Ted Lasso: A complete series review

I finally managed to watch the final season of Ted Lasso. Of course, I would be in dereliction of my duties if I did not tell you what I thought of the series as a whole. Just to give you the tl;dr version of it: Ted Lasso really should have ended after season one. it was lightning in a bottle it couldn't possibly be sustained, especially not with a genre switch and an almost doubling of the runtime of individual episodes. But let's not get ahead of ourselves and start at season one and why it had the impact it had when it came out in 2020.

In the spring of 2020, the world was in the grasp of a worldwide pandemic. You might remember it. The outlook was grim and with the first lockdown underway, people were trapped inside and cut off from social connections. Way too often, existential anxiety gripped people as well. In this general malaise, Ted Lasso dropped like a bomb. Not only did it buck the general trend of entertainment media at the time to be grim and about high-stakes saving of the world, It managed to infuse its relentlessly optimistic titular character with a seriousness that was completely decoupled from the irony and meta commentary so pervasive in many modern media.

This, crucially, did not apply to all characters in the series. Their often-farcical plots provided serious obstacles for Ted Lasso that he needed to overcome. But he did so by surprising everyone with positivity and by making real connections to people and touching them in a deep way that was transported directly from the screen into the hearts of the audience. It didn't much matter how little sense the episodes made plot-wise. What was relevant was that they spoke to a deeper emotional truth. Just consider the very ending of season one: Ted’s foil Jamie Tartt had just scored the decisive goal against our heroes of FC Richmond, but wasn't getting any joy out of it because of his shitbag father. Ted sent him a note congratulating him on the win – and he smiled.

It is moments like this that came as a surprise and a genuine plot twist, albeit a small one, that really were at the heart of what Ted Lasso was all about and what its success rested on. And for one season, that was perfectly fine. One season at a specific moment in time where the needs of a large audience for exactly this material were strong enough to overcome the traditional weaknesses that a comedy format naturally has and that doesn't lend itself well to expanding the scope dramatically.

And yet, this is exactly what happened. Season 2 dramatically switched genres. the show began to reimagine itself as a drama, without really abandoning its roots it's a comedy. Dramedies are of fraught genre at the best of times, but trying to reinvent yourself as one on the fly can only lead to disaster. Not only that, the showrunners also got it in their heads that this switch merited and almost doubling of episode length as to compete with serious dramas on television.

This was a serious miscalculation. The characters sufficed as vehicles for jokes, but they were not suited at all to serve as vessels for drama. That would require much more depth than any of these cardboard stereotypes could ever hope to muster. That is not to say that you couldn't make a drama about a football club with a relentlessly optimistic coach facing off against the perils of the world. What I'm saying is that you can't do this with these specific characters while retaining any connection to what you did in season one and still retain the whimsical nature and the jokes that your audience loved and that you can't let go of because you fear you’d lose them.

Therefore, new characters like the therapist never clicked at all because they lacked the root in the comedy and good wipes of season one and were clearly built for the dramatic aspects of the show. the attempt to fill Ted with serious dramatic depth also fell flat on its face. The only thing that at least partially worked what's the conversion of Nate into the bad guy, but more because the material of season one lent itself better to a retcon than the material of all the other characters. his conversion came as a shock mostly because it went against what season one had been all about and not so much as a “betrayal” of his character.

But in the end, season two was not well received and in the Apple headquarters, panic was palpable. I can almost see the committee hearing in which the way forward for season three was decided. going back to the good vibes of season one that people loved while retaining the dramatic aspirations in the structure of season 2 which might forge the path ahead for nominations and awards. Of course, this cannot work.

And in the event, it doesn't. The season three is not quite as bad as season 2, but it's merely non-offensive. It desperately tries to recreate the good vibes off season one and to return to the more jokey format, but the absurd lengths of the episodes in the equally absurd pretension that their dramatic storylines have anything of value to say and need to be retained weigh the thing down like a millstone.

And so, we returned to the good vibes of season one, which said committee seems to have made out as the most important aspect of the success of the show. There are still occasional jokes, but the quality is surprisingly hit and miss. They seldom get over the level of a mild chuckle and oftentimes they left me bewildered as to where something is coming from. Since the show also elected to keep its pretensions to dramatic storytelling by giving several characters something resembling an arc - more on that in a minute -, the jokes oftentimes come out of the blue and have no real connection to anything that is going on, leading to a very disjointed experience.

The best example for this for me is when the players go to their national teams for the World Cup and Dani Rojas becomes an incredibly aggressive person out of the blue and injures his teammate van Damme. Inexplicably, this is treated as a joke throughout the whole season, and this strange character change goes completely unexplained. It is typical for the comedy structure because it surprises the audience and everyone around the changing character, which on a meta level is even acknowledged by all the characters, batch the effort to combine a consistent dramatic arc with such surprising jokes falls flat all the time. You simply can't have it both ways.

This might be worth it if the dramatic arcs would work, which they really don't. The most striking example here is Nate’s redemption arc. Completely out of the blue the show, which has gone to considerable pains in establishing him as the big bad, decides to make him into an object of compassion and pity and to let us root for his romantic success. set romantic success is established by simply existing. It is entirely unbelievable for any of this to happen. His girlfriend and his relationship to her are a fantasy version of how relationships work if women have no personality, agency or desires of their own. This isn't rooted in a warped understanding of gender dynamics on part of the showrunners; they have proven the feministic bona fides often enough. It is simply an expression of the laziness surrounding the dramatic arcs in general.

Ted himself is a problem of another sort. His issues just are not worth the traumatic time investment they are given, which leads to his story running around in circles and revisiting the same beats over and over again. The constant need to create positive vibes also runs counter to any dramatic development or exploration because the positive or jokey scenes never really work together with the dramatic ones and interrupt the proceedings.

The worst plot of season three is reserved for Keeley. Her character stopped making sense in season 2, because by all means she should have just dropped out of the story, having lost most of her connection to FC Richmond and the goings on there. Instead, she is given a business arc that is also a sheer fantasy version of how a business works. I hate the trope of the workplace as a kind of resort in which you work out your individual issues and in which no one ever works. This is the case with Keeley’s firm even more so then with the football club itself. It is entirely unclear, why anything she does would ever work, aside from “we need to keep this character in the story”. it is therefore boring, almost completely shorn of jokes and has the most forced good vibes of any storyline.

This leads me to my main issue with the dramatic arc in general: no one ever seems to work. People are always meeting in offices or training spaces to talk about personal issues and to trade jokes, to engage in lovable team building exercises or to simply hang out (seriously, doors do not exist in this series most  of the time), but there is no actual work going on, not at the football club nor, especially, in Keeley’s office. this was no problem in season one, where everything was mostly a comedy show. But if you really want to tell dramatic stories, you cannot continue to operate in a fantasy space.  

The only person to have something resembling like revelations or development is Rebecca. Her parts are the ones reserved for the most genuine good feelings. But even she doesn't get to anything cohesive and has some of the most cringy developments of the whole season, such as her speech to the other club owners which would work as a satire on Aaron Sorkin if it was intended as such. Unfortunately, it isn't. Her last scene, in which she reunites with her love fling from Amsterdam, it's also so forcedly saccharine that it hurts in the teeth.

This is a general trend with the good vibes of season 3. They are almost uniformly forced and oftentimes at least border on cringe. The soundtrack is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. Generic upbeat and inspiring tones that could come from a cheap commercial signal me in advance what I have to feel now, even if the scene in question doesn't warrant it at all. The scenes often make little to no sense structurally in the plot, such as in the communal singing of “Hey Jude” in front of the pub. It is a beautiful scene taken in isolation but the plot developments building up to it in the general arc in which it is integrated make no sense at all. I'm always feeling emotionally abused by the show, giving the good feelings and smiles a dirtied quality.

All this does not go to say the Ted Lasso was a bad show. It's just very mediocre and workmanlike in its seasons two and three, and it could have gone out on a high note after one season if it hadn't dragged on into this wide field of mediocrity.