![]() ![]() Nate’s colleagues do not treat him like an authority figure, let alone an esteemed member of their team, which the show makes clear is especially bruising in a work environment that consists of only male colleagues. At the funeral for Rebecca’s father, Nate shows up in a suit Ted picked out for him, prompting Jan, a player for AFC Richmond, to say, “Another man buying you clothes is infantilizing, no?” When a guilt-ridden Nate confesses to Roy that he kissed Keeley, Roy laughs him off, because he believes Nate could never be a rival for his girlfriend’s affections. Ted no longer showers Nate with the kind of praise he did in season one, and he hires Roy as another assistant coach, making Nate feel less valuable. In season two, the micro- and macro-aggressions that led to Nate’s blowup were planted deftly over multiple episodes. They did what they thought would seem nice for Nate and the show’s audience. In this season of Ted Lasso, and with Nate’s story line in particular, the writers forgot this. ![]() Niceness is not the same as kindness, which more regularly involves selflessness as evidence of care. It can be surface-level behavior and, too often, what people fall back on when they face confrontation. Being nice means being agreeable, polite, pleasant. ![]() Affording someone grace is not the same thing as being nice, an adjective that, understandably, has stuck to Ted Lasso, because it so blatantly seeks to uplift its audience. It’s Ted Lasso succumbing to its worst impulses.Īt its best - and it was at its best in its first season and most of its second - Ted Lasso celebrated the ways humanity is better served, as a community and collection of individuals, when we recognize that all of us are fallible and everyone deserves some grace. Rather than make a meaningful effort to examine Nate’s nastiness (an effort they definitely expended on Ted while exploring his panic attacks), the show backpedaled away from darker notions and returned Nate to the gentleness he’d demonstrated in season one - all in the interest of a happy ending. The writers, juggling way too many story lines and inflating run times to accommodate them, lost their focus and, more important, their nerve. Given that season-two snapshot, it was natural to assume that season three, seemingly the show’s last, would deconstruct this aggressive version of Nate as well as the role Ted and his teammates played in making him feel so disrespected. In one simple shot, the former assistant coach at AFC Richmond, heretofore regarded by his colleagues as nonthreatening, is transformed into a real threat, a man so angered by the indignities he endured to this point that his hair has turned white, he has leaked information about Ted’s panic attacks to the press, quit his position working under the coach, and taken a job as head of rival squad West Ham. The last frame of the season-two finale of Ted Lasso is the seething face of Nate Shelley. The third (and presumably last) season of Ted Lasso chickened out on its heel turn. ![]()
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