Frank DuNN: Conversations at the junction of faith and politics
The Gospel According To Ted
Ted Lasso shows us both the worth and the price of believing.
Frank Dunn
8/24/20267 min read
Do you know Ted Lasso? Or should I say watch him?
If you do, what I’m about to say probably will make sense. If you don’t, I recommend that you go to Apple TV and subscribe just so you can watch the past seasons and the new one which, after a couple of years, has opened with a new twist.
Over a decade ago, NBC Sports developed some promotional sketches designed to strengthen and support Premier League coverage. Thus was born “An American Coach in London.”
Ted Lasso, the coach, played by Jason Sudeikis (pronounced Su-day-kiss), talks with a Southern accent, is a goofy hot shot who gets hired by Tottenham Hotspur—a football club based in Tottenham, North London—with no working knowledge of British football, the game Americans call “soccer.” He has trouble grasping the basics, like tie games, offsides, and the number of halves in a match.[1]
Sometime between 2013 and 2019, Sudeikis and several others got together and decided to take the Ted Lasso character and make him the protagonist of an unfolding story that transforms a bumbling character with a little too much self-confidence and a shortage of experience into a three-dimensional person whose optimism is the outer defense against profound inner grief and anxiety.
That’s the beginning of the gospel of Ted, who is positively neither saint nor angel. If the gospel is about anything, it is the stunning assertion that flawed human beings are indeed the vessels wherein divine consciousness makes a dwelling.
More about Ted in a moment.
Let me draw back a bit and invite you to ponder why it is that the true prophets today are rarely the “religious” people, but often are the artists, the writers, the musicians, and the comedians. Art has always been across cultures the chief way to express the inexpressible, to grab the attention of the wandering eye, to spark awe and wonder and surprise in souls bored or anxious or cynical.
On an evolutionary level, we do all these things and many more like sports and games, as we try to pass on survival information to the next generation. It is, of course, possible to pollute the creative process with half-truths, superficial platitudes, paranoid fantasies, and propaganda.
But it’s precisely the truth-tellers who deliberately take off the masks of imposters subverting what is true. The truth-tellers unabashedly announce that emperors have on no clothes, and burst the balloons of those with inflated egos enabling perennial movements to sterilize the arts, to silence critics, to regulate artistic styles, to insist on uniformity to tradition even if that tradition is decrepit or worse.
Such a group of writers, comedians, and out-of-the-box thinkers got together and forged the world of Ted Lasso.
But how does that world offer a glimpse of what I’m calling “gospel,” which in this case is wider than the Christian-specific term commonly used?
The secret of the show’s unique moral architecture is the writing room built by a mix of seasoned TV sitcom veterans and improv/sketch comedy performers who leaned heavily into humanism rather than snark, according to my online research.
Jason Sudeikis, who plays Ted Lasso, is a Saturday Night Live alum (actor/writer) known for playing charming, slightly swaggering characters. Sudeikis views himself "writer first, actor second". He was determined to make Ted an un-cynical, emotionally intelligent figure who intentionally subverts toxic masculinity and traditional "macho" sports tropes.
Bill Lawrence brought the master structure of emotional sitcom storytelling—knowing how to ground rapid-fire comedy in deep, genuine dramatic strokes.
Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard) spent years living in Europe, and brings a genuine love and understanding of international football/soccer culture and European sensibilities to the writer’s room.
Joe Kelly is another veteran writer for Saturday Night Live.
Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent): Originally hired strictly as a writer, Goldstein, a stand-up comedian and writer), felt such a deep connection to the character of Roy Kent that he secretly recorded an audition tape for the role on his last day in the writer's room. He went on to win two Emmys for acting while staying on as a writer/co-executive producer.
Jane Becker & Leann Bowen are both veteran comedy writers who brought rich character depth, ensuring the female leads (Rebecca and Keeley) had an authentic, supportive friendship rather than a conventional petty rivalry.
Ashley Nicole Black, Emmy-winning writer (A Black Lady Sketch Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee) joined in Season 2, sharpening the show's commentary on identity, mental health, and institutional authority. In my opinion some of the wisest counsel of any I’ve ever heard comes out of the mouth of Dr. Sharon, the character who is Ted Lasso’s (and the team’s) counselor/therapist through much of the second season.[2]
What in thunderation does this have to do with “gospel,” let alone why does it fit a blog focused on the intersection of faith and politics?
Most good sit-coms—"The Golden Girls” comes to mind—offer more than laughs, though plenty is hilarious. But few delve into the inner lives of the characters. Ted Lasso does. But the point seems clearly to be not to probe a character’s psyche for the sake of just doing so, but to share (I won’t say “expose”) what is going on in their psyches, another word for which is “souls.” The result is that viewers get to see that beneath the flaws and shadows, every person has a story, usually a narrative of confronting dangers, demons, and dragons just to survive, and maybe thrive.
Ted the optimist sees the possibility of positive outcomes out of the direst circumstances. Without being the least bit preachy, and without (so far as I can discern) ever mentioning religion or talking about spirituality in the abstract, Ted gives players permission to be real. The storyline becomes particularly compelling when Ted’s chipper persona begins to crack. We begin so see that all his optimism is a daily cover for deep pain and grief. He has unresolved issues and is pained by some of the decisions he has made, not the least of which is putting an ocean between himself and his wife and son in Kansas. We see the price he pays for his endlessly sunny attitude: panic attacks, conflict avoidance, living on the edge of losing far more than a game or a season—living on the precipice of losing himself.
Most of the other characters, too, are not plastic persons whom we can facily label “good” or “bad.” They are simply responding to their own traumas, fears, and insecurities. In the process, this nest of writers, governed by the mantra, “Be curious, not judgmental,” model what it is to be in real situations, replete with jealousies, rivalries, and conflicts expressing the gamut of love and hate.
I watched the first season and noticed two things that have never disappeared. One is my wish that Ted Lasso had been around when I had high school youth groups. The other is that, like my mother during moving sermons from the pulpit, I couldn’t get through an episode without choking up and shedding a few tears. As to the second, I’m good with being openly moved. As for the first, I would have been pilloried by parents for exposing their innocent teens (!) to a raunchy vocabulary where the F-word flies around like mosquitos in a Carolina swamp.
Nonetheless, Ted Lasso manages to cover most of the basics in any overview of morals: how to be authentic; how to face one’s suffering; how to pay attention to people who are hard to get along with, and moreover hard to like or love.
In one of the shows in the first season, the Richmond AFC is spooked by a curse stemming from 1914, when young soldiers were housed at the stadium before shipping off to fight in World War I. Ted arranges what he never calls (and probably no one would identify as) a ritual. Ted has every player bring a sacrifice—a deeply personal item of value—and drop it into a metal trash can set in the middle of the room. They set the items on fire to cleanse the room and release the ghosts, in a blend of humor, solemnity, and collective catharsis.
Nothing precious about it, but it is amazing to see a thoroughly secular group intuitively build a sacred space to burn away past trauma and move forward together. Is this not the gospel in action, yet flying under the radar? It seems to me that the Good News always needs to be translated into the natural idioms of communities. None escapes the necessity of occasionally defanging some demonic force preventing growth and stymying creative energy.
Wrongdoers like Jamie Tartt or Rebecca in the first season aren’t defeated or publicly shamed. They are drawn into community and given space to choose accountability. For example, in the scene I just recounted, Jamie, a star player who has an ego bigger than several other big egos put together, comes forward to make his own personal sacrifice for the team. Immediately, such an unanticipated move shifts the emotional tenor of the room from fear and division to celebration. No character on the team is likely to see what I see in it, yet they experience what I do—and maybe you do—when you live through the reality of crucifixion and resurrection. Labeling it as such is not important. Experiencing it is priceless.
When Ted arrives back in London, he wanders through the empty Richmond clubhouse. When he walks into the men’s locker room, he sees the same sign that he taped above the door episodes ago. BELIEVE. That’s it. What to believe, whom to believe? The sign is not a question; therefore, it has no answer. It is an imperative. And, as with all imperatives, you, I, the team, Ted, each of us must figure out whether we’ll respond to the imperative and what it means to do so.
At this moment in the life of the United States of America, we are either standing on the rim of disaster, or we are trying to cope with the onslaught of disasters in progress. I continue to believe that we can learn to live the Grace we might glibly say we believe in.
We are not so different from the Richmond AFC whose boss hired Ted Lasso to cross the Atlantic and effectively kill a club out of sheer spite. As we watch the viral spread of corruption, unmonitored disease, the rationalizing of genocide, abdication of public responsibility, and the host of additional enormities daily multiplying, the question sooner or later becomes not what we will do, or even can do, about it all. The issue becomes how we can redeem each moment by accepting our vulnerability, by incessantly practicing kindness, by owning our own shadows, by grounding ourselves in what truly matters, by believing in the power of common endeavor.
Not one of us is flawless.
And believe it or not, every one of us is loved far more than we can ask or imagine.
That’s the gospel as I understand it.
And I think that is the “gospel” —though he’ll never use the word—of Ted Lasso.
[1] The full original 2013 promo film is accessible at An American Coach in London, in which Ted gets hired by Tottenham Hotspur. Tottenham Hotspur also shared a fun Behind-the-scenes with Coach Ted Lasso from that original 2013 shoot on their home pitch.
[2] Much of the above material I gleaned from the internet.