Opinion | Tressie McMillan Cottom on ‘Ted Lasso’

When “Ted Lasso” premiered in 2020, it was supposed to rehab masculinity’s brand. Beaten up by #MeToo, beleaguered by Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency and diminished by fair competition from diversity, masculinity was looking peaked.

For two seasons, the small show about an American football coach taking charge of a British football team led a successful charm offensive. The titular character was fond of saying that you just have to believe. “Ted Lasso” asked us to believe that we could rehabilitate American masculinity without rehabilitating the strictures of gender. The show became a modern fairy tale about a global society where feminism kind of won but a white guy from okey-doke middle America could succeed by being nice. That notion propelled Ted through deft depictions of anxiety, loss and intimacy for two strong seasons.

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Then in the third season when it was time for the men on “Ted Lasso” to grow up, they did what men usually do onscreen: They put femininity in a box. Women were pushed out of the action, like the sassy Keely, or into dead-end storylines, like the powerful Rebecca, or into inexplicable character arcs like Nate’s girlfriend, Jade. There were some sparkling performances in what might be the show’s final season, but Ted was lost. He rambled about a premise that grew too ambitious for the character. It was not entirely his fault.

“Ted Lasso” premiered near the aftermath of Trump’s presidency, with Covid still roaring. Trump’s domination of news media meant a constant stream of invective, disjointed sentences and violence filled every corner of the discourse. Our friends slipped into misinformation cyclones, and families were torn apart over masks, school safety and the very idea of science. The violence of Jan. 6 was a warning that Trumpism was here to stay.

Ted Lasso emerged as a pop culture Ronald Reagan. Our politics may be beyond repair, but our entertainment could offer a new dawn in America, even if we had to move to Britain to get it.

Then the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Covid was over. Ted clearly got the U.S. news over there in Britain. His sunny disposition was gone. His once charming witticisms turned daft. His brooding for his marriage took on a dangerous pallor. It’s hard to admit that as hungry as some are for a new dawn in America, we are still in the muck of the American dusk.

In retrospect, what did Ted ever really do to deserve all the credit we gave him? A moment in the third season called us on the carpet for not wondering just who this guy is. Ted asked Rebecca to hire a private detective to spy on his estranged wife and her new boyfriend. The move was a disembowelment of Ted’s positive masculinity, everything the show purported to oppose. It is harmful and controlling, if not violent. And the show asked us to empathize. The Cornell philosopher Kate Manne says ours is a culture socialized for undue sympathy with powerful men, especially as they enact violence against women. Maybe our little comfort show about positive masculinity was a cautionary tale about romanticizing himpathy all along.

The “Ted Lasso” finale is satisfying fan service about the power of friendship, but altogether the uneven third season teaches us a more important lesson. It is self-defeating to believe in redemption without the hard work of resolving the crisis. As a culture, we are no more ready for the premier league as Nate the kit man was ready to coach his own team. CNN is so eager to bring back Trump’s misogyny opera that it hosted him for a 70-minute town hall a few days before Mother’s Day. He was in fighting form. He paced the stage. He sparred with his far younger female interlocutor. The audience was packed with Trump supporters. The camera panned to them when Trump hit a rhetorical high note. Their faces were frozen in various states of collective effervescence. They may be a minority, but Trump’s America is willing to fight to the death for toxic masculinity. Not even in our imaginations can we seem to muster an equally passionate, positive defense. Until we can, we do not deserve to believe.