The hit show ultimately relegates its star to the cornfield league.
The hit show ultimately relegates its star to the cornfield league.
A pple tv+’s Ted Lasso has concluded its final episode, and good riddance. What started as an extended riff on an NBC promotional skit became a Covid-era overnight streaming sensation that’s been on directional life support ever since its breakout first season. It’s obvious now that Ted Lasso hated its protagonist — a growing suspicion confirmed just before the credits.
The show’s premise was hilarious even in Times New Roman: A Kansan college-football coach travels to England to helm a soccer club — exploring this new land with his enigmatic assistant, Coach Beard. Hijinks and kinks ensue as the foul-mouthed and libertine Brits grapple with Lasso’s generous American disposition. But Lasso’s presence in the show bearing his name steadily faded as side characters greedily took up screen time.
The man is provided every reason to be a mess: His wife leaves him for their marriage counselor (quasi-Protestant Lasso later has an off-and-on hookup with his boss’s girlboss best friend), alcoholism becomes his evening companion, and he spends two seasons as either a mewling background character or a high-kicking jester. Viewers are treated to a Midwestern man being taken advantage of (hired to lose) while he regresses as a man, father, and professional, and all for nothing.
Despite all of that, the show came within a manicured moustache whisker of a satisfactory finish, only to stumble offside in the final five minutes.
(Spoilers ahead)
The last season of Ted Lasso attempted three things, two of which it did successfully. It tried to make as many story lines and characters gay-themed and gay, respectively, as it could, it sought happy endings for the writers’ pet side characters, and it endeavored to send Coach Lasso home a better man.
The problem with that last bit, as Mark Hemingway pointed out in his May 3 article “Can We All Finally Admit ‘Ted Lasso’ Is a Terrible Show?” is that Lasso’s writers are postmodernists and have no idea what “good” and “bad” are. Hemingway notes that “none of the characters in ‘Ted Lasso’ are necessarily ‘good people.’” He adds: “Perhaps they’re trying to be good people, but they’re not ‘good people’ per se. It’s a pretty crucial difference.”
For example, Rebecca, the owner of the club, engages in a torrid affair with a player, Sam. Similarly, the socialite media manager Keeley has an affair with her boss, Jack (a woman). Because each of these scenarios involve women in positions of authority having sex with their employees, it’s treated as romantic. But the great villain of the series, Rebecca’s ex-husband and former owner of the Richmond club, Rupert, is cast as the odious fat cat who diddles the secretaries. Suffice to say, expecting subjectivists to build a better Ted is wasted wanting.
As the penultimate episode aired, it was time to accept that for its masculine suggestion, Ted Lasso is a female fantasy. Unlike dime novels, however, this fantasy was one of secular power. Everything a progressive woman craves — the patriarchy humiliated, unitarian intersectionalism, and diverse young men willing to please them while assuaging their white guilt — is all there for the taking. The best example of manhood in the show, Higgins, is a bumbling fool in the vein of Jerry from Parks and Recreation. When a woman does wrong in the show, her actions are sympathetic and quickly forgiven — dismissed like they never happened.
But those last five minutes, as Ted Lasso flies home, without Coach Beard, to return to a house that isn’t his and become a cheerleading peewee soccer coach — are just devastating. Everyone stays behind in London. Sure, Lasso has his son again. But Ted is a neutered dope. He’s reduced to a caricature of what he was in the first episode, after giving others all he had for three years. But he’s no Christ figure; he’s just an aw-shucks Kansas boy that had his heart broken and lives in a one-bedroom apartment when he isn’t sharing hokey wisdom with his kid’s soccer squad.
White men can’t jump, and they can’t win either. A tale of our times, this Ted Lasso.