Mustached Radical Empathy
Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso is a show of character study and comedy-drama wrapped around the guise of football. Ted was faced with the impossible task to coach a premier league club causing the media, fans, and players into a world of frenzy as to why he was selected and accepted the role.
Rebecca, the club owner of AFC Richmond, hired the inexperienced and alien-to-football coach Ted Lasso. She was rich, tall, and stunning yet was full of spite and vengeance. She is determined to hurt her wealthier and cheating ex-husband by squashing the AFC Richmond Team into bad press, losing streaks, furious fans, relegation, and bankruptcy using Ted Lasso as her star ingredient for destruction.
Then there’s Jamie Tartt, the talented striker, and scorer of the club. To make up for his godly talents, he was infamously egotistical and demeaning to others he deemed unfit. He belittled Ted, mocked the veteran teammate Roy and bullied Kitman Nathan which inspired and proliferated a predominant culture of bullying in the club.
Nathan or Nate the Great was the bullied Kitman. When given a chance to show his personality, Nate was sweet and smart which lead to his eventual promotion as an assistant coach alongside Coach Beard and others. After the recognition and attention that was scarcely given before, he deformed into a harsh and jealous person.
When Coach Ted first landed in England, he was met with conniving characters but strangely Ted Lasso, the newly anointed manager of AFC Richmond face the negativity of the Club and the community headstrong with positivity. Normally, people would match negativity equally, feeling that their pride and talents would be disrespected in an environment of hate but Ted argued that he doesn’t prioritize winning or losing rather he cares about the people around him — to make them better human beings.
In Season one episode eight, Ted and Rebecca met Rupert and his spouse at their local pub. Ted and Rupert eventually played darts which involved a bet where if Rupert loses he can’t sit and watch in the owners' box and if Ted loses Rupert can choose the last two lineups for the season. Ted agreed.
Rupert seems to love making high-stakes challenges only he can win showing his enormous vanity but unbeknownst to Rupert, Ted is talented.
In the episode, Ted said:
“All them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them were curious. They thought they had everything figured out. So they judged everything and judged everyone.
And I realized they are underestimating me — who I was had nothing to do with it.
’Cause if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions.”
The emotional and gut-wrenching monologue invokes not only emotions but three important lessons:
- Belittling and eventually judging negatively is a response to not knowing;
- Who a person ‘was’ in the past doesn’t matter in the present. People judge based on what they see and what they know now; and
- We can be more understanding and empathetic toward others through curiosity and asking questions.
Then it seems a new set of perspectives and re-framing is needed.
Jamie’s father, James Tartt Sr. loves football and his mates, which is ridiculously ironic to the minuscule love for his son. He asked for free tickets from Jamie — not to support and watch his son play but to support the opposing club and mock Jamie publicly when he lost. Not just emotional abuse, James Tartt Sr. is also physically abusive towards his son, claiming he was not proud of him and then throwing a shoe at Jamie in the process. Jamie Tartt is a victim of abuse but passed down the cycle of abuse to others and had transformed into James Tartt Sr.
Rebecca has an incredibly wealthy and unfaithful father. Her father’s acts didn’t only hurt her mother but also created an old wound in Rebecca’s childhood. Rebecca despised her mother for not leaving and constantly forgiving her father. But ironically, Rebecca married Rupert, a direct carbon copy of her own wealthy and unfaithful father. Her hatred is not only toward Rupert, her father, and her mother but also towards herself.
Nate’s eventual fall of grace was also driven by his father. His father was emotionally absent and yet loudly judgemental. He was shown to throw looks of disapproval and passive-aggressive judgment. As implied in the show, Nathan had lack or had no confidence and bravery which resulted in his lack of success, at least until Ted showed up. At first, Nathan felt his father was ashamed or holds no respect for his son’s vocation but even after Nate’s promotion as an Assistant Coach and his celebrated winning tactics is meaningless. From feeling invisible to gaining confidence and attention, his father easily crushes it by rendering his achievement and confidence into nothing.
In the show, Nathan seeks Ted as his father figure but in Season Two Ted is unable to be radically selfless and was preoccupied with his mental wellness. The only one who’d filled decades of absence, Nate felt alone and neglected.
In a world where social media and superficial qualities are championed, as a society, we are subjected to judge people on the surface and to hate unapologetically without consequences in our fake-Twitter accounts.
As I’ve written before, writers of books and shows alike, are emotional manipulators. They conjure characters to be hated and to be loved by framing and focusing on the negative traits of said characters like how I portrayed Jamie, Rebecca, and Nathan before. In real life, we are all uninitiated and new people are blank pieces of paper. We wrote the blank paper based on our perceptions and experiences and react to what we have written before. Rather than act based on a presumption of what we see and feel, the show wanted us to have the gift of hindsight, by assessing maybe people are the way they are because of unseen and yet communicated factors. To unlock and understand is not to react with negativity but to ask questions and try to understand and connect.
“ — Questions like ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?’ To which I would answer ‘Yes, sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father, from age ten till I was 16, when he passed away.’” Ted said “Barbeque sauce.” Ted continued, as he shot the last dart and won the game.
What we can learn from the show is that Ted took the course of radical empathy, a type of empathy that can be executed in the absence of information and communication but serves better if information and communication are present. Ted might not know back stories and details of Jamie, Rebecca, or Nathan but retracts judgment, ridiculing, belittling, hating and any negative verbs one can muster as he understood people are defined by their past but are inherently good because humans can change for the better.
Sadly, this level of empathy is gained by Ted with an unpleasant experience of witnessing his father’s death. Ted expresses that his father was kind and cheerful to everyone but still doesn't understand why his father committed suicide. From this experience, Ted learned that even the nicest of people can still be misunderstood, and implied that negative feelings and emotional wounds should not be left untreated or be zealously punished, promoting psychological treatment and communication.
In the football-themed show, where masculinity, male-dominated, and men’s stereotypical assumption to be mentally and physically strong are predominant, they present a challenge for the people to do the opposite. They argued; if in that world they could change and be empathetic, why can’t we?
