team debating whether to bring Nate back than a lot of the things that did make it to the screen. It’s hard to emotionally engage with these things happening when we didn’t actually see them happen. Imagine if in season one we didn’t actually see Rebecca tell Ted that she’d been scheming to destroy him, and we just heard at the top of the next episode, “Oh, I took care of it. He’s fine with it.” We would’ve been robbed of one of the most beautiful moments in the entire series.
Wait, Ted is leaving?!!?!
Nate’s redemption arc was almost entirely off screen. It would have been far more interesting to show the actual thing.
Every minute Nate has been onscreen has been part of his redemption arc. I’m not sure what you were expecting to see.
Nate quitting on screen instead of a news report telling us it happened off screen for one example.
The whole Keeley storyline is a complete miss this season. Season three episode 12 should have ended with Keeley walking into the newly founded KJPR. Would have facilitated much interaction with her and Rebecca and not wasted a bunch of time on this new random half-cast we don’t care about it. I’m just shocked at how much they have screwed up the plotting this season.
Yeah, I understand what they are getting at with trying to have Keely mirror what’s happened to Ted. But that would have been perfectly fine to save for the inevitable spin-off series. There were more for Keely to do within the confines of the club / inner circle. If the rumours of reduced Juno Temple availability for season 3 are true, this may have very well been an unfortunate, but needed retooling of the plot events.
I never understood why she and Roy took at break at the end of season 2, aside from the writers lazily trying to force conflict into a relationship that was one of the best parts of that season. They both just, “got busy” and didn’t go away on holiday.
There are also a million ways that couple can have conflict without breaking up. I just have no idea what happened to the writers room in Season 3.
Regulars like Higgins (Jeremy Swift) and Dr. Sharon (Sarah Niles) went to the back burnerUh…That’s where they should be. We like these characters, they are great, but when did it become a thing that we need to see what every-damn-body is up to all the time? If Ted Lasso made a mistake, it was trying to turn itself into an ensemble series. Keeley is very lovable, but expanding her role has been one of the ways the show lost focus. We were following a whole business venture completely tangential to what’s happening in the club.
I’m OK with Higgins remaining a secondary character, and I would have been OK with that for Dr. Sharon, too. But I think it was a mistake to cut her entirely from season 3. The show has missed that character as a surrogate for the audience and as a way for other characters to explore their motivations. Keeping Dr. Sharon around as a secondary character would have helped move along a ton of development in season 3, in my opinion.
Also there were at least two storyline beats that probably should have some input from Sharon.
Ted finding out that Michelle was dating her therapist and Colin’s concern about Isaac’s reaction to finding out he was gay (or Isaac going to Dr Sharon for advice).
And maybe Jamie’s out-of-the-blue freakout in last week’s episode. It was a bit jarring to see him in mental crisis out of nowhere. Maybe if we’d seen him working with Dr. Sharon on some of this stuff before this one episode, it would have seemed a bit more natural.In the end, Jamie’s crisis seemed, like so many other one-episode “arcs” this season, manufactured to move the plot forward. It came up so quickly that it didn’t feel organic. Dr. Sharon would have helped with that because she would have made visible several areas of character development that the writers have left to the audience to draw assumptions about.
So… a rumor that I heard — which is probably worth what most rumors are, I suppose — is that Juno Temple did not have as much availability for filming as she did in previous seasons, because she was making something else. So if Keeley feels isolated from the main cast and trapped in her own little world of small stories that don’t tell us anything new, that could well be why.Keeley has long been one of my favorite characters, and in fact I would argue that Ted’s whole coaching project fails if she is what she appeared to be at first glance — a shallow, self-centered celebrity clout-chaser. Having her turn out to actually be a big-hearted ray of sunshine who zeroes in on what the people in her orbit need and helps them get it is one of the critical developments that makes the show work as an argument for openness and empathy. Sadly, there was much less of that this season, squandered as her screen time was on two characters (Shandy and Jack) who were seemingly created solely to be kicked to the curb, but she did get Barbara to open up a bit and I loved that relationship.Do I want more Keeley-and-Rebecca time? For sure. Do I think hour-long episodes of Ted Lasso have broken the show? No, I don’t. Is this show as tightly-plotted and likely to deliver a perfectly fantastic crescendo of a finale as, say, The Good Place? I doubt it. But as somebody who enjoys Bill Lawrence and his “hangout” shows of sweet, goofy oddballs being sweet and goofy and eventually getting the things they want out of life, I predict I will enjoy it and may even tear up a time or two. Nothing wrong with that!
Yeah, I was thinking of writing a comment, but most of that second paragraph says what I was going to say. I just feel like they left that complexity or even competence behind this season— most of the time it seems like Keeley is either unaware of what she should be doing at her job, or they’re not even trying to show her doing her job.
I’m guessing Lawrence will get quite a bit more say once Sudeikis goes home…and the show will improve dramatically.
Also, re: that rumor, I checked her upcoming projects on IMDB and the one that’s past the pre-production stage is Fargo season 5. That definitely would’ve taken a significant amount of her time to film, since she’s listed as credited for all ten episodes, but I also don’t know how far along they are in the production anyway.
I started hooting like an idiot when I read the headline, because I so fully agreed with it. It’s a combination of two things: One, separating Keeley from so much of the rest of the cast and the main story just hurts the story and chemistry overall. For two, the character had so much more depth in season 1— as Ajax said, seemingly “a shallow, self-centered celebrity clout-chaser” but really much smarter and savvier than that; big-hearted, kind, and fearlessly honest; in the process of figuring out what she wants out of life other than “dating 23-year-old footballers,” and, also, actually good at PR. This season she’s often not even seemed to know how her own business works, and all her stories seem to be self-contained in ways that don’t tie into the main plot and don’t explore the story opportunities that could actually lead to some kind of growth or change. (Keeley hires Shandy but then doesn’t try to mentor or guide her, for example. And I don’t really know what the point of introducing the relationship with Jack is. And they’re both opportunities for Rebecca to give her good advice, but she doesn’t give any advice on mentoring in the former and in the latter she’s seemingly unconcerned with the power imbalance in such a relationship or that it could jeopardize Keeley’s business.)
I read this article and my thought was, “Oh, looks like the writers have been reading Capt. Tragedy and my conversations in the comments about all the problems with Keeley this season.” I feel like we should get ghostwriting credits.
Her character was interesting, if one note, in S1.
Keely was always superfluous, though, and was defined by her relationship(s) with other characters. It’s not surprising that there’s not room in the show for her when she’s really not a part of the world of any of the characters.This website has accused the Keely scenes of feeling like a “Ted Lasso spinoff” and I agree. She really isn’t an organic part of the show, so it’s weird that so much screentime is devoted to her, no matter how much fun Temple is in the role.Most of the material around her relationships this season with both Roy and Jack has been seriously weak. But even if it was better, it would still feel like it doesn’t quite belong.
Are we watching the same show? They’ve spent inordinate amounts of time on Keeley’s agency and then her relationship with her boss that went absolutely nowhere (and was nothing to do with any storyline in the show, apart from a vague “personal growth” type narrative that never really hit). In the end she had a very rich friend just buy the agency and put her back in charge. What did anyone learn by the end of this? “Have very rich friends”?
Did you see her professional sneaking to follow Jamie? She’s been training to be a private detective!
Keeley is my least favorite part of this season, and I’ve overall hated this season. I would’ve rather she just not be on the show then what we got, which really dragged the whole season down.
But wasn’t Keeley Jones always on the sideline? She isn’t and never has been any focal point in this story. And when the story did actually do something with her they turned her into a Bisexual Tourist and an Incompetent Manager of a business she was actually good at until they needed her to be the volley ball in a dick measuring contest again. The character has never been more than a prop.
Season 3 actually opens us up for a Keeley spinoff. I’d watch it!
I had zero problem with where Keely landed in the bigger picture, and think that most of the things asserted in this article…didn’t happen? Best example how Rebecca *found* her family in the end, which isn’t Keely centric.There is a lot of kicking-ass by Keely that happened off screen, and a desire to have seen that is valid, but that doesn’t make not showing it an error. She was so belovedly human struggling in her relationship with Jack that I don’t think there is a yellow card here, let alone red.