Season 2 of Ted Lasso is a Disappointment
The Rough Second Act of a Fun Show
*Spoilers for Ted Lasso everywhere.
Season 1 of Ted Lasso is one of the best seasons of comedy made in North America. If you have not seen Ted Lasso Season 1, you need to see it, because it is fantastic!
Season 1 is a masterstroke, a beautifully put together comedy with excellent writing, strong acting and a legitimately wonderful energy. Unfortunately, Ted Lasso Season 2 is not that. Instead, it is a deeply mediocre season with some breakthrough moments scattered through. This isn’t quite a Game of Thrones level collapse, but the decline is still striking. And it’s mostly due to a couple ill-advised choices the writers made.
Let’s talk about those choices and why they don’t work!
Some things that are okay
A few necessary caveats. First, Ted Lasso Season 2 isn’t a Bad Show— it’s a mildly pleasant use of 35–40 minutes of your time. The setting is fun, the actors are doing their best and everyone is having a good time. In general, the vibes are pretty good with Ted & crew, so there are worst things to do than spend some time with them.
There are also some genuinely touching moments! This show has one of the best explorations of therapy I’ve seen across any medium — Season 2 advocates for therapy and shows its potential to heal wounds and spur growth, while also gently, thoughtfully and compassionately acknowledging the very real and rational reservations people have about therapy. Doctor Sharon is the perfect character to drag Ted kicking and screaming into emotional healing and when Ted and Rebecca both revealed their trauma with their fathers, I started openly sobbing.
Even during a weaker season, this show still has the ability to occasionally dial back in and crank a 30 yard free kick into the top corner. But that makes it even more frustrating the many, many times when the showrunners make a hash of it.
No conflict
Season 1 of Ted Lasso is very much a comedy, but it’s a comedy with major dramatic stakes in it. The central tension is Ted vs. Rebecca — Ted’s unwavering optimism vs. Rebecca’s deep bitterness. Rebecca has hired Ted to fail and takes every opportunity to undermine him and ruin his life. In turn, Ted’s unfailing good cheer relentlessly chisels away at Rebecca’s defenses of cynicism, scorn and misanthropy. The emotional peak of the series is Rebecca’s confession to Ted about her misdeeds, and Ted’s immediate forgiveness.
Everything else — Richmond’s relegation, Keeley breaking up with Jamie and getting together with Roy, Nate becoming more confident, Ted’s own divorce — is a B plot that maps nicely onto the overlying A plot.
By contrast, the overarching tension of Season 2 is Ted Lasso vs…himself? Nate? The very concept of fatherhood? There really isn’t an overarching A plot for Season 2, which means Season 2 is essentially a season of several different B plots that are all mostly unattached to each other.
Even more frustrating, there are several opportunities teased within Season 2 that could have been developed into a real, substantive challenge, such as:
- Jamie’s return poisons the culture Ted has been building
- Because of Sam’s boycott, Dubai Air pulls out of sponsoring Richmond, putting the entire club on the brink of insolvency
- Ted’s panic attacks lead to him being deemed mentally and emotionally unfit to lead the club
- Roy’s return to Richmond leads to a clash with Jamie, two players who have always hated each other
- Rupert makes a play for control of AFC Richmond
- Rebecca dating Sam destroys team chemistry and causes a major scandal for the entire club
All of these could be big moments to challenge Ted & co, and all of them are waved away. I’m not saying that any one of these are perfect conflicts, and maybe it makes sense to softly resolve a couple of these. But overall there is just nowhere near the level of conflict in Season 2 as there was in Season 1, which has one extremely negative effect.
Strength in Adversity
By removing conflict Ted Lasso makes its titular character a weaker and less interesting character. Ted is an incredibly positive and optimistic character, and a lot of the glowing reviews for Season 1 make special mention of Ted’s optimism and good cheer. But what makes Ted special is that he is extremely positive and optimistic even in the worst circumstances.
Season 1 Ted is parachuted into an alien country with a hostile fanbase, an undermining owner and a deeply toxic locker room culture, all while he is going through a divorce. He’s not stupid, and even if the particulars of English Football or the depths of Rebecca’s machinations are unclear to him, Ted immediately realizes he’s screwed. But he still believes in the best in people! He is kind and caring and gives everyone a chance to be a better person, even and especially if they don’t do the same for him.
Trent Crimm serves as an excellent viewer proxy in Season 1, first mercilessly bullying the obviously out of his depth Ted:
But then, Trent is slowly somehow won over by the incredibly optimistic Ted:
Ted Lasso of Season 1 is an incredibly optimistic person who is somehow able to power his way into the hearts and minds of even the most closed off and cynical people. He’s an inspiration!
By contrast, Season 2 Ted Lasso is in a familiar place with a supportive owner, friendly teammates and no pressure to win whatsoever. He’s still incredibly cheerful — but that’s just what a normal, well-functioning adult should be like in that situation! Sure, Ted has his personal struggles in Season 2, just like he did in Season 1, but there’s no dragon to win over, no wayward souls to rally.
That removes one of the strongest pieces of his character, and it makes Ted’s weaknesses as a character more apparent. In both seasons, Ted is incredibly cheesy, very annoying, and borderline incompetent at his job. For Season 1 Ted it doesn’t matter, because he’s in the worst possible position and he still is overwhelmingly positive and optimistic. I’d run through a brick wall for that man! But Season 2 Ted is just another kind, slightly annoying older white man who has a comfortable job and is here to hang out.
The Vibe Trap
Without a central conflict Season 2 of Ted Lasso ends up in a place where it solely becomes about *Vibes*. There’s no central conflict motivating the plot, so hey let’s just throw everyone together and hang out!
And look — in some ways, this kind of works! The acting in this show is pretty solid, everyone is pretty charming, the setting is fun. I would be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally enjoy having a relaxing brunch or an evening glass of wine while watching the players and staff of AFC Richmond hang out.
But the *Vibes* approach means a complete and total disregard for moving the show forward. In Season 1, all ten episodes had some sort of propulsive action that moves the characters and plot forward. In Season 2, there are three full episodes (Christmas, Rom-Com and Coach Beard) that are either mostly or entirely bottle episodes. These episodes are of varying quality — the Christmas one is kind of a fun and charming use of *Vibes,* while the Coach Beard episode is extremely bad.
But whatever the quality of these episodes, only one of them (Rom-Com) has any lasting effects on any of the characters (and it really only affects Roy Kent), which means that we went from 0% filler episodes to almost 25% filler in a single season! This really causes the overall season to drag, and makes a 12 episode comedy series feel way longer than it should.
Roy and Nate
Two characters show the high and lows of the newfound focus on *Vibes* above all else. On a high note, Roy was the absolute star of Season 1, and he elevates his game in Season 2. Roy’s gruff, growling dismissal of every single person he talks to is nonstop, perpetually funny. In a show that becomes more and more about *Vibes*, Roy is perpetually pointing out how stupid everything is and it’s always funny to watch.
Even when Roy is being nice, he’s incredibly rude and it’s awesome!
Every single one of Roy’s scenes crackle with energy, and his scene partners all step it up when they’re paired with this growling humanoid wolverine:
Nate, by contrast, has an extremely weak season. In Season 1, Nate has a nice little arc as he builds his own confidence under the tutelage of Ted and Coach Beard. It’s nice, and it’s well done! In Season 2 Nate is supremely weird! I think he ends up in an interesting place (more about that later), and I don’t hate the thought behind his arc, but the execution is really, really bad.
I don’t hate the idea of Nate breaking bad. There are some indications in Season 2 that Nate isn’t in a great place. He’s consistently rude and bullies Will, and has several nasty exchanges with Collin before Coach Beard sets him straight. He clearly has unresolved issues with his father.
But almost every major moment Nate has is shot and scored as a major victory and growth for him (and by extension, for his friends and coworkers). For instance, witness Nate scoring the window table for his parents’ anniversary dinner:
And when Nate coaches AFC Richmond to a stunning upset victory during Ted’s panic attack:
These are all shot, scored and presented as major triumphs for Nate and the rest of the Ted Lasso ensemble. These are fun, rewarding parts of the *Vibes* experience that is Ted Lasso Season 2!
The problem is that the showrunners also want Nate to slide into the darkness, and so moments from those triumphant episodes are used to fuel his descent into madness. Nate spitting on himself in the mirror and his increased coaching confidence are two major pieces that lead to his eventual dramatic turn against Ted. But the problem is the show literally showed me a more confident Nate as a fun and happy thing a couple episodes ago! Confident Nate goes from a net positive to the show’s vibe to a huge negative so, so quickly.
It’s really hard to overstate how big the shift is. Nate is a decent (if flawed) person until the last two episodes of Season 2, at which point he transforms into a deranged maniac. In the last two episodes he:
- Makes a move on and kisses Keeley
- Leaks an extremely personal and damaging attack about Ted to the tabloids, and never confesses his involvement even when Ted gives him multiple chances
- Confesses he kissed Keeley to Roy, then flips out when Roy doesn’t bite his head off
- Has a screaming match with Ted where he unloads a double barrel of unresolved family trauma in his face
- Leaves to work with sworn enemy Rupert, completing his full villain transformation with a new head of evil hair
This is insane! It’s such a dramatic pivot from who Nate was in Season 1, but also who he’s been for almost all of Season 2! And none of this is foreshadowed because Ted Lasso tries to have its cake and eat it too.
The show wants Nate to end up in a dark place, but they also want his major moments to be fun and part of the overall good *Vibes* of the show. The showrunners try to fold Nate’s downward slide into the show, but because everything always has to be so positive and fun, it’s hard to give his arc the nuance it deserves. This means Nate ends up in this space where he’s mostly fine until he goes insane for the last two episodes and it just really, really doesn’t work.
Almost a Sitcom
Of course, there are plenty of excellent comedy TV shows out there that don’t really have a central conflict, and exist primarily on *Vibes*. They’re called sitcoms, and some of them are quite good!
But while sitcom writing may not have the highest reputation, there are some things you absolutely need to do. To have a really good sitcom you need a minimum of five absolutely rock-solid characters who you can bounce off each other in funny and interesting ways. Ideally you can just pull two names out of a hat for those shows, and then the resulting pairing is an interesting group to watch.
As an example, The Good Place mostly pulls off what Ted Lasso attempts. The Good Place will shift between a dramatic story-driven show to more of a classic sitcom pretty seamlessly. But The Good Place can do this because Michael Shur has a roster of six incredibly fleshed out characters and at any point he can just put two or three of them in a room together and watch them riff.
It becomes immediately clear that Ted Lasso does not have that bench of characters. On the show, only three fit the bill for the depth of character required for a sitcom — Roy, Ted and Rebecca. Any scene that includes two of those characters is a banger. A scene that has one of them is probably decent. But if at least one of those characters isn’t onscreen, the pairings start to become pretty weak.
Try to think of at least one good scene from Season 2 that didn’t include at least one of Ted, Roy or Rebecca. Nate and Coach Beard? Jamie and Dani? Dr. Sharon and Higgins? None of these pairings or scenes are terrible, but they’re all pretty flat and unmemorable. That’s because these characters aren’t fleshed out enough to stand on their own — Jamie Tartt is a ton of fun when he’s sniping at Roy or getting treated with genuine kindness by Ted, but on his own he’s a bit of a lightweight.
Of course, in Season 1 that exact same structure worked really well — but that’s because that season was anchored on Ted and Rebecca’s conflict. For instance, in Season 1 we don’t go particularly deep into Jamie and Keeley’s relationship and breakup, but it works because Keeley’s growth is explicitly tied to Rebecca’s development. In Season 1, these two are great! But in Season 2, without a major conflict to anchor around, whenever Jamie/Keeley are onscreen without Rebecca/Ted/Roy, the scene just falls really flat. The handful of scenes that Jamie and Keeley have together are really strange. Witness when Jamie confesses his love to Keeley:
It’s a very off-key moment, and while both actors do their best with the writing, it’s still weird. And then the writers basically undo this scene, with Jamie immediately apologizing and Roy and Keeley patching things up. What happened here? Why did this occur?
It’s not that the writing has immediately become terrible, but any weaknesses are way more apparent in Season 1 than Season 2. And that’s mostly because Ted Lasso Season 2 becomes a show about people hanging out, but it’s only consistently fun to hang out if Ted, Rebecca or Roy is onscreen.
Coach Beard and Higgins
The paths of Higgins and Coach Beard in Season 2 serve as a nice example here. In Season 1, Higgins and Coach Beard are an underrated X-Factor in every single scene they’re in. Any scene immediately becomes funnier with the insertion of either character. Coach Beard will deliver a scathing one-liner, Higgins will get mercilessly bullied, and it’s hilarious! They also provide a sounding board and a humanizing element to the two most important characters, Rebecca and Ted, respectively. They’re awesome!
But they have two very different paths in Season 2. Higgins remains absolutely hilarious. He’s deployed sparingly, for laughs, and he’s always funny. His consistent bit this season is that he doesn’t have an office, and the screenwriters have a ton of fun dropping him into various ridiculous settings as an exclamation point on a scene. The one episode where we spend more time with Higgins is the Christmas episode, and the deeper focus works because the show has already established him as the one core cast member with a deeply stable family life. It’s a heartwarming, silly and fun spotlight for Higgins, and it works!
We get just enough Higgins throughout Season 2. He’s a character who is used sparingly, and he is carefully dropped into scenes where he makes sense and strengthens the scene. It works really well, and it’s extremely funny!
Coach Beard, by contrast, has the worst fall off from Season 1 to Season 2. His character gets extremely overexposed, and it just does no favors to anyone at all. First of all, there’s a constant focus on Coach Beard’s on-again, off-again relationship with Jane which just makes no sense at all. Who was asking for this? Who thought this was a good way to spend our time on this show?
But all of that pales in comparison to the Coach Beard bottle episode. The entire episode is a meandering wander down Beard’s backstory, answering a question no one asked (“what is it like when Coach Beard drinks”) in a format no one wanted (“a 40 minute bottle episode right after Ted reveals how his father died”) featuring characters no one wants to know more about (“The three soccer hooligans from the pub who don’t have names”). None of this moves any of the plot forward, and it all hinges on Coach Beard — a character who is so, so fun in small doses but just does not have the weight to handle this sort of assignment.
Character development is great, but this development actually makes Beard a less interesting character! One of the great things about Beard is that he’s deeply unpredictable, and bounces off the more classic Ted in ways that are amazing and funny. Coach Beard is a chess master, a prolific poetry reader, a former professional biter of butts and according to Brendan Hunt’s headcanon a former Phish roadie. It still hasn’t been established whether Beard is actually his (first? last?) name! Coach Beard is really fun, but part of the fun is that he’s a mysterious enigma — showing him wandering around London turns out to be a lot less fun than hearing random anecdotes of his insanity dropped into casual conversation. Sometimes it’s just more fun to hear the highlights rather than see the whole story!
Coach Beard isn’t a bad character! But he’s not a character we want to be solely focused on for a whole episode. Because of the quasi-sitcom nature of Ted Lasso Season 2, we end up spending that time with him, and everyone is worse off for it.
Looking Ahead
So, there are some major issues with Ted Lasso Season 2, all of which means this season is solidly mediocre, unlike the classic Season 1. But despite all the numerous issues I’ve laid out, I’m still excited about this show going forward!
The main reason is the introduction of Evil Nate. As painful as the journey was to get Evil Nate, now that Evil Nate and Rupert are on the same side it creates a compelling adversary for Ted and Rebecca (and all the assorted denizens of AFC Richmond).
Having an adversary to face off against (and probably win over!) would give Ted Lasso Season 3 a much improved structure. A challenge from Evil Nate and Rupert would highlight Ted’s extraordinary character, keep the show from falling too deep into *Vibes* territory, and avoid the quasi-sitcom feel of Season 2. A central conflict would give secondary characters like Keeley/Jamie/Beard something to anchor on, while propelling star characters Roy/Rebecca/Ted to new heights. It could be really fun!
And hey, if you can still enjoy Ted Lasso Season 2 despite its numerous flaws, power to you! Hopefully Season 3 returns to the heights of Season 1, but maybe it doesn’t — maybe Season 3 is more like Season 2, or maybe it’s even worse. And if that happens, it’s okay! Ted Lasso already got in one absolute cracker of a season, which is more than a lot of shows get. Even if all Ted Lasso gives us is one incredible season, a bunch of memes and the knowledge of Dani Rojas’ existence, that’s pretty great!
You’ve got to enjoy the little things in life, and if Ted Lasso Season 2 is what does that for you, I’m not going to try and take that away. I always hope for better from these shows, but if they merely turn out okay, that’s fine too. The important thing is to learn from where these shows falter, see how they can do better, and enjoy the ride.
Or at least, that’s what I think Ted would say.
Richmond till we die,
Jefferson