Dog-Eared Corner - Z2.1
Ted Lasso Was Always Going to be a Loser
(SPOILERS: Ted Lasso season 1 & Remember the Titans)
Okay, let me re-phrase: Ted Lasso, the character, and his lineup of misfit boys, were destined to lose the final game in the series’ first season. Not because he was a bad coach, or they a pack of losers. Not because Ted was an American football coach who knew absolutely nothing about soccer, or because he was set up to fail from the beginning. Not even because having them lose in Season 1 gives the series somewhere to go in the next season (though this is far closer to the answer than any of those other things).
No, Ted Lasso (and his team, AFC Richmond) had to lose in the end, because that’s what the narrative demanded.
Why couldn’t they win, you ask?
To answer this, we must examine what the show—what the story was really about.
In a recent post, we explored the meaning of the word “Protagonist”. We determined that a narrative’s protagonist, is in fact a function of its conflict (rather than the other way around). Because, conflict as you may recall (the combination of Goals and Obstacles), is essentially what the story is, and wherever our empathy falls within that conflict, THAT is the Protagonist.
Ooohhhh! Okay, Wing. I get you.
Oh, hello, Mr. Rhetorical Device! It feels like forever since we last spoke.
That’s because you don’t blog as much these days.
Right. Um, sorry.
Anyway, I think I see where you’re going with this. We’re reverse-engineering this shit. If Ted Lasso is the Protagonist, we have to look at HIS PRIORITIES to see what the conflict is.
Interesting. Please, go on.
Well, we KNOW Ted is the protagonist. We’re able to determine the main conflict (and his Narrative Goal) by looking at the the things he says and does. On at least four occasions, he tells us that he doesn’t care about winning or losing. Trent Crimm from The Independent even reiterates this in his profile on Ted.
So we can SEE that winning is not the goal. Winning is secondary. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter if Ted wins or loses the final game; his goal can still be achieved (or confounded) regardless.
Oh, you dear, sweet rhetorical being. I don’t think you’ve ever been closer to a correct answer than with what you just gave me.
And yet…
You’ve still got it backward. We can’t say we’re aware of the Narrative Goal because of the kind of character Ted Lasso is;
We know what kind of character Ted Lasso is, because of the Narrative Goal.
Ted could tell us he doesn’t care about winning or losing TEN TIMES EVERY SINGLE EPISODE; if the Narrative tells us otherwise, we’ll know that he’s lying.
So what does the Narrative tell us?
Over the course of the season, we see the team play a good number of games, yet, aside from the finale, there’s very little actual game-play shown onscreen. When there is, the successes and failures we see are never in terms of winning the game. The obstacles are always either internal to the character or interpersonal among the team. Moreover, the team wins a number of games over the course of their season, and loses more (probably), yet the narrative’s focus never falls on Win vs Lose.
We know Ted Lasso doesn’t care about winning, because the narrative doesn’t.
Now you may recall, I didn’t say, “It didn’t matter if Ted Lasso won or lost the last game”, which might be the case if it were simply a story that happened to take place in a soccer club—if the soccer itself didn’t matter. But what I said was, he was “destined to lose”. Because, narratively, this had to happen. To understand why, let’s stop looking at what this story isn’t, and examine for a second, what it is.
Ted Lasso is about FAMILY.
More specifically, it’s about found family. In ten 30(ish)-minute episodes, the series offers an assemblage of disparate egos, warring motivations, deep insecurities, and characters who are essentially—and in actual fact—strangers; it takes this mess of incompatible realities, and one by one, it pieces them together. It smooths the seams and repairs the tears as they come.
Watching, we see without having to think about it, this is what each and every episode is about. Bringing people together. Forming family. This is the Narrative Goal. So when good ol’ Ted tells us he doesn’t care about winning or losing, we don’t think to question it; this is a truth we’ve already internalized.
Okay, Wing. I see how I got that wrong. But, hang on. By what you’re saying, since, winning was never the goal, couldn’t they have still one the last game? They’re family either way, aren’t they? Can’t they just … be winners too?
Remember Remember the Titans? (Heh.) There’s a film about an unstable team forming bonds like family, yet in the end, they won.
Yes! Very astute, Mr. Strawman! But you see, there’s a difference. Remember the Titans was always also about winning. The film establishes this right off when Coach Boone is told he’ll be fired if he loses even a single game. His Goal is to win the Championship. (He just has to bring the team together in order to do this.) The major obstacles in the film’s Narrative are not things that threaten to tear the team apart, but ones that threaten their victory. A conspiracy to rig games against them. The injury of their star quarterback. Even the intra-team squabbling early on. All of these serve the Win vs Lose conflict.
Ted Lasso, on the other hand, faces none of these challenges. Even when the team’s owner, Rebecca, endeavours to sabotage the team’s chances of winning, she does this by attempting to tear them apart. In away, Ted Lasso is a complete reversal of Remember the Titans.
With Ted, it’s ALWAYS about Family.
And so, at last, we come to the finale. Why must Richmond lose it’s game in the season’s last episode? For the exact same reason the Titans had to win. Like Coach Boone, Ted brings his team—even deleterious owner, Rebecca—into a single cohesive unit. And like Boone, he does this by uniting them around a common goal: winning. But their goal isn’t his goal, remember; the bringing them together part had always been his goal. So the only way to test his success—the only way we can see he’s truly succeeded, is to take away the thing uniting them, to dissolve the framework around which they have constructed their familial bonds and see if they hold together.
And so they lose.
And what are we shown? The team survives it. They’re sad together. The lost son, who in fact played against them, is shown he’s still loved and valued. And the surrogate (and initially reluctant) mother figure refuses to allow Ted to leave.
Win or lose, they are family.
None of this could have happened if they won. The strength of their bonds—the achievement of the Narrative’s Goal—would have been untested. Unclear. If they had won, we the viewers might have been happier. We probably would have still liked the show—maybe even as much—but it would have lost so much meaning; its impact would have been diminished.
And this, a true writer—a true artist—could never suffer.
Ted Lasso was destined to be a loser. Only in defeat can is victory be seen.
