What’s Beard Reading? (3.05: “Signs”)
When I started these short weekly reflections for Season 3, I took a risk that there would be something of note to say about Beard’s reading selection(s) each week. Beard’s books in Seasons 1 & 2 were varied and interesting enough to justify that risk, I thought. And over the last few weeks, I have found this lens helpful for better understanding the show’s characters and themes.
This past week, though, I found myself frustrated — both by Beard’s book choice and by what I think it might suggest about the show’s direction.
Metaphor has been the driving force behind Ted Lasso, ever since Beard and Ted first stepped on the Richmond pitch in the pilot episode: “Feels different, Coach,” Ted suggests as he touches the grass. “I mean, the same, but different.” Beard concurs, and ensures we don’t miss the import: “Metaphor.” Heavy-handed, perhaps, but Ted’s folksy manner and the coaches’ witty repartee charm us sufficiently to go along with it (“You know it, baby,” Ted replies).
That’s perhaps why this third season has felt off somehow.[1] The show’s signature charm and sweetness has receded a bit, even while the metaphors remain. Season 3, Episode 5 is titled “Signs,” which calls attention to the symbolism at work in Lasso here and elsewhere. Beard’s books are part of that literary fabric, drawing out bigger implications from concrete objects — as symbols are wont to do.
But by episode 5, it feels as though the symbolism of Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid is turning stale. We get it: Beard’s keen to learn the intricacies of the game. And I suppose the idea is that he needs to keep returning to Wilson’s book because it’s so rich and inexhaustible in the wisdom it offers? Yes, understood. We got it a long time ago. Now tell us more.
The show has excelled, I think, because it doesn’t patronize its viewers, at least it hadn’t before this season. And I’m hoping that currently what feels like a slide toward the rote and perfunctory is more apparent than real (Side note — I loved this interview with Wilson, which also discusses connections between the show and another of his books.)
Even still, there are echoes I find between the troubles Richmond itself is facing and the frustration some viewers may be feeling waiting for the show to close on a satisfying note. An early scene from this recent episode captures the chaos behind the team’s string of losses. Ted’s attempting to cast a vision for the coaching staff when Rebecca joins them. They’ll turn the ship around, Ted says, and point it North (gesturing for emphasis). Others chime in, supposedly correcting him but in reality adding to the confusion: “That’s North, Ted,” Rebecca forcefully asserts, pointing in the opposite direction. But no one can agree: Higgins, Roy, and Beard each identify North as elsewhere. A compass would, of course, settle the matter, but Ted is instead left bewildered by his team’s conflicting convictions.
In a way, this serves as a nice contrast to Ted’s locker room challenge that closes out the episode (and presumably marks a turning point for the second half of the season). Finally, Ted has rediscovered his voice and realizes the team needs the unifying inspiration that he once insisted on but has let lapse more recently. In this talk, Ted emphasizes the cooperative spirit necessary for the team’s success. That’s good stuff, and I hope this bodes well for the remaining seven episodes. But it’s hard to see how this exaltation of community is compatible with Ted’s individualistic reflections that follow. The show’s conception of belief has always been shaky, but never more so I think than in this talk.
Ever since Ted taped up his first crooked “Believe” sign, the word has served as a rallying cry for the team and for fans of the show. It taps into our hopes and dreams, giving weight to our idealistic visions, convincing us they’re possible to achieve. It inspires the team’s best efforts and steels them to overcome whatever obstacles they face. But it can also ring quite hollow on close examination.
“I believe in believe,” Ted memorably says in the last episode of season 1 (“The Hope that Kills You”). In his exhortation at the close of “Signs,” Ted centers such belief in the individual emotion, mind, and will. “Believe doesn’t just happen because you hang something up on a wall. It comes from in here, and up here, and down here,” Ted says, passionately motioning toward his heart, head, and gut. It’s inspirational because he identifies human dignity and value as foundational, affirming “the belief that I matter, regardless of what I do or don’t achieve” and “the belief that we all deserve to be loved, whether we’ve been hurt or maybe we’ve hurt somebody else.”
But it’s also vacuous because it’s unclear what follows from these overly broad pronouncements, especially as it relates to the team’s pressing need for direction and cohesion. Cutting away to Nate at Taste of Athens during this speech makes some sense. He has lost his way, and he needs to find his way back. Jade can perhaps help him better see himself and rediscover what really matters. Even still, his moral restoration will require more than feel-good aphorisms.
The reference to Keeley, however, showing her suddenly making out with her new female boss, doubles down on Lasso’s weakest point — making the individual the locus of truth and goodness. In “The Midnight Train to Royston,” for example, Ted tells Rebecca not to listen to anyone else for how to deal with Sam: “You just listen to your gut, okay? And on your way down to your gut, check in with your heart.” Now imagine if this were a male team owner (Rupert, say), and the player were female.
The problem becomes a bit clearer in this light. People really can believe bad things, and they really can do bad things born from those bad beliefs. The bottom line is that the show simply cannot have it both ways: either people need to be honored and valued, or we have obligations only to our desires, ourselves.
As the show is unwittingly demonstrating, we desperately need a more robust ethic than one driven only by self-concern. We need a moral compass, as it were, to let us know when we really are pointing North.
All that said, I do still have a lot of faith that the writers can pull things back, given how well they handled the previous two seasons. The indulgence manifest in the show’s problematic sexual ethics doesn’t fit with its highest storytelling aspirations, and so I am cautiously hopeful they will of necessity take a backseat to the larger story that Ted Lasso is trying to tell.
[1] This NPR review shares some of my same reservations about Season 3, especially in light of how great it’s been to this point. The author, like me, anticipates this is all prelude to a strong finish.
Other Installments of “What’s Beard Reading?” (for Season 3):
Episode 1, “Smells Like Mean Spirit”
Episode 2, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea”
Episode 7, “The Strings That Bind Us”
Episode 8, “We’ll Never Have Paris”
Episode 9, “La Locker Room Aux Folles”
