Ted Lasso turned a lovable soccer team into a bunch of boring therapists

Ted Lasso is over and everyone is handling it great.

We don’t see the moment when Ted (Jason Sudeikis) announces he’s leaving AFC Richmond and England to go home to Kansas City; that happened between the last two episodes. People are a little sad, but that’s okay. This is the story of a man who has made the club what it is: caring and emotionally connected to each other. They almost won the title, just like Ted promised in the Season 1 finale. But at least Ted Lasso can rest easy knowing that it has made his characters better people who are able to talk about their feelings. Unfortunately, that “growth” came at the complete expense of the quality of the show.

Ted Lasso seemed like a breath of fresh air when it first premiered. Released in 2020, the Apple TV Plus show became a sleeper hit, thanks to the half-hour comedic ease with which it tackled everything from major character divisions to football practice. While the truth about Richmond’s situation can be hard to reconcile (an owner actively trying to fuel the team; a coach going through a slow divorce), the solutions were always so clearly rooted in the characters. In this way, Ted seemed like a proof of concept: he is an optimistic person because he chooses not because nothing happened in his life that made him angry. Some of the most pivotal moments of the first season – the darts monologue or Rebecca’s confession – are powerful in acknowledging how instructive his philosophy could be. They are quieter wins than on any other show. But they work! If other people would just follow his lead, the world just might be a better place. You just had to believe, as the sign said.

In contrast, Season 3 ended up being so frictionless that it’s hard to believe anything anymore. Nearly every plot development feels set up for minimal payoff: superstar new roster addition Zava (Maximilian Osinski) came and went, changing little about the show or the football season. Nate (Nick Mohammed) went to West Ham only to be surprised that his cad of a boss was indeed a cad.

Image: Apple TV Plus

Image: Apple TV Plus

The problem is not that these developments are undone. It’s that there’s nothing major delivered by any of them aside from killing time and doing PSAs in the locker room over nudes. These ideas become less and less convincing as the show snowballs through; rather than fulfilling seasonal arcs, the series takes on the task of being a cultural atlas for all positive male behavior. It’s tiring, and the effect is to briefly shift characters left and right as key developments from the final season take place off-screen. Nate makes peace with his father after a life of pent up disappointment as he realizes his father just wanted him to be happy. Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) briefly feels that Rupert (Anthony Head) has grown, only to discover that he hasn’t, which makes sense since the whole show has made him unforgivably cruel. Roy (Brett Goldstein) and Keeley (Juno Temple) have their much-anticipated reunion because Roy says their troubles – which also happened offscreen and between seasons – were never about her and it was always him.

So when the finale pulls it all together in a montage of people being happy, it feels right for a show that’s become so disinterested in what the characters’ choices actually are. mean, either for what motivated them in the first place or for the consequences of those decisions. Everyone can diagnose their own issues and hang-ups, as each character now speaks as if their thinking has already been peer-reviewed by a therapist. Who the characters goods, how they might work through their issues (or not!), and the ways in which that conflict might be productive fell by the wayside. Kindness was so equated with filtering one’s feelings clearly and with a neat resolution that everyone just do That.

In that way, it makes sense that everything clicked into place so neatly, from Nate’s return to Richmond to Jamie making peace with his toxic father. Both involve interrogating messy emotions and giving characters room to respond imperfectly to things. In its final season, Ted Lasso made a lot of time for things, but couldn’t make time for them. While the runtimes have exploded to more than double the average of the first season, the show has been too interested in being a soapbox on the importance of feelings and emotions to make time for the characters to actually experience them. to have. This is the end of the world if Ted Lasso know it. There is no room for anything less than feeling good.