Newsletter | The Tragicomedy Of Ted Lasso Season 3

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on March 22, 2023. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

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THE THING ABOUT Ted Lasso is that it acknowledges — and celebrates — the innately human tendency to use humour as a front for pathos. Most stories reflect the real-world habit of employing comedy as an escape. The silence and sighs are often buried by the laughs. But what makes Ted Lasso unique is that the escapism is inextricably linked to the truth. The jokes are never too far from the sobriety. The comedy of existing is connected to the tragedy of being.

While writing about Season 2 last year, I mentioned that Ted Lasso infuses the narrative eccentricities of a workspace comedy with the disarming realism of a chamber drama — the equivalent of, say, combining Michael Scott’s The Office shenanigans with the loneliness of his post-work life in a condo. The bottom line is that the protagonist, Lasso, nurses a few whiskeys alone after work every night. He stalks his family on the computer. It’s almost like he’s reverting to type — something we don’t usually see in such shows — after putting on a performance all day. We aren’t supposed to see these parts, but the series urges us to reimagine the characters as regular people.

This unforeseen poignancy shaped the second season, which had no qualms going into darker places while maintaining the cheeriness of a sports sitcom. While the titular American coach leads troubled English football club AFC Richmond back to the Premier League on a shoestring budget, there is no dearth of heartbreak, death, divorce, panic attacks, therapy, unresolved trauma, resentment and difficult relationships.

The first four episodes of Season 3 (four of 12 were available to critics) expands this hybrid territory. It’s too early to say, perhaps, but the confrontational identity beneath the spoofiness feels a bit more…natural. Like an adult settling into a routine. The tonal jumps are a little more seamless. For instance, the season opens with a touching scene itself — Lasso is preparing to send his son back to his ex-wife in America after the holidays. The kid’s visit is over. It has the vibe of a honeymoon (phase) ending, a father-son tale reluctantly morphing into a workspace comedy. The man returns to an empty flat — this is the primary narrative thread — before heading to do his job, which just happens to be the “theme” of the show. He’s a football coach by day, but a vulnerable human by night.

This dichotomy continues across the four episodes. If the humour is airy, the conflicts are grounded. Coach Lasso is still leading a team full of samples, but he looks like someone whose mind is on the other side of the Atlantic. As entertaining as his days on the field are — what with assistant coaches Beard and Roy Kent shouldering much of the technical burden — he is disturbed by the fact that his ex-wife, Michelle, might be dating their former marriage counsellor. Lasso’s pain is fuller after months of therapy. Roy is as grumpy as ever — even treating ex-rival Jamie Tartt as his new redemption project — but the season opens with Roy and Keeley parting ways due to their busy schedules. 

Nathan Shelley is now the “wonder kid” manager of top club West Ham United, but he is struggling to be the villain that the show set him up to be. It’s not rage but heartbreak that’s driving him, and more than once, we see Nate getting soft about his former club and feeling like an imposter, before his new boss — the vengeful ex-owner of Richmond — convinces him to be mean. He summons Nate’s bitterness, convincing him that he was chosen on merit and not as a middle finger to Richmond. Meanwhile, owner Rebecca is desperate for her team to defeat West Ham because it’s now led by her ex-husband, but she is also spooked by the absence of companionship at her age.

As a result, there are moments of genuine life (and research) scattered across the levity. Trent Krimm, the skeptical reporter who was fired from The Independent, shadows the team to write a book on their rise. But Roy Kent, a former player himself, is still hurt by an article Krimm wrote years ago — he forbids the team from being too ‘open’ in front of the bewildered journalist. Then there’s the arrival of superstar striker Zava, whose God complex is hilariously based on the great Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Rebecca poaches him at the last moment during the transfer window with a very relevant line of debate. It happens in the men’s restroom while Zava is peeing — which is to say, the setting is amusing — but she taunts the footballer for not considering a ‘small club’ because he is perhaps afraid of being exposed. Maybe he isn’t as good as he thinks he is, and the challenge of joining a newly promoted club instead of a top-tier title-winning outfit might just confirm that.

It’s the sort of argument one can level towards legends like Ronaldo and Messi — they’ve only played with wealthy title contenders to bolster their reputation instead of perhaps changing things up and inspiring an underdog team to glory. (Maradona did that with Napoli). Then there’s Keeley’s anxiety as the boss of a fancy new PR firm. She is annoyed by a company veteran who’s been hired to ‘babysit’ her, but Keeley softens when she notices that the woman’s rudeness is a consequence of her being shunted across several countries over her career.

You can see the compassion of the upcoming resolutions from miles away. But that doesn’t dim the unerring honesty of these moments. It’s discomfort food disguised as comfort food. It’s a mental health story disguised as a ‘mental’ football experience. By now, Ted Lasso fans might have realised that Lasso’s sunshine personality — the backbone of the show’s fame — is a defense mechanism. His cloying goodness and simplicity is a mask he wears to drown out the complexities of his head. It’s a toxic trait, where a person pretends to be happy to make the sadness go away. He is haunted by his father’s suicide, which in turn messed up his marriage, which in turn made him take an ‘overseas job’ in the hope of distance making the heart grow fonder. Every decision he makes as a manager pales in comparison to the stakes of his middle-aged life, and the agony he feels at the prospect of his family slipping away.

Which is to say that the light-heartedness of the show is a mirage of sorts. Maybe we are only seeing what he wants to see — the bright mood, the quirky people, the too-bizarre-to-be-true situations. Maybe Ted is actually a self-destructive drunk who raises hell in the locker room and whips them into paranoia before every game. Maybe he’s actually a gaslighting monster who was hit with a restraining order by his ex-wife, and now he’s venting on a mediocre football club that needed his sort of barbaric attitude. Maybe he’s a sex fiend who has been bailed out by Rebecca time and again, because she’s been through the wringer herself. Maybe Ted brutally bullied Nate and drove him away. Maybe the show is merely a crowd-pleasing manifestation of his alt-niceness.

That’s the beauty of Ted Lasso. It hides — and hides behind — the depth and direness of a beast. It’s in the name, too. Lasso is a rope with a noose in America; elsewhere, it’s just a droll American gimmick.

Watch Ted Lasso Season 3 on Apple TV+