Ted Lasso is over: long live Ted Lasso?

It’s a sure sign a movie, book, or series is good, when you find yourself saddened when it ends, because there won’t be more of it to look forward to. First time it happened to me was with J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. I might have been 10, I guess. “Well, I’m back”, said Sam Gamgee. 10 year old me was a pool of tears. The only consolation was that I could, after a little break, read it all again. And there was also the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales …

Well, the last episode of Ted Lasso series 3 ‘dropped’ last night, as the cool set say. Inevitably, it wasn’t the best of the lot, not by a distance. At times, the show’s telltale good-heartedness spilled over for mine into twee, but I never liked Sound of Music either.

It looks like this is a definitive end, and you almost have to hope there won’t be a series four. Characteristically, there was even some reflection on whether this was really it, encoded into the script of the finale. Can anything be perfect?, the characters philosophise. Or is it better to accept imperfection, and work with it?

All good things, anyway, come to the end, as far as we humans know. It’s unlikely there’ll be a Silmarillion for Ted Lasso’s Richmond FC.

The big question of Ted Lasso is how on earth this odd-ball (pun noted), quirky show about an American grid iron coach making it in the English Premier League with a second rank Soccer team could ever become so stratospherically internationally successful?

We only got into it recently, this year, in fact. I’ve never been much for sporting dramas. Either sport itself is drama, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, why watch? If it is, why watch a show about it? And how can nonprofessionals be presented as playing like the pros? — it never convinces.

Thankfully, there are just a small number of would-be ‘live’ takes from Richmond FC’s actual soccer games. Some of it is pretty good. In fact, the show is far less about football, than the lives of the small circle of the series’ major characters: the boss, Rebecca (and her sleazy ex-husband Rupert), Coach Ted (and his broken family), his buddy “Beard” (with eccentric partner Jane), Leslie Higgins (FC admin), the ebullient Keeley Jones on marketing, no-nonsense ‘man’s man’ Roy Kent (a former Chelsea legend), lovable team players Sam Obosanya and Danny Rojas, swarve journo Trent Crimm, and the team’s troubled star(let) Jamie Tartt.

The football really is a backdrop and prompt, as the show documents the relationships between these figures, and the divergent story arcs each of them travels, as the show unfolds.

The script writers have almost certainly taken a major in psychology, with heavy doses of Acceptance Commitment Therapy.

The men are mostly avoidant, the women are over-fused (spoiler alert). Jamie’s womanising (and his perfect hair) is a front for a father-sized chip on his shoulder; Roy Kent’s brusk bravado hides a pattern of running away when things get hard; Keeley’s been overdependent on others’ validation; and Rebecca needs to grieve, and rediscover what really matters, before she lets her anger ruin her whole life. And so on.

As Ted says early on at a present conference, for him the coaching game is not about wins and losses, so much as helping the members of his team develop as human beings. And with that Stoic-sounding idea, there’s your show.

It’s Rebecca Welton who’s bought Coaches Ted and Beard to Richmond. It was her means of getting revenge on her cheating ex-husband, who’s always loved the club. At the start of the show, she presents as just about as imposing as she is statuesque, a bit bitter and rather heartless. The plan is for Richmond to fail so badly that the whole operation goes under.

It’s only Ted’s unflappable generosity and good humor, coupled with home-baked biscuits daily (then Keeley, then Sam, then a third man), that brings her around, or back to herself. (The next to final scene of Series 3 out front of the airport, where we leave her, is memorable).

Coach Lasso himself at the start of the show seems way too good to be true. Of course, no grid iron coach would ever get hired on a revenge trip by a Premier League boss these days, let alone giving press conferences announcing his indifference to his team’s results.

What Ted has in spades is people skills. At times, he comes off almost like a grinning sage — Socrates meets Ned Flanders — as he faces down Richmond fans chanting “Wanker” on game days, deals with players who rightly think he knows nothing about football, a boss who is initially out to sabotage anything good he does, and the usual range of egos in a professional soccer team.

Ted doesn’t seem to know any adversity that he won’t meet with a goofy grin, an offbeat story from ‘back home’, or a sage one-liner. He uses humor, compulsively — and as it turns out, and as a means of deflection, to keep folk (and his own darker side) at a safe distance. He looks down upon no one, although he’s capable of looking up to others — like the great Pep Guardiola, when Richmond meet Man City in Series 3. (Fair play to him there, some would say). Above all, Ted seems to know how to forgive everyone but his own mother, or the psychological profession itself (in fairness, he has good reason).

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once commented that a tragic hero is someone who can be betrayed with impunity, and will persist anyway. In that light, Ted would be a comical tragedian, or tragical comedian.

And, well, Ted’s got some good lines over the journey. He’s a big fan of Walt Whitmans’ ‘be curious, not judgmental’. Montaigne would agree. This next line gets nicely repackaged, at start and end of the show, to put a bookend on Ted’s evolution:

You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? It’s a goldfish. You know why? It’s got a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish …

I also like:

Boy, I love meeting people’s moms. It’s like reading an instruction manual as to why they’re nuts.

Ted is using the Tao of projection here. And everyone’s mum is different, as are their dads.

Arguably the best character, though — people are going to differ, and each has their moments— is Ted’s unlikely Judas, Nathan Shelley, or, as he’s quickly dubbed by Ted and Beard: “Nate the Great”.

Nate starts off packing the gear at Richmond FC. Like everyone else, he can’t see why a goofy grid iron guy is now running the show at his football club. Nate’s a shorter man, of Indian background, doing auxilliary work. But Ted straight away sees past all that; for him, unlike nearly everybody else, such superficial stuff makes no difference.

What Ted sees is that Nate has a mind for the game — indeed, as we eventually discover, he has a mind for nearly anything he puts it to. He’s soon promoted by Ted to the coaching team, where he starts master-minding daring plays by the end of Series One.

Yet, like us all, Nate’s not perfect. When Roy Kent — in a fantastic episode playing on ‘romcom’ themes — returns to coach Richmond FC in Series 2, Nate sees red: or rather, green (he gets jealous, and feels inadequate). As a result of feeling sidelined, he shamefully betrays Ted, ripping up the talismanic “Believe” sign the coach had placed above the locker room door on his way out of the club, presumably forever.

Of course, Rebecca’s ex-husband, the arch-villain Rupert Mannion has by this stage bought Westham United, and is ready to take Nate on as Head Coach there. From Ted’s 2-i-c, friend and brilliant assistant, the Apprentice goes over to the dark side; taking joy in undermining the man to whom he owed his very career in the coaching game.

When Rupert sees Nate has made a real connection with the beautiful Jade, however, he does what toxic narcissists-sociopaths sometimes do. He sets out to ruin the “wonderkid”, as Nate has come to be known — just for the thrill of preventing him achieving the kind of happiness this glamorous millionaire is unable to find with anyone but himself. (As Jade says, when she meets him: “Well, he seemed very rich”).

Anyway, Nate has the courage and decency, when the triangulation is effected, not to betray Jade, but to leave Westham United. It is the beginning of his turn around. The broken Premier League coach resigns without notice, and moves back into his parent’s house — there to confront his own demons, and reconnect with his dad after decades. Soon enough, with Jade’s assistance, Nate returns to Richmond FC.

Of course, Ted then does what Ted does, and forgives him unconditionally. In the final montage, Nate’s at Roy Kent’s and Beard’s side, as Richmond begins its next chapter, having finished 2nd in the Premiership. Again: spoiler alert.

What is there to say about all this, and about what the show’s gigantic popularity says today?

In an age where Hollywood has widely regressed to infantile exercises in burning money on blowing things up, with cardboard cut-out muscle men and glamor dolls, Ted Lasso is definitely different. How could this sometimes weird little show, which is actually about adult people facing difficult and sometimes quite dark adult sh*t, become so successful?

If the show has a message, it is that people are the most important things, and the relationships they form with each other. Then there is the value of community, forged in the face of shared joys and adversities. Then, as I’ve said, there is the work of individuals facing up to our own demons, so they don’t visit them upon their partners, colleagues, neighbors, … or neighboring countries, come to think of it.

Ted Lasso, if it teaches anything, would teach that the pursuit of money, of physical beauty, of hierarchical rank, of being the Grand Puba at all costs —and the devil take the hindmost — that is, the predominant values we’re all surrounded by — are shallow, illusory, unsatisfying pursuits which won’t go the distance in anyone’s lives.

If Ted starts by being called “Wanker” by the Richmond FC fans, in the end, it is Rupert Mannion, more rightly, who has earned that chant as he departs the scene.

This is a man whose entire life course has been a single, live-action attempt to show anyone who’ll pay attention, and himself, that he’s an irresistably successful, seductive, well-dressed and well-connected Superman. He’s left in his wake a trail of jilted women, broken football clubs, and as we leave things, an upcoming law suit for inappropriate sexual relations with a female secretary.

One of the other, larger than life characters —again, brilliantly performed — is Edwin Akufu. He’s the drop-in billionaire tyrant-boy from Ghana who comes to tempts Sam Obisanya to leave Richmond in pursuit of coin, and then to try to recruit Richmond FC into a kind of soulless global superleague— the Soccer equivalent of Liv golf.

When Sam chooses his friends over cash, or when Rebecca manages to convince a room full of elderly British football bosses that soccer is about more than becoming filthy rich, Edwin’s tantrums are epic. Like Rupert, this character who on most estimations today would be considered superlatively successful, is made to look like a fool.

Come to think of it, there’s not a single character in Ted Lasso who aims at money, fame, glamor, ego, and these kinds of shiny things that does not end up defeated, exposed, or booed off the stage.

The point is that you have to ask — at the end of the day: how realistic is any of this, and how could it relate to most of the show’s viewers actual lives?

Perhaps part of the sadness of Ted Lasso ending is that, with the show done, we all know there’s not a snowflake’s chance in hell that a Premier League Football Club in the next decades will ever come close to approximating the kinds of values and virtues the show celebrates. We know that no boss, like Rebecca, will end by delivering up over 50% of the club’s shares to fans, because, as Ted has said: “it’s their club. We’ve only got it on loan for a while.”

We also know that there’s not a snowflake’s chance that many companies or governments around the world are going take a lead from “Lasso’s Way” (what Trent Crimm proposes to entitle the book he writes, in the show, about Ted’s time at Richmond) — beyond, perhaps, the glossy missive you’ll read from HR, or in the culturally air-brushed marketing campaigns.

Sadly, that gap between reality and the show’s profound, almost folksy decency has already sparked the kinds of world-tired cynicism it is aimed at overturning with laughter.

But I should be fair. Despite its critics, the show isn’t all pie in the sky.

If you look, actually, Ted Lasso shows that to get to where Richmond gets — as a genuine community of people who care for each other , as a material priority, rather than victory, fame, the bottom line, etc.— people have to make hard decisions, with real consequences.

Ted is away from his family from first episode to last, and his marriage doesn’t make it. Many of the players, too, are far from home. Beard has to stop projecting his own rage onto Nate, in order to face the guilt of his own past betrayal of Ted.

Sam has to reject undreamed-of wealth, to keep solidarity with his friends. Rebecca has to convince bosses of major league football teams to reject untold billions to join a soulless superleague.

Jamie has to realise that his father was flawed, and that he can through hard work, and not putting himself first, become more than a superficial f-boy. Even Roy Keen has to work, to overcome the fear of failure his legendary no-nonsense gruffness has covered over for years. And on it goes.

Well, these are not easy things, except to put on a page, or maybe into a script. They are not things that have direct economic value, or which are glamorous. They involve choosing forms of conduct in ways which come with costs, in terms of not choosing other things, which a whole series of forces are always pushing us to prioritise.

As far as those things are concerned, Rupert Mannion’s way — good looking, rich, powerful, deceitful, and fundamentally self-interested — looks far better than Ted’s and Richmond FC’s. Such people can, at least in the short term, achieve many things, and they will do it without the shame that might weigh down on others’ consciences.

So, Ted Lasso is ended. And it’s a bit sad, if you were or you are a fan. Will its legacy live on, per the old phrase “the King is dead, long live the King”? It ought to, but contra an old philosopher, ‘ought’ does not always imply ‘can’.

Richmond FC was first relegated when Ted and Coach Beard arrived, having never so much as watched much football/soccer, from the Premier to the Championship league.

By the end of series 3, the ship has been righted. Now, they are in a league with a near-identical name: the Champions’ League. You only need to finish fourth to get there. Why would you do that?

Money, comes the answer from Roy Kent.