The hit sitcom is a witty ode to empathy. Its second season remains warmhearted—and turns the show’s original thesis on its head.
This week, the richest man in the world took a jaunty tour of space, and then thanked the workers who labor in his warehouses for providing him with the opportunity. This week, the coronavirus has continued to surge in states where vaccine uptake is slow—some people echoing the idea, as one man put it this week, that the medical establishment is attempting to “shove” the vaccines “down your throat.” This week, the Olympic Games that were delayed because of that pandemic will begin in Tokyo—a testament to the miraculous capabilities of the human body that might well double as a super-spreader event. This week, too, a TV show that explores what happens when rugged individualism turns toxic begins streaming its second season. These events should not be so connected. But the coincidence is darkly apt. Ted Lasso began as a fish-out-of-water story about an American football coach brought to the U.K. to lead a British soccer team; it expanded into a nuanced meditation on kindness, masculinity, and responsibility —and on what it means to be a good person. “Fútbol is life,” one of Ted’s players, Dani Rojas, likes to say, and Ted Lasso, over its first season, converted that slogan into its premise. Through a feel-good story about a soccer team, Ted Lasso slyly questions Americans’ abiding mythologies—about talent, about success, about the elemental relationship between the individual interest and the collective good. It is a show with a lot to say about the grim fictions at play when, say, a billionaire, enabled by a culture that treats commercial success as permission, joyrides into space while his workers fear taking bathroom breaks. Sports, as metaphors, bring to mind notions of competition, but in the process, they bring to mind notions of fairness: In any given game or match, everyone is constrained by the same set of rules. Part of the poignance of Ted Lasso is that it recognizes how powerful sports are as microcosms—of the world as it is and as it could be. The show’s first season embraced, with humanity and heart and excellent wordplay, the most optimistic elements of sports. Its second season, to its great credit, questions all the optimism. “There’s a wonderful atmosphere here,” Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, a sports psychologist brought on to help the players of the fictional AFC Richmond, says of the club. “All the employees are thoughtful and kind, and they actually listen to one another.” This is not the end of her assessment, though. AFC Richmond, she also points out, is not winning any games. The team is stalled, beset by losses and draws. One by one, its players—and, finally, Ted himself—seek out the doctor’s counsel. One by one, they tacitly acknowledge that optimism, as an operating principle, can take them only so far. Dr. Fieldstone is a fitting new foil for Ted, because she is impervious to his aggressive strain of tenderness. She is not charmed by him. She is instead mildly annoyed by him. She forces him, through that simple rejection of his schtick, to question himself. But the introduction of an actual therapist into the mix of characters in Ted’s orbit—she does professionally what Ted prides himself on doing informally—allows the show to explore the nuances of its own convictions. What does kindness look like, actually, when your financial fortunes, and those of your team, depend on you winning matches? Does optimism suggest a faith in oneself against the odds, or a delusion? “For me,” Ted declares in the first season, “success is not about the wins and losses.
