"Be A Goldfish; It's Got A 10-Second Memory"

Why Ted Lasso may be the perfect show at the perfect time for an angry and divided nation

You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? A goldfish. You know why? They got a ten-second memory.

• Ted Lasso

I didn’t start watching Ted Lasso until about halfway through the second season. My experience with shows based on sports is that they’re generally

A) poorly written,

B) show a distressing lack of knowledge of the game and/or

C) are sappy beyond belief.

So, I figured I’d give Ted Lasso a pass. I have enough stupidity in my life, right? Besides, I’m a Spurs fan; if I want to be frustrated by a soccer team, I can watch Tottenham v. virtually any English Premier League side on just about any weekend morning. It’s like being a Minnesota Vikings fan; you get used to having your expectations built up…only to be let down hard. (Though, to be fair, Spurs are exceeding expectations this season…like top-of-the-table exceeding expectations.)

Then I’d heard enough of my soccer fan friends telling me that it wasn’t just a soccer show; it was very well done and about much more than the game. I became curious and watched the first two seasons in pretty short order…and I was very favorably impressed.

I haven’t watched Season Three because Erin has yet to watch Season Two, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of her. And so I wait…and wait…and wait….

NASHVILLE — I didn’t watch the first season of “Ted Lasso” until the second season was already underway on Apple TV+. I wish I’d been watching from the very beginning, when it first began streaming in 2020. It would have made me feel better during a national election season — not because the show is even winkingly political but because its characters are so utterly, inescapably human. Humanity felt sorely lacking from public life in those days.

By the time the aw-shucks football coach showed up on our screens, we had long since become Americans mired in an America we no longer recognized, a nation so dangerously polarized that many people would think nothing of cutting off their closest family members if they didn’t vote the “right” way. As the first episodes of “Ted Lasso” were being released in 2020, a report by the Pew Research Center noted that “A month before the election, roughly eight-in-ten registered voters in both camps said their differences with the other side were about core American values, and roughly nine-in-ten — again in both camps — worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.”

Ted Lasso never would’ve worked if it had been set in the US…say, if Lasso had been coaching an MLS side. No, the fact that he was dropped in England and the culture shock, along with the clashes between his Americanisms and the stiff-upper-lip British cultural tendencies, make for some enjoyable humor.

Lasso arrives at AFC Richmond a broken man, though he camouflages it well. On the verge of his divorce being finalized, separated from his young son, and faced with coaching a sport he neither recognizes nor understands, Lasso is at a crossroads.

Faced with being alone in a foreign culture where the beer is warm, the food is terrible, and people drive on the wrong side of the road, Lasso determines he could go one of two ways. He could lose himself in self-pity or seize his new opportunity and use it as a life preserver, which is the choice he makes.

He comes off as a preternaturally sunny personality, but he’s chosen to move forward without feeling sorry for himself. He also knows an organization depends on him, and men look to him for guidance. So, even if he isn’t always feeling it, he determines that the best way through his personal quagmire is to move forward with a smile.

It’s clear early on that Ted Lasso is a soccer story that isn’t about soccer. It’s a story that does a beautiful job of character development. Though Ted Lasso is the main character, and we learn a lot about his issues back in the States, we also learn a lot about the other people who make AFC Richmond what it is. And it’s that character development that makes Ted Lasso so rich and nuanced. Soccer is merely the vehicle that ties the story together.

Ted Lasso provides America a respite from the Sturm und Dräng that’s characterized so much of our political/ideological interaction for the past few years. We can focus on an episode with a life lesson for about an hour every week. It isn’t preachy, but if you watch and listen, there’s a message behind each episode, which usually involves taking care of and looking out for each other.

Soccer and life are a lot alike in that respect. You’ll never be successful in either if you think you can go it alone. When I played, I was a goalkeeper. My job was to keep the goal out of the back of my net by whatever means (within the laws of the game, of course) I had at my disposal.

Of course, I was one man among 11. I had to make sure my defense was organized in front of me. When things began to break down, I had to move people around to deal with problems presented by the opposition. When I had the ball in my hands, I had to let my teammates know where I was going to send it so they’d know how to organize the attack.

Sometimes, it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But we never succeeded or failed as individuals. It was never 11 soccer players running around doing whatever they thought they needed to be doing. It was 11 players trying to function as a team, a unit at least trying to pull in the same direction.

As we go through life and leave the teams we play on behind, we find other teams. Sometimes, they're called “family,” and other times, “business.” But the lessons and principles remain the same. None of us succeed on our own. We need each other, and we need to work together toward a common goal to get where we want to be.

And sometimes it takes a TV show to remind us of that.

No, Jason Sudeikis isn’t Sir Laurence Olivier, but Ted Lasso was never intended to be high drama. As nourishing entertainment, it’s not an entrée; it’s an appetizer- but one satisfying enough that it might make the viewer want to order dinner off the app menu.

“Ted Lasso” never claimed to be a healing salve for national fury. It is simply the story of a heartbroken but optimistic American football coach who accepts a job as manager of a British football team in the hands of a heartbroken and pessimistic owner who has just won it in a bitter divorce. Rebecca Welton knows almost nothing about running a sports franchise, and her imported coach knows almost nothing about the game that Brits call football. Rebecca is Miss Havisham in Manolo Blahniks. Ted is Forrest Gump in the Premier League.

But there is something about Ted Lasso’s sunny optimism and faith in silliness as a social lubricant, something about his openness and his unshakable kindness, that lifted Americans’ pandemic-worn hearts. “You know what the happiest animal in the world is?” Ted asks a glum player just bested in a team scrimmage. “A goldfish. It’s got a 10-second memory.”

We’ve been out of the pandemic for a while, but the scars remain. Our economy is still boogered up in many respects (try getting your damaged car into a body shop, f’rinstance). We may never get back to where we were, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find our way back to something close to it.

Or perhaps something different and maybe even better.

We may have lost much of where we were, but nothing says we can’t find our way back to connecting again and pulling in the same direction.

Be a goldfish; it’s got a 10-second memory.

Even as Ted Lasso struggled to adapt to England, he found a way to be himself as he tried to heal from his personal tragedy. In doing so, he lifted those around him as he lifted himself. It may not have restored his marriage or reduced the distance between himself and his son, but it was a positive step.

Sometimes, by looking outward, one can find a way to heal.

Maybe we trusted him because his cornpone wisdom turned out to be more than an empty cliché. Early in the first season, Ted repeatedly finds himself the butt of jokes and the target of stadium chants — “Wanker! Wanker! Wanker!” — but he is an adoring father whose only child is an ocean away, a family man whose wife no longer loves him. Ridicule can’t touch Ted Lasso. His sorrow is already complete.

He may think of himself as a goldfish, in other words, but he is also a broken human being who has not yet lost faith in the promise of wholeness.

Ted Lasso, the character, wasn’t shallow enough to believe that his sorrow would insulate him from the ridicule he faced from angry fans and a British press that lives to topple those who occupy pedestals. He never thought of himself as someone with nothing to lose because he wasn’t prone to self-pity, but he was solid in his self-belief and ability to motivate those around him.

Even when things looked bleak for AFC Richmond, Lasso still had hope. He knew that if he lost hope, he had nothing to offer those around him.

The team Ted inherits is a fractious group of lonely rivals and low-grade bullies from around the globe — the U.N. in a locker room. The players learn to love and trust Ted, but they also learn from him how to recognize and acknowledge each other’s humanity, how to love and trust one another. From there it’s only a small, inevitable step to playing as a real team.

In this rendering, “Ted Lasso” may come across as hardly more than a parable, a fairy tale of human failure and confusion and pain and grief that becomes a story of human goodness. But the show is also hilarious, a fictional world populated by multidimensional, one-of-a-kind eccentrics. The loony non-sequiturs and inexplicable predilections, especially coupled with the show’s extravagant use of insult and expletive, help it avoid the treacle it might otherwise have descended into.

Having spent a fair amount of time in locker rooms, I can attest that there’s no way the show could’ve duplicated what takes place there. It can be a profane, fractious, and occasionally volatile atmosphere that’s nowhere near as clean and docile as we see on Ted Lasso.

Still, I love the halftime scenes for the humanity and lessons Lasso imparts to his charges. The “loony non-sequiturs and inexplicable predilections” are a bit over the top, but motivation can be as much art as science, and every coach approaches it differently. If self-parody is genuine and not an act, it can work. Athletes respect honesty and detest artifice.

If a team I played for was down 3-0 at halftime, we already knew that we sucked. We didn’t need a coach to blow sunshine up our skirts. We wanted something we could grab onto, something that might give us at least a glimmer of hope.

Sometimes, a trick play might be your best (or only) hope…because ain’t nothin’ else working, amiright??

I had a high school football coach who used to beat up a school bus when we were stinking up the field at away games…which was most of the time. I don’t know if the school district billed him for the damage he did, but his attempts at motivating us were largely unsuccessful. I kept my head down (and tried not to laugh) until his rage subsided…or halftime ended. I was a backup quarterback who spent most of the time on the sideline; what was I supposed to do?

I’m looking forward to watching Season Three- if Erin ever manages to get through Season Two.

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