ted lasso & individualist personal growth
nobody develops in a curated, optimized vacuum by realizing things on their own
Thank you, thank you to everyone who read my last newsletter and who subscribed! There are many more of you now and I’m grateful that you’re here to join me in themeless contemplation. In recent months I’ve been distracted by moving, thinking too much, trying to avoid thinking too much, etc.
One of the ways I’ve been avoiding thinking, or at least thinking in a different way, has been through taking lots of concert photos. You can see some I’m proud of here if you’re curious. I really love music in a way that I find difficult to articulate, and a part of me wants to protect that because it’s one of the few things I haven’t really corrupted in my pursuit of articulation. My one writing thing - I recently reviewed Jane Wong’s debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City for the Chicago Review of Books! Would love to hear thoughts from anyone else who ends up reading.
[Light spoilers for the third season of Ted Lasso ahead… but do you watch Ted Lasso for plot. You do not need to have seen Ted Lasso to read]
Ted Lasso has been hailed as a show about “radical positivity” and “soft masculinity,” an example of our culture’s return to the feel-good sitcom with storylines and characters that destigmatize mental health and challenge toxic masculinity. Ted Lasso himself experiences panic attacks and seeks therapy to process his father’s suicide when he was a teenager; Jamie, the hotshot star of the team, spends three seasons learning to be a genuine team player and to stop seeking approval from his verbally abusive father.
Although the show doesn’t always balance its saccharine outlook and more serious storytelling ambitions well—certain scenes, like the locker room conversation about sharing nudes in the most recent season, have been roasted for taking on an after-school special level of stilted moralizing—at least flopping that way intends to land in a place of kindness and good.
This is why I was bewildered by the show’s handling of romantic relationships. "Love-bombing" is mischaracterized as a charming behavior during Keeley's relationship with Jack, the venture capitalist who showers her with insistent affection before eventually pulling herself and her funding after Keeley's nudes are leaked. Coach Beard's tumultuous relationship with Jane, whose only characterization is as “crazy girlfriend,” is laughed off as a punchline, despite repeated mentions of violence and intimidation and her shredding his passport to prevent him from leaving the country. They end the season married and expecting a child.
No one piece of media can be expected to nail its portrayal of every aspect of life, but I’d rather the writers of Ted Lasso have not even opened this can of worms if they were going to uphold longstanding dismissals of abusive relationship behavior. I’ve also seen limited mention of these issues in reviews, with the exception of this Salon piece on Ted Lasso’s treatment of queer characters and Kylie Cheung outlining the abusive arc of Keeley and Jack’s relationship in Jezebel.
I began to wonder what happened here, what turned off in the writers’ brains when it came to these relationships compared to the aforementioned, much more thoughtful character development. I do think one reason this happens is that depictions of aspirational romantic relationships are so rife with abuse are so normalized that it is incredibly difficult for people to recognize them as such. Given this reality, a far more interesting line of thought could have been characters realizing this to some degree and trying to face it.
A difference I’ve been thinking about between the first category of plotlines and the second that I listed out is how individualistic the stories Ted Lasso handles well are. Ted Lasso’s therapy is very much about his own processing and changing how he sees things. Though his panic attacks are mentioned and he briefly discusses his father with his mother, it’s mostly a him problem, accompanied by the respectfully distant support of those around him. Jamie grows with the encouragement of Ted, Roy, and his mother, but it’s mostly an internal reset of ego and expectations. There’s not very much friction or direct person-to-person conflict. It’s a stern conversation followed by a decently swift, straightforward evolution. A parental cameo and a repaired relationship.
I do think some types of personal problems can be addressed more like that, dealing with your own thought patterns. I would love if everything operated so cleanly, trust me. When I first heard the idea that relationship wounds have to be solved relationally, I was annoyed. That is terrifying to me. It runs counter to our society’s general fixation on optimization and linear improvement. I want to become my best self in a quiet little corner after reading all the books and articles necessary and then burst out of my cocoon ready to be the consistent and ideal friend and partner.
Overcoming the discomfort of having to grow with other people is a part of the impossible-to-streamline, ultimately worthwhile process of improving as a person. Yet the dominant idea of personal growth right now is frictionless, bootstrap-oriented, and riddled in pseudo-therapy language. “Go to therapy” like therapy is the end-all, “cut out toxic people in your life,” tallying “emotional labor” like you’re billing a client, calling things “setting boundaries” that are not boundaries.
As Rayne Fisher-Quann puts it, “Rather than being a gradual, non-linear journey towards realization and fulfillment, we’ve begun to imagine "healing" as a series of personal-discovery tasks that exist to make the self more comprehensible. We’re encouraged to enumerate our flaws, systemically comb through our childhoods for neat, pert little stories that can explain how each of them came to be, and then destroy them.” There is no space in that idea for other people to actually be on the journey with you, for accepting that in a lot of cases the less than appealing parts of who you are aren’t vaporized as much as they are reframed and folded in.
There’s little room for real conflict, regression, or clashing in this concept of growth. That’s the vibe of the character development that Ted Lasso is able to successfully manifest for the most part. It’s palatable ~main character syndrome~ meets ~mental health awareness~ that we can still celebrate because it does represent progress and representation in a way. Ted Lasso himself gives regular speeches about the essentiality of trust and support, but the show rarely faces the vulnerability and sometimes pain that learning to trust and support involves. Romantic relationships, as the central focus of so much media, are probably the most mythologized while also being, in reality, the relationships where the most messy and interdependent conflicts and growth occur, so the lack of acknowledgment of that in the show flattens them down to the worst bits. If conflict of any form isn’t allowed, neither is real examination of what’s going on, leaving these weird dynamics as unexamined, disconcerting situations.
Ted Lasso has real heartwarming moments of collective love and community—when the whole team helps to clean up Sam’s restaurant after it’s vandalized by bigots, Nate and Beard’s conversation about forgiveness and second chances, former enemies Roy and Jamie biking around Amsterdam in search of a windmill. Perhaps, like the dream of personal growth in isolation, the appeal of a feel-good sitcom is witnessing those hard won victories without the hard winning.
Assigning You Reading
Kathryn VanArendonk on Ted Lasso as a whole, and how in trying to be everything, it faltered. I think the goldfish problem, fear of conflict, and choosing themes over stories definitely apply to what I’m talking about
Of course, Jia Tolentino’s profile on the man I’ve been forced to think about recently by virtue of being a Taylor Swift fan. Hunter Harris sums it up perfectly.
For all my fellow Normal Gossip/Kelsey McKinney fans. You’re probably also a Defector fan! The Internet isn’t meant to be so small
We continue to live in a continually expanding McMansion hell
RIP Succession, long live Succession, the story of how HBO almost lost Succession is very Succession-y
All the Asian Connies are Connies for a reason!
Rainesford Stauffer’s new book, All the Gold Stars: Reimaging Ambition and the Ways We Strive, comes out on 6/6! Two pieces from her recently that I really enjoyed: Could I Still Be Ambitious Without My OCD? and Is My Writing a Hobby or a Career?
Relevantly, waitressing and writing and ambition (LINK FIXED)
Are we… pro-cringe now?
To be honest I had assumed all teenage and twenty-something female fans of The National came to it as I had, by having a crush on a moody boy… not true! The sad and divorced in vibe band is great in their own right
“The truth is that the more you fuck with yourself, mine your own collapsing hillsides for bad jokes, second guess yourself as the rubble tumbles down into an important local source of drinking water, and wave off a professional team of environmental engineers in order to sift rubble out of the stream by hand, hour after hour, the more confident you become. I mean, it’s a laborious way to develop more swagger: think too much about who you are, work hard to redeem yourself over and over, tap dance furiously, scribble on fifteen pads of paper, throw everything away and start over, start over and over and over.” I love Heather Havrilesky’s voice
On the books front, I’m proud to say I’m actually 2 books ahead on my goal. Shocker! I recently read (and very much enjoyed but also screamed at the realism of) Real Life by Brandon Taylor and am now making my way through Filthy Animals so I can crack open his latest, The Late Americans