Review: Ted Lasso, "Smells Like Mean Spirit" | Season 3, Episode 1
The return of the Apple TV+ comedy embraces an uncertain future for the show and its namesake
Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of the third season of Ted Lasso, which debuted today on Apple TV+. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews will only be available to paid subscribers. You can find out more on our About Page.
The decision by Jason Sudeikis to spend the better part of two years insisting that Ted Lasso was a “three-year plan” and then delivering—as the new showrunner, with Bill Lawrence stepping aside to focus on Shrinking (which I’ve been reviewing here at Episodic Medium, if you missed it)—a third season premiere with zero clarity on whether this remains to be the case is a choice.
The facts, though, are clear. Obviously, Sudeikis and his co-creators made this plan before the show became an Emmys juggernaut, and a huge calling card for Apple in an era of streaming expansion. It also happened before the show had proven the capacity of both its central character and its supporting cast to extend beyond the flimsy starting point of “U.S. football coach travels to England to coach the other football” into complex, dynamic characters that resonate with audiences. And needles to say the decision pre-dates the explosion of licensed merchandise onto store shelves, giving producer Warner Bros. plenty of incentive to keep the train rolling as long as possible. Put simply, I do not think there is any possibility that Ted Lasso as a cultural entity will cease to exist following this 12-episode third season.
But Sudeikis is very clearly still convinced that the idea of Ted Lasso as this kind of football coach has a fundamental limitation, based on “Smells Like Mean Spirit.” We reconnect with Ted at Hearthrow, sending his son Henry back home to Kansas City after six weeks in London. When he gets on the phone to his therapist Sharon afterwards, we watch as he deconstructs the evidence Henry was in his apartment—the LEGO is cleaned up, the pillow fort is decommissioned, etc. We watch as he shaves his face, packs the biscuits in his bag, and gets ready to return to AFC Richmond, but in the process he asks a crucial question: what is he still doing coaching AFC Richmond?
He went to AFC Richmond as an escape from his failing marriage, and he stayed when it became clear that he could make a difference in the lives of his players and coworkers…and that the marriage was truly over. The second season, though, saw Ted channeling all his energy into “rescuing” his team from relegation, failing to register that he himself needed to be rescued from an ongoing mental health struggle. But while his road to recovery is still ongoing, Richmond is officially back in the Premier League, and now Ted finds himself in a climate where everyone thinks the team will be relegated again, Rebecca is champing at the bit to wage war against Rupert and Nate at West Ham, and Ted is too busy tracking Henry’s flight back to Kansas City to be invested in much of any of it.
By the end of “Smells Like Mean Spirit,” it is clear that Ted Lasso will not remain in London past this Premier League season. I was a bit insulted when the show felt they needed a cliffhanger ending where Henry’s getting toys from a new Dad, to be honest, because the existentialism is itself enough to make their point clear. Sharon is right that Ted never quits anything, but this implies that his “task” is to win, something that he’s inherently struggled to internalize over the course of the show’s run. Rebecca is right that at the end of the first season he was fiery in his determination that they’d return to the Premier League and “win the whole fucking thing,” but a lot has changed since that moment in terms of his life’s priorities, and we see more than enough here to conclude that he is not going to be the coach Rebecca pictures as her champion in the war ahead.
The question, though, is how much the show is willing to commit to the idea that he’s actually the coach she needs. Their tension in “Smells Like Mean Spirit” comes from the optics of Ted abandoning practice to take the team into the literal sewer while “Wonder Kid” Nathan Shelley spits insults about the entire media predicting Richmond to finish dead last in the Premier League. Unlike Rebecca, we saw the players before Ted abandoned practice, losing their focus in the locker room as pundit after pundit questions their capacity to win. We also see how his roundabout lesson about how each player needs to create a sewer system and then connect those systems together like an emotionally supportive human centipede to feed off of their best coping strategies seems to get through to them, to the point that they use it as soon as the news of Nate’s comments breaks. We know that despite outward appearances, Ted’s approach continues to work, and Rebecca herself seems to understand this at their press conference as he pivots away from her desired counter-attack against Nate to instead self-deprecate.
But here’s the thing: although last season the show ignored this in order to focus on personal stakes, Rebecca is the owner of a business, and it actually is deeply important that Richmond succeed on the pitch in order to remain solvent as a business. And the truth is that last season Richmond returned to the Premier League in spite of Ted’s coaching style and not because of it, at least given how little the show seemed concerned about connecting the on-field developments to what was happening behind-the-scenes. In the comments of my review of the season two finale, someone wrote at great lengths about how the show is really about how Ted’s “players are people first” approach adopted from famous college coach John Wooden and his Pyramid of Success is superior, but I always return back to the moment in the first season where Beard has to remind Ted that these are not college students. Their professional futures depend on this, and he can’t treat his job like his goal is to make them better people instead of winning matches.
But the show definitely wants him to do this, and my greatest fear for this season is that the show is going to suggest Ted’s coaching philosophy is so powerful it can propel a barely-promoted team to the Premier League championship—an unprecedented feat—as the ultimate underdog sports story. He may be right that focusing his attention on helping his players continue to connect as a team and work through the pressures of playing professional sports will generate positive results on the field, and it’s clear from our brief glimpses of Nathan Shelley: Head Coach that it’s far superior to the insults and punishment being doled out at West Ham. But the show cannot simultaneously shell out for Premier League licensing to amp up realism and insist that there are not fundamental realities of the Premier League—money, contracts, etc.—that would create a ceiling on how a team like AFC Richmond would perform.
And thus we have the tension that sits at the future of both Ted Lasso and Ted Lasso. If this is a TV show about AFC Richmond, it needs to be about striving to win the Premier League, because that’s the goal you need to have at an elite level. But if this is a TV show about Ted Lasso, that’s not the goal he has, nor a goal he wants to have. It’s Henry who adds the Premier League trophy to Ted’s LEGO recreation of a football stadium, not Ted, who cares far more about Henry’s optimism that he and Nate could one day be friends again. That, in truth, is all Ted wants: to reconcile his emotional connection to the people who have been part of this journey. And at least in this premiere, I was heartened that the show observed this tension but also a bit alarmed when Rebecca smiles to herself as Keeley lauds her for letting Ted be Ted, knowing that a conscious uncoupling needs to be in their future for both sides to get what they really want.
This brings us to the other unconscious uncoupling, as Roy and Keeley spend the episode apart before coming together to break the news to Phoebe that they’ve…well, they don’t really know. I sort of admire the writers’ choice to just have Phoebe herself point out how stupid this storyline is so I don’t have to spend too much time on it. There’s zero effort to actually connect to the forced effort to poke holes in their relationship in last season’s epilogue, and when Phoebe pushes them for any kind of explanation it’s all dumb cliches about being busy, as though they weren’t busy before. Sure, we see Keeley so busy that she double booked her lunch with Rebecca with her emotional breakdown, and Roy expresses some anxiety about taking over the tactical side of the team in Nate’s absence, but the notion that they need to break up—or, in Keeley’s words, take a break—is unmotivated and feels like a contrived source of tension about which I share Phoebe’s position: it’s stupid.
Although it’s a super-sized premiere, there’s not much room for the rest of the supporting cast to get involved: the team has their anxieties, but no one player’s story rises to the surface, and Beard and Higgins are purely supporting their bosses here. The rest of the episode’s oxygen belongs to Nathan Shelley, as the show begins splitting its time between three different workplaces. And look, I know the episode ends with Ted convincing himself that it’s possible for he and Nate to still be friends, but who the hell wants to be friends with Nate given the way he treats people? Between his abuse of his players and his appalling disrespect to his coworkers, Nate is just a wholly unlikeable presence, and I can already tell I am going to struggle mightily with the redemption narrative the show is laying out.
Because ultimately, Ted Lasso as a show and Ted Lasso as a person need to believe that there is good in everyone, and that it’s just about getting through to them. And with Nate, the show is not being subtle about where all of this behavior comes from. It’s a classic Catch-22, because the very qualities that Ted and others hold onto in order to believe that he is capable of being redeemed—his humble beginnings, his innocence—are also the ones that drive him to be a relentless asshole. He’s so obsessed with being valued and appreciated, but any praise he receives only convinces him he isn’t worthy of it, forcing him to pull himself further away from his former identity and just mistreat everyone around him. Throw in a healthy dose of daddy issues with his father, Ted, and now Rupert, and you’re left with a truly broken man who is so consumed by his traumas that he has no perception of anything but himself.
This premiere gives us a solid glimpse of his relationship with Rupert, which feels like it will be important moving forward. On the one hand, you could argue that he is enabling Nate and his behavior, pushing him to dig at a wounded Ted and Richmond and continue salting the earth in that relationship. And certainly there’s a real turning point in Nate driving into the stadium in the beat-up old car he chauffeured Ted with back in the pilot, but driving off with a fancy new sports car that better reflects the person he wants to be, Rupert watching from his creepy window. But to suggest that Rupert is the one corrupting Nate is misleading: all Rupert is doing is feeding Nate’s toxic behavior, either because he sincerely believes it will help him win or because he knows it will fuel his feud with Rebecca. All Rupert is doing is delivering positive affirmation to a broken man desperate for validation, who—ironically, given how he leaked Ted’s mental health issues—has a breakdown as soon as he leaves the bubble and faces the media.
To put it in another way: as Ted reckons with why he’s still in London, Nate has yet to fully reckon with why he’s doing anything he’s doing. There’s no capacity for self-reflection, only a soulless quest for respect that he feels he has earned, with no regard for who gets hurt along the way. It’s clear that we’re going to be charting Ted’s navigation with the end of his football coaching career with the beginning of Nate’s, and I just hope that in doing so there’s a concerted effort for everyone to unpack how Nate’s situation happened and what could have been done to stop it. I need Ted and Beard to confront how they could have done more to minimize his mistreatment of their team, and I eventually will need Nate to accept responsibility for his actions. This isn’t to say I need them all to be friends, and frankly if they’re setting up Nate returning to Richmond as coach in Ted’s absence I’m going to be furious because that store is closed as far as I’m concerned. But the end of one career and the beginning of another offers a meaningful space to ruminate, and the show owes that to the characters and their storylines.
That is going to be a tall order. I’m not convinced I’m capable of having empathy for Nate after how he’s treated everyone around him, and while I admire the show’s choice to tackle his unlikeability head on, I’m not sure how you build a comic season of television around it. “Smells Like Mean Spirit” isn’t without comedy, but that comedy dies when we visit West Ham, where Nate’s continued insistence he said “Wunderkind” is too pathetic to elicit a chuckle. And while Ted being Ted at the press conference asserts that the status quo of the show’s relentless positivity will still have a place, ending on his existential questions about his future points to a tension that will make it harder for the show to avoid the stakes and consequences they’ve established.
Which is why this is the final season of Ted Lasso as we know it. By season’s end, we’ll see whether the post-Ted AFC Richmond has enough of a purpose to become a show in its own right, or whether Roy and Keeley’s on-and-off romance will bridge their respective workplaces enough to sustain a larger narrative. And while the circumstances necessitate a focus on Premier League championships, it’s clear that these human dynamics are more central to Sudeikis’ vision for this final season, and how he chooses to resolve that will ultimately determine the Lassoverse’s future.
Stray observations
If you noticed the credits moving much faster than usual, you’re right—Toheeb Jimoh (Sam), Cristo Fernández (Dani), Kola Bokinni (Isaac), Billy Harris (Colin), Anthony Head (Rupert), and James Lance (Trent Crimm, formerly of The Independent) have all become series regulars. And speaking of which…
Colin Corner: Of the actors elevated to regulars, Colin is by far the least developed, and so I’m really curious what facilitated this move. If you’re following these reviews from their former home, you’ll recall that I spent much of season two scrounging for some sort of evidence to follow up on the time Colin casually brought up Grindr, so consider my antenna fully erect actually no scratch that, don’t do that, abort metaphor.
They could have just had Sharon on the phone, given that she’s now with another sports team and simply seeing Ted as an ongoing client, but I do appreciate that they took the time to be like “Sharon Fieldstone fucks” as Sarah Niles departs the regular cast to guest status.
Look, if you’re going to license Premier League teams, you really do need to commit to realism, so can we have a conversation about the idea of a direct flight from London to Kansas City? Did they invent this route exclusively for Ted?
Related: with due respect to the young actor playing Henry, I do not believe that child would have any opinion on his country’s political climate, and worry the show doesn’t realize that not every child actor can pull off Phoebe’s wisdom beyond her years.
“Fuck you, Joe Rogan”—I’m absolutely for this sentiment, although I don’t know that I was clear on what Keeley was doing, exactly? Was she acting as Rebecca’s PR rep? Is Rebecca formally a client? That was certainly my sense, but hard to gauge with the exposition necessary in their time together.
Jamie’s hair has…only gotten worse between seasons. I truly can’t stand to look at it. It hurts my eyes.
While James Lance’s presence in the credits confirms that his weird prominence at the end of last season means we’ll be getting a followup on Trent Crimm, formerly of the Independent, we do learn that fellow press room mainstay Marcus has picked up his gig, which gets a nice reaction during Ted’s press conference.
With Rebecca’s presence in the office, it’s hard to gauge how much we’re meant to see figures like Keeley’s CFO as characters we expect to see again, but I presume that wasn’t just a one-off conflict over finances.
Fun little moment where sweet, simple Will is busy trying to balance water bottles on his knee before Ted calls him over to get the hippie bus driver who started a cult and lives at the stadium (that runner was…weird).
I was a bit annoyed that Ted didn’t actively mention Match Game while trying to convince the press to go along with his joke structure, given that’s where I remember being introduced to it.
Obviously, we know Apple shows have absurd music budgets that allow them to afford Beyoncé, but I’m not super convinced “Ring the Alarm” matched the vibes of the final scene? And while Jake isn’t a bad name for a stepdad, I do think Harry’s even better, so a pity that was off the table.
Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Ted Lasso! I started this Substack five months after concluding my reviews of season two at The A.V. Club, and being able to continue the dialogue I started with the readers and commenters there was a huge reason I wanted to create a space to continue writing in this format. I know not everyone reads the comments, but I spent some time going through the comments on my finale review, and I was reminded how enriching I found the back and forth my critical take on the show inspired. And while I’m sure that there will be some mild celebration when a review appears on the site without my byline, I’m hopeful some of you will migrate here to continue what I feel are really productive conversations about comedy, narrative, and the function of criticism. As ever, your direct support makes it possible for these conversations to have a home online, and so spread the word and help support these reviews and the rest of our Spring lineup here at the site (check out our About Page for the full schedule).
While it's entirely possible that I'm reading too much into this, I think the set design of Rupert's office was quite telling as far as what the show has planned for him and Nate. If you show me a guy wearing all black sitting in a big black chair in a big black room in front of a big, circular window, my mind is immediately going to the Emperor's throne room from Return of the Jedi. And there are certainly further parallels with Rupert promising Nate the one thing he desires the most and drawing Nate further into his thrall by encouraging his worst impulses. Which naturally leads to the question, is the Emperor/Darth Vader parallel intentional? And if so, will it continue all the way through to Vader's redemption at the end of the film (with Ted, the person who sees the good in everyone, as the Luke in this metaphor)?
As big an asshole as Nate has been shown to be, I do see how they could at least engender sympathy for him by revealing that Rupert never believed in him or his acumen, that he only stole him away from Richmond to get back at Rebecca, and that he doesn't actually care about Nate as a person. In essence, having Rupert play the part of Rebecca from the pilot, with the difference being that Nate is no Ted and has no desire to try and turn their relationship into a healthy one (nor is Rupert a Rebecca, as he lacks things like "a heart" or "a soul"). Whether such a play would be enough to pull off a full Nate face turn (or if such a play is even in the cards) is yet to be seen, but I can kinda see the contours of a way in which they could try to make it work.
You're right that they need to be careful not to make everything Ted does "clap if you believe in fairies" magic and at least pay some lip service to the idea that football fundamentals matter. But beyond that I don't care even a tiny little bit about the "realism" of a team at the bottom of the Premier League winning it all, and I sure as hell don't want (and don't expect) the show to turn into a treatise on training best practices. Look at it this way: I assume all the teams in the league (including Richmond) spend 90% of their time doing the same kinds of drills and strategies. A show called Ted Lasso is going to focus on the 10% of time that Ted Lasso's way makes a difference.
It was a good start but necessarily had to spend a lot of time on table (re)setting. This is the first season I have watched live so not being able to move the plot along by pressing the Next button is going to be a little frustrating.
Stray Observations
* I liked that they lampshaded that Rupert giving Nate the car was not intended as a big surprise.
* The Roy and Keeley nonsense... can we not?