Ted Lasso Season 3 Made A Catastrophic Storytelling Decision From Which It Never Recovered
This post contains spoilers for "Ted Lasso" season 3.
The third and presumably final season of "Ted Lasso" was a complete mess. Sure, it had a few nice moments: Jamie and Roy forging a friendship (which was inexplicably marred in the finale), Rebecca meeting that random Dutch guy, Trent Crimm being welcomed into the Diamond Dogs, Colin coming out to his teammates. But so much of the rest of the season was the result of sloppy storytelling, where several significant plot beats happened totally off camera and extended episode runtimes stretched underwhelming storylines to the breaking point. (Sorry, Keeley: The KJPR subplot did not deserve nearly that much attention.)
But amid a number of missteps and stumbles, one terrible decision towers over the rest. In my eyes, the biggest mistake the "Ted Lasso" writers made in the third season was how it handled Nate, AFC Richmond's former kitman who became a full-fledged villain in the season 2 finale.
Nate the Not-So-Great
In the season 2 finale, after Nate launches into a tirade against Ted, taking a swipe at his family, calling him a "f***ing joke," and generally behaving like a spoiled, entitled child, the show cuts ahead two months, revealing Nate has been hired as a coach for Rupert Mannion, the show's overarching villain. Nate smugly smirks at the camera as the episode cuts to black. The visual and emotional language of the show is clear: Nate is now a "bad guy." The heel turn is complete.
We've seen that he has a tough relationship with his father, and his underlying anxiety and insecurity are relatable to viewers. But the way he lashes out at Ted — as well as his West Ham players and characters like new Richmond kitman Will — in order to make himself feel better is not excusable by his past traumas. The show knows this: In the language of the series, we're supposed to think Nate is being a total jerk.
Nate and Jade, the show's worst romance
The problem, then, is that "Ted Lasso" also expects the audience to invest in a romance subplot between Nate and Jade, the hostess at A Taste of Athens. There are interminable minutes devoted to this relationship, which I could not have possibly cared less about. Even if I was able to care about this subplot, the show borked it every step of the way. As a character, Jade is designed to be somewhat enigmatic, but instead comes off as a blank canvas.
Much worse than that, Nate's outlook on women seems incredibly toxic. I don't know if it was ever established exactly how old the Nate character is in the series, but Nick Mohammed, the actor who plays him, is 42 years old. It's not cute for a 42-year-old man to be asking his female family members "how do you tell if a girl likes you" and stalking around outside her place of business. The fact that they respond "You can't!" like it's some kind of joke is also not great. (The show awkwardly tried to legitimize that question by having Roy ask it in the finale, but it rang false because we've seen him have an actual relationship with a woman by that time.)
Later in the season, when Rupert (who knows Nate is in a relationship) invites Nate out to a bar and surprises him by having two women there with him, Nate walks away. It's clearly the correct moral choice, but I did not feel the wave of triumph I'm sure the show intended me to feel, because by the show's own standards, Nate is still the villain! He cursed out the hero of the series! The very person who believed in him enough to promote him from a locker room attendant to a coach!
If this were a show like "Succession," where parsing the nuances in flawed characters is the name of the game, maybe these moments would work. But this is "Ted Lasso," a happy-go-lucky series that has defined itself by its "warm hug" appeal and its straightforward, some might say obvious, approaches to things like character and story. I appreciate ambition in narrative storytelling, but by season 3, this show nearly drowned in its ambition and lost sight of what made it interesting in the first place.
A catastrophic decision
Going into season 3, there were predictions galore about what Nate's "redemption" might look like. But the writers of "Ted Lasso" season 3 botched that, too — and this fundamental mistake altered the entire balance of the season, and therefore the show.
By definition, for redemption to occur, one must do something to offset or compensate for a defect. But here, the order of events is backwards. Nate literally does not try to apologize to or make amends with Ted until the very last episode, after he's already been hired back on the AFC Richmond staff.
Even his rehiring felt like a flawed piece of storytelling. Coach Beard comes to Nate's door, offering an olive branch to his former colleague, asking him to come back to the team, and revealing his own surprising history with Ted in the process. The emotional scene is intended to make you feel like Beard is doing the right thing, and maybe even make you feel a little bit bad for judging Nate so harshly over the course of the season. But again, the show itself had set Nate up as a villain, and had done absolutely nothing to make me think fondly about the character in the intervening time. Literally the only thing that could cause me to care about Nate again is seeing him apologize to Ted and try to make things right, which hadn't happened yet. So the writers spent the entire season spinning these Nate wheels, leaving the audience at arm's length and doing a disservice to both the character and the series in the process. It was a catastrophic decision, and one from which the bloated "Ted Lasso" season 3 simply could not recover.
"Ted Lasso" is currently streaming on Apple TV+.