‘Ted Lasso’ fails to go all-in on women’s soccer, failing its own ‘Believe’ mantra
· Yahoo Sports
By Steph Yang
Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for season four of “Ted Lasso”.
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Apple TV’s hit series “Ted Lasso” has long asked viewers to trust it with an emotional commitment, following characters down a path and emerging into a world of deeper understanding and empathy.
In other words, to believe.
That’s always been its biggest strength, so it’s a shame that in season four the show seems afraid to do exactly that with its women’s team.
While the show found ways to successfully depict some of the current hot-topic issues of professional women’s sports, such as the reality of having second jobs, childcare responsibilities and dealing with injuries, it falls short in overall character development. That should have been an easy tap-in for a show like “Ted Lasso,” whose first season was a brilliant construction of a complex and good-hearted man based on a bit from a commercial for NBC’s Premier League coverage.
Instead, the show fumbled around with various disconnected character plot lines. It siloed off the fictional AFC Richmond’s women’s team from all of the returning characters, even Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), ostensibly the driving force at the club behind the creation of the women’s team in the first place.
Its only victory was assistant coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds), a shining beacon of everything that “Ted Lasso” can do so well, and a disappointing reminder of how we were left without.
From owner Rebecca Welton’s (Hannah Waddingham) reluctance to fully back her women’s team financially or emotionally until compelled by others, to Keeley’s unpreparedness for translating top-flight excitement into the second division, it seemed “Ted Lasso” was also planting seeds for deeper discussions of how women are growing the women’s game. Yet these issues were given fleeting mention, never to be expounded on again.
Rebecca spent exactly one episode panicking over her feminist credentials. The rest of her season was spent on her romantic relationship and the quite frankly tedious mystery over who was acquiring all the club’s shares, a subplot that didn’t do much to reveal or develop any facet of Rebecca’s character until a short exchange with villainous investor Zelda (Tracey Ullman, brilliant as usual but hampered by the plot) in the final episode.
As for the Greyhounds, few players were fully well-rounded outside of short interludes and splashes of personality when they should have been used as part of the beating heart of the show.
Undoubtedly, many of these choices were made with good intentions as a shorthand to show the inequalities of the women’s game; Hollywood forces creators to bend reality in the name of other priorities all the time. Instead, the lack of care in showing where the women’s game really is today was a slapdash disservice in an area where there is more responsibility to show honesty and care for the full story.
Popular media, particularly one with the economic might of Apple behind it, has a real ability to drive cultural power. Research shows that storytelling is a key to real-world growth. Studies done by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, The Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, and Sports Innovation Lab, among others, have found that women’s sports fans more frequently follow and look to support the players rather than teams — following personal storylines, responding more strongly to athlete-driven media and creating commercial power through personal brands over team brands.
In fairness, I rewatched season one of “Ted Lasso” to see where the show had landed with its original men’s team characters in 10 episodes. And in that time, there was simply more attention given to the dynamics of the men’s team and its primary and secondary characters, from Roy Kent and Jamie Tartt down to Isaac McAdoo, Colin Hughes, Dani Rojas and Sam Obisanya. Like a real soccer team, it was easy to hear distinctive voices and pick your favorite men’s player.
Unfortunately, one of the very few popular media pieces showcasing a women’s team did an inadequate job of creating the same variety for those women, clinging to returning characters without integrating them into the women’s team.
Roy mentoring Alice as a coach, acting as a direct punch counterpoint to Ted’s more meandering style? Rebecca diving headfirst into the world of women’s sports investing and wondering what it might be like building an empire there, after scraping over every inch as a rich and powerful woman in the men’s game? Keeley embracing the work of turning Richmond into a proper hub of women’s football and maybe even doing some mentoring of her own among a group of women who, like her, have had to hustle and grind their way to respect? Just a few suggestions.
Instead, the season finale felt more like the writers’ room getting a do-over of the season three finale — at the time seen as the series’ end.
The show planted an incredible seed with Rebecca’s reaction to Alice questioning whether she considered hiring any woman for the head coach position. But the moment promptly dead-ended with Rebecca spending half her apology getting defensive, reminding Alice of “what (she went) through to even create a space where she thinks she can critique me like that” and requesting more understanding for her position in the future.
There was no willingness to reconsider hiring a man with no experience in women’s soccer over the head of an experienced, albeit young, female coach.
Perhaps that might have been an interesting question for both Ted and Rebecca to grapple with for at least a few episodes more. Ted, the title character, is portrayed as a man so humble that season four opened with him working in a grocery store, and yet he willingly stepped into the role over Alice.
What an intriguing season it might have been had he recognized on screen that he was taking a job away from a qualified woman, and within that context, continued to mentor her, rather than only switching positions at the end of the season.
Maybe Alice’s promotion feels more earned on an emotional level having gone through a season as Ted’s assistant, but there were plenty of ways to structure things to allow for more than a few scenes’ worth of lip service to the very real issue of professional pathways for female coaches.
Still, if the show did one thing right, it was Alice, making it all the more frustrating that it was not willing to tug more on the threads of the rest of the women’s team.
Alice’s journey from an emotionally brusque but technically brilliant coach to a more empathetic leader was such a pleasure to see, for what little we got of it. Her constant bouncing off of Ted melting into something resembling a partnership had some of the magic of season one.
No scene was more captivating than in episode eight, “Follow the Anger,” when the show dared to slow down, lose the patter, and simply let Ted breathe and be warm but silent next to a weeping Alice.
Alice was the emotional lynchpin of the season with all of the credit to Reynolds’ performance — her ability to veer from lemon-mouthed dryness to heart-aching loneliness and back again was the fulcrum on which the women’s team rested.
Alice’s scenes with players Gemma Jay (Abbie Hern) and Shannon Stone (Shannon Hayes) were absolute jewels amid the muck of various romance subplots of the returning characters. One sinuous dance move from Alice to inspire confidence in a young player was more rewarding than a thousand shots of Rebecca’s texts with her Dutch pilot boyfriend or Roy’s wearying dates and bickering with Keeley.
Alice’s entreaty to Rebecca to see Gemma during the pain of her knee recovery was a beautiful nod to the actual pain many players have spoken about after their own injuries. And her addition to Ted’s Believe sign was crucial to the understanding that the women’s team can’t rest on belief alone, because the only way you can play through low wages, poor facilities, and gender discrimination is to do nothing but believe.
With rumors of more seasons still, there could be much more payoff to come for AFC Richmond Women. But the show would need to relinquish its death grip on old storylines and truly embrace new ones for that to properly happen.
The season four finale does seem to have buttoned-up old characters to make way for new, but why wait 10 episodes? Just like the new wave of investors into women’s sports, “Ted Lasso” should have gone all in on its women’s team.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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