My favorite part of Ted Lasso is when it reveals that it’s so much more than a show about being nice. During season one, my husband and I sat beside each other watching Episode 7, “Make Rebecca Great Again.” As the characters performed karaoke and Ted escaped outside to melt against a brick wall, we exchanged observations.
Jason: “He’s going to sign the divorce papers.”
Me: “He’s going to have a panic attack.”
We were both right, though my prediction materialized first, which was validating: I’ve suffered panic attacks myself, and I had sensed something simmering beneath Ted’s “aww shucks” exterior for awhile. There was more to his story than positivity.
That thread is picked up again in “Man City,” episode 8 of the current season [spoiler alert…].
Roy Kent is the sort of person who is kind, but not nice. His gruff exterior and countless f-bombs — the latter of which lead to him getting called into his niece Phoebe’s school because she’s been mimicking that behavior — belie a solid emotional core, evidenced by his willingness to have a come-to-Jesus with Phoebe about his fear that he’s passing his worst traits on to her. Later in the episode, after Richmond’s brutal loss to Manchester City, Roy (along with the rest of the team) witnesses Jamie’s dad cruelly harangues his son. Jamie stands speechless, before Roy crosses the room to embrace perhaps his worst enemy. There’s a man who doesn’t run from his feelings.
Contrast this with Coach Lasso’s response to Jamie’s breakdown: visibly discomfited, he exits the stadium and calls team psychologist Sharon Fieldstone to tell her — through his own tears — that his father committed suicide when Ted was a teenager. After nearly 2 seasons, we’ve finally seen the skeleton in Ted’s closet, the shadow side of his personality. One senses this is just the beginning of his journey to confront that pain, given Ted’s near inability to even bring it up.
Two men: one who’ll yell at you then weep through a press conference (much to his girlfriend’s, ahem, pleasure) and the other who tells dad jokes but hasn’t properly confronted the brokenness left behind by his own dad.
Which brings me to my favorite part of the Gospel: when it reveals it’s about so much more than God — or me — being nice.
My first encounter with this truth was after two solid years of confronting my own brokenness — begrudgingly at first, then weekly, on a couch inside my counselor’s office. Primed for these confrontations by personal and professional failures that left me identity-less, these weekly couch sessions were moments of truth leading me to escape my own karaoke bar (Alabama) and find solace in the unlikeliest of places — New York City. I’d begun to wonder if God was really all he was cracked up to be; after all, I’d been obeying him (ish) for all of my life and he’d let everything go pear-shaped. Not very nice.
But in New York I made friends, felt at home, even found a church that preached about this new-fangled idea of grace. Then the bottom dropped out again, in the form of a phone call from my dad, who told me that his accountant had found I owed thousands of dollars in taxes to the state of New York and needed to move back home now. I felt betrayed: by the place that had given me a sense of belonging, and the God who’d led me there.
Underneath the betrayal, though, what I really felt was the brokenness of shame in having disappointed my dad, whose approval I’d always yearned for, and my Heavenly Father, whose voice I must have misheard.
Over the next few days, as I waited for my appointment with an accountant in Brooklyn, I cried on the subway behind sunglasses and wondered how I’d gotten everything wrong. I exchanged not-nice, yet for the first time real, words with this God I thought I knew — but who revealed to me that our relationship had been transactional up to that point. My commitment to good behavior in return for his commitment to “enlarging my territory.” And in the end, I realized that the Gospel isn’t karmic tit-for-tat, because God isn’t limited by human imagination or our attempts at control. I had come to New York and unwittingly stepped into a crucible because this was the only way I would finally see that God is not nice. But this not nice God is also so deeply and eternally more than that: he is kind. It was his lovingkindness that saved me from a lifetime of having to prove myself. I had entered a crucible and the doorway was my brokenness. The crucible, though, was made of his scarred hands and they were taking on that brokenness, transcending it and holding me.
This is grace, not karma, and grace provided the key change for my life that has persisted since — a grace that embraces me through my own shame, my own brokenness, across multiple continents and diagnoses and through parenting and marriage and every other locker room in which I’ve fallen apart.
In Mark 10, Jesus is approached by a rich young man who asks him how to get eternal life. At first, Jesus is surprisingly polite — telling the man what he wants to hear, the commandments he has successfully kept. Then he shows his devastating lovingkindness. “Jesus looked at him and loved him,” and then delivered the death blow: give up everything and follow me. Face the end of your own abilities, the deeper truths that your outward success has hidden from you. “The man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.” The issue was never about money. Not really.
Jesus has a way of pinpointing the very things we clutch with white knuckles, the things we place our security in that ultimately distance us from our own brokenness. Jesus was never all that nice, but he was always kind. To him, falling apart might just be the best thing that ever happened to us. God is close to the brokenhearted, after all. The nearer we are to the cracks and frayed edges of our lives, the more we see the grace that’s embraced us all along.
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[…] Redemption can be observed and measured from a distance: we, as an audience, can watch a redemption arc and make it totally about the onscreen character’s journey. Catharsis, though, requires our personal involvement — an emotional engagement with the story. As we watched Nate feel the grief that resulted from his choices, we felt that grief with him. Unlike, for example, Glee (a show I watched in its entirety but was rightfully skewered), which generated catharsis in a way that felt emotionally manipulative, Ted Lasso’s character arcs felt earned and authentic (until some parts of the last season, tbh) and, consequently, relatable. Particularly resonant for me was the S1 revelation that Ted suffered from panic attacks — one that added layers to his character and prevented the audience from being able to see him as just a simple, bumbling, nice guy. (Contrary to some spectators’ assessments, Ted Lasso — the person and show — was about so much more than being nice.) […]