Review: Ted Lasso Wholeheartedly Embraces Humanity, Thorns and All

Season two of Ted Lasso clicks into a comedic groove when it delves into the messier idiosyncrasies of its characters.

Ted Lasso
Photo: Apple TV+

In season two of Ted Lasso, branding ace Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) asks the players of the fictional U.K. Premier League football club AFC Richmond to help promote Bantr, a new dating app where strangers connect without seeing pictures of each other. Some curious players, along with club owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), dip their toes in, and a few even find love, or something similarly exciting. Bantr is emblematic of the fervently optimistic, sometimes naïve worldview that drives the season’s early goings. The series suggests that all it takes to shed one’s barriers to humanism—like superficiality and cynicism—is opportunity: a dating app, a tribulation, or any other vehicle of enlightenment.

Ted Lasso’s inaugural season ended with AFC Richmond moved down to the EFL Championship division, and season two begins with the club deep in a streak of ties, perfectly embodying their utter mediocrity. But former Division II college football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) serves as the foremost evangelist of can-do, feel-good positivity. “It will all work out,” he tells the team during their rut. “Exactly as it’s supposed to.”

With their clean-cut didacticism, the first eight episodes of the new season often evoke public service announcements or, more generously, fables. Ted Lasso occasionally exhibits a self-awareness about its tendency to resolve conflicts with breezy neatness: The season’s fifth episode, “Rainbow,” amusingly spoofs rom-com tropes as Lasso, who continues to know almost nothing about association football, tries to hire former Richmond hardman and fan-favorite Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) as a coach. “You had me at coach,” Roy eventually tells him.

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Elsewhere, though, the characters experience epiphanies with unexpected ease. In “Headspace,” Roy gets into a tiff with Keeley, his girlfriend, about her need for some space. The next day, hotshot goal-machine Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster)—recently returned to Richmond following a stint on reality TV—talks to Roy about the importance of giving teammates space when they need it, triggering a contrived revelation about Roy’s relationship with Keeley.

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When the season eventually delves more deeply into the messier idiosyncrasies of its characters, however, it clicks into a comedic groove. Sudeikis is breathlessly hilarious as “Led Tasso,” the grumbling, cartoonishly harsh alter ego that he assumes in order to rally his players. Equally vicious and cracking is the tirade that ex-kit man and current coach Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed) launches against Will (Charlie Hiscock), the new equipment manager, when he treats the team’s laundry with lavender fabric softener that Nate deems too calming. If the series unconditionally clings to hope that people are essentially good, it at least recognizes how competition and pressure can warp even the kindest souls.

There’s understated tragedy to the way that Nate, desperate to be taken seriously, hunches over his phone and mouths random tweets about himself after a whip-smart gametime call puts him in the spotlight. Elsewhere, Rebecca navigates her love life following an acrimonious divorce, and the series shrewdly uses these scenes to explore her sense of self-conception rather than her relationships with men. And the season’s most heartwarming sequence chronicles an annual holiday open house that director of football operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) and his family host for the team’s expat players, as the party endearingly contextualizes the boyishness of the athletes, Higgins’s fatherly commitment to his colleagues, and the difficulty of being far away from home.

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No one feels the latter more than the newly divorced Ted, who spends an agonizing Christmas away from his son for the first time. The series smartly exposes the cracks in his folksy ebullience through AFC Richmond’s decision to hire a therapist, the no-nonsense Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles). Early in the season, he discusses his skepticism of therapy with Sharon, at which point we’re treated to the rare sight of Ted feeling disgust and failing to contain his anger. Sudeikis crushingly conveys Ted’s vulnerability, and it’s hard to watch the character’s slow implosion without thinking of the pain that often courses through the goofiest of comedians, or Sudeikis’s recent split from Olivia Wilde. The way the series unearths Ted’s heartache, not to mention Nate’s insecurity and Rebecca’s loneliness, makes Ted Lasso more than just a sharp comedy. It’s a wholehearted embrace of humanity, thorns and all.

Score: 
 Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Toheeb Jimoh, Sarah Niles, Jeremy Swift, Phil Dunster, Nick Mohammed, Brendan Hunt, Elodie Blomfield, Cristo Fernández, Stephen Manas, Billy Harris, Kola Bokinni, Annette Badland, Charlie Hiscock  Network: Apple TV+

Niv M. Sultan

Niv M. Sultan is a writer based in New York. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Drift, Public Books, and other publications.

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