Ted Lasso’s fourth season started a few weeks ago — or, more precisely, two Wednesdays ago — and, in doing so, brought back one of the only two1 shows that I consistently watch or pay attention to when episodes come out weekly. Unlike the previous three seasons (two of which won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series and one of which was, you know, definitely a thing that happened) the fourth has shifted the series from the fictional AFC Richmond’s long-established-but-still-middling men’s Premier League/Championship side to the club’s fledgling women’s squad in their first year of operations.
Which, of course, means that it has shifted from a show I watch to a thing I can talk about in this newsletter and not feel (as) bad about. Not just because it’s about women’s sports — though we do try to go out of our way to cover women’s sports under the rule of “it’s not covered for being a sport3 nearly enough”.
It’s because, unlike almost every other sports TV show in history, outside of perhaps A League of Their Own4, the constraints placed on the people we are watching have less to do with decision the people who are running or ran the team have made, per se, but the very nature of the thing they are doing. Even Coach takes place at an ersatz but well-respected B1G Ten-ish football team, before joining an expansion NFL team in the final year(s?, I lost track) of the show. The closest thing5 to this season of Ted Lasso that we’ve had in America would presumably be something like Bay City Blues, a 1983 show based around a minor league baseball team.6
Which is to say, for one of the first times in television history, it’s a show about what it’s actually like to play or be involved in an “obscure” sport, doing so overwhelmingly for the love of the game and the camaraderie that it engenders, with the hopes of riches and fame barely factored in to the equation every time you get up way too early to train or stay up way too late watching film. Now, women’s soccer, particularly in England, is not all that obscure in the traditional sense. But, as the show makes clear (in a way that very much reflects the real world) it’s never prioritized by basically anyone involved in its growth outside of the players, coaches and enthusiastic members of the staff.
More importantly, though, as Lasso repeatedly insinuates (in particular with the “Higgins report”) and sometimes just flat out says (or shows you with the three drinking buddies at the pub badmouthing the idea of women’s soccer while admitting they’ve never seen a game) the problems for these leagues stretch far beyond the immediate vicinity of the playing grounds. These constraints are materially important too, both in the world we’re being asked to visit every week and the meta narrative that the show is trying to work its way through.
When the climatic scene (SPOILER ALERT?) of this week’s episode (“Curiouser and Curiouser!”) happens, and the Lady Greyhounds are given access to a bigger and better locker room commensurate with their experience and dedication — after being forced to share space with the academy (essentially the kid’s) team four-to-five days a week — it’s a moment that works well from a storytelling perspective as well as on a cathartic level. And its efficacy is in large part due to the audience knowing what we are seeing is not necessarily a contrivance done for TV to make things more dramatic, but a symbolic representation of the inequitable worlds in which the men and women’s teams live and play.
The show also touches on the idea that it’s not just unequal treatment or uneven support with which women have to deal. But the ways in which those systemic issues combine with things like a higher propensity amongst women to suffer catastrophic knee injuries to create a world in which not only is playing these sports less likely to provide meaningful financial security but also a more dangerous way to make a living. This dichotomy is the driving force behind the new season’s breakout character, Alice Chilton (played by Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds), who it is explained blew out both her knees, one of them twice, before deciding to hang up her boots instead of continuing to pursue a once incredibly promising career for little to no reward.
That she could, as Ted says “overcome all that” and be identified as a brilliant strategist and tactician with a deep and abiding love of the game and its players; but, still end up having to sit behind a man who only started following the sport a half a decade ago puts in big bright lights the ways in which the system we have produces worse outcomes for women. Even when the people involved are fundamentally kind and good people with the best of intentions.
And, ultimately, that’s idea and many of the ones that seem like they will be explored on Ted Lasso this season are why we do this dumb little newsletter: To highlight the ways in which systems act upon us and the things we love, trying to find bits of joy in the morass of shit we wade through most days.
Because sometimes it’s worth it, taking all the pies all the pies in the face. And other times you just stand there, hip deep in pie.
1 The other being the Scrubs revival, because there’s nothing I love more than vicariously reliving my past mistakes (in this case, the way in which my crush on Dr. Elliot Reid has manifested itself in basically every bad decision I’ve ever made regarding a romantic partner, but that’s probably here nor there.2)
2 Says the divorced dad/ex-hubsand of a nurse living in his childhood home.
3 As opposed to, in the case of women’s sports, a cudgel used by assholes to target and harass transfolk.
4 The Amazon Prime show, not necessarily the movie.
5 You could, in theory, include the Los Angeles Waves from Running Point in this conversation, but unlike Ted Lasso, that show takes place in an entirely fictional world where the NBA just doesn’t exist, as opposed to a cartoon version of our world where a fictional team happens to play, as is the case in Lasso. And also, that would be two references to Running Point, which is roughyl three too many if you ask me.
6 However, I literally couldn’t tell you a single thing about the show outside of the fact that it existed for exactly eight episodes (of which only four aired) and then was shelved for almost 30 years before ESPN bought the rights to the show and burned the remaining stock off in 2011.
7 RIP Sports Night, the greatest fake spots