Review: Ted Lasso, "We'll Never Have Paris"
Although I was probably the internet’s most prominent Ted Lasso skeptic among critics covering the second season back in 2021, I want to be clear on something: I didn’t go into this season thinking that the show’s collapse was inevitable.
Even as someone who had some serious issues with how that season played out, the core of Ted Lasso was still solid in my eyes; while some of the decisions at the end of the season—mainly throwing a wrench into Roy and Keeley’s relationship—were suspect, I didn’t consider them enough to suggest the show was headed in the wrong direction. And while it’s now clear that the transition from Bill Lawrence running the show to Sudeikis doing it himself was a seismic shift in both philosophy and coherency, it gave the impression of a peaceful transition of power, and I really believe I gave this season a fair shot when it began.
I acknowledge that this may seem like a distant memory now that we’re deep in the weeds of season three, but I can only respond honestly to what we’re seeing on screen. Regardless of whether you consider the forest or the trees, Ted Lasso has become an untethered, unfocused, and underthought shell of its former self, and whereas I could understand how the last few episodes had some flashes of the show’s former glory (even if my structural issues persisted), I would contend there’s no such silver lining to be found in “We’ll Never Have Paris.”
In writing about an episode like this one, there’s really no good place to start, as any attempt to focus on the big picture (forest) just devolves into a rant about a particular storyline (the trees). From a forest perspective, there’s no question the core problem of the season is the choice to extend the narrative beyond AFC Richmond and its employees. I somewhat understand the impulse behind Keeley PR and West Ham as separate story engines in the abstract, but in practice it’s spread the show so thin that it’s hardly recognizable. But the bigger issue is that the trees are rotten: both of these stories have drifted between boring and baffling, with no clear vision on what they’re trying to say. Perhaps there’s versions of these stories that enrich the show instead of poisoning it, but they are nowhere to be found in this outing.
The way Keeley’s storyline plays out in “We’ll Never Have Paris” is a real breaking point for me. From the beginning, Keeley having her own PR firm was an idea in search of a motivation: the story was first introduced as a potential disruption of her relationship with Rebecca, with a real focus on the mentor/mentee dynamic they had built across the first two seasons. But once the show actually made Keeley her own boss, they lost the plot on what they wanted this storyline to say. There’s a vague sense that she’s exploring her full potential, but her struggles to control Shandy and connect with her new co-workers needed more time to make this into an actual story and not an idea floating in the ether, and she needed to be more actively engaging with other bosses in the show’s orbit (Rebecca, Ted, etc.) and exploring her sense of self. When they introduced Jack, it tied her work life to her romantic life, but again without much clarity, and with another hit to her sense of authority that was addressed in last week’s episode but not really unpacked (and isn’t raised again here, so apparently one date at Taste of Athens neutralized the entire messed up power dynamic in Keeley’s eyes).
Everything that happens here only muddles the situation further. Jack had some red flags in previous episodes, especially last week, but here she waves them in Keeley’s face by both passively and actively slutshaming her for recording intimate videos that are subsequently leaked in the show’s nearly decade-late “Ripped from the Headlines” take on 2014’s iCloud celebrity nudes leak. From the time Jack was introduced, I questioned the show’s judgment introducing a new love interest for Keeley when her relationship with Roy is so unresolved, making it hard for anyone to root for a new connection. At the time, I thought the largest obstacle was that Jodi Balfour is just not magnetic enough to overcome the burden placed on her, but it turns out the bigger problem is that Jack’s an absolutely terrible person, who basically rides off into the sunset like Zava having existed solely to…kill time, effectively?
How is a 12-episode dramedy out here introducing and then disposing of characters in four-episode arcs like they’ve got oodles of time to focus on what people actually care about? Jack did nothing to clarify Keeley’s relationship to her work, and somehow the most meaningful growth in this story came for Jamie, who stumbles in as the guilty party whose bad password management led to the leak in the first place. And then there’s that bizarre scene where Roy is so jealous about the idea of her sending a sexy video to someone else that he pries into her business amidst his attempt to be supportive, and…I’m sorry, but I just cannot wrap my head around what this story is meant to accomplish as part of Keeley’s larger story arc and whatever the hell the season as a whole is going for. I won’t take the bait on another Jamie red herring after last season’s late-breaking love triangle feint, not while the Roy situation is so unresolved, and so I’m just…at a loss of why Keeley’s side of this story veered into this toxic relationship that blew up so spectacularly.
I also hated Nate’s story, to be clear, but my issues with it stem from a fundamental difference of opinion: whereas the writers are deeply invested in Nate’s redemption to the point they’re pretending it’s already happened and telling “golly gee” romantic stories with his void of a love interest that pretend season two never happened, I am not, and thus we are at an impasse. If you share the writers’ interest in Nate, his story here is banal and harmless, and it’s probably mildly entertaining to see him try and fail to create his own Diamond Dogs with his hapless new co-workers. Meanwhile, I’m yelling “YOU TREAT YOUR EMPLOYEES LIKE SHIT AND NOW EXPECT THEM TO CODDLE YOU IN YOUR ROMANTIC FOIBLES, AND NONE OF THIS EXPERIENCE IS LEADING YOU TO DELIVERING THE APOLOGIES TO THEM AND YOUR FORMER CO-WORKERS THAT YOU STILL HAVE NEVER DELIVERED?!” I’m truly happy for you if your blood pressure doesn’t rise during Nate scenes, but there’s really no coming back from where the show has brought me, and thus here we are.
The shared issue between these two sides of the show, though, is that the writers have found that impressive spot where Keeley and Nate stories struggle both because they’re taking up too much time in the show as a whole and because they nonetheless manage to feel like they’re missing huge chunks of story that would make them, well, make sense. There’s maybe a more competently structured version of this season that finds a rosetta stone in each episode to tie everything together, but the thematic link of the team and its season has become disconnected from what’s happening around it. Just look at how the team’s integration of Total Football, which was so effective last week, gets swept into a brief montage of victories and then in the rest of the episode this might as well not even be a show about a football club.
“We’ll Never Have Paris” does at least attempt to solve the problem the fragmented narrative focus has created, as they make a half-hearted effort to turn the celebrity photo leak into some type of connective tissue. But even then, it’s hard not to picture how this story would have worked if the show wasn’t so spread out. What if characters like Ted and Higgins had been given opportunities to connect with their friend Keeley as she navigates this situation, so she had a clearer picture of what a proper response would be? What if the coaches had been involved with the locker room conversation the players have about it, as opposed to just Roy eavesdropping for his later interaction with Keeley? What if it had felt like the photo leak was a global issue the team and everyone in its orbit were dealing with, instead of a Keeley story that really only comes into the locker room because they want to stoke the flames of the love triangle and because they saw it as a convenient way to inch forward in Colin’s coming out story (and then literally not follow up on it in this episode for some ungodly reason).
This reality isn’t achievable as long as the show is so unwilling to sever stories from one another, and this is clearest in Ted’s corner of “We’ll Never Have Paris.” Now, I don’t doubt that there are men like Ted who come to terms with their divorce initially and then, faced with the prospect of their ex-wife moving on, lose their chill. But it doesn’t serve any other part of this show for Ted to suddenly lose his shit about his ex-wife dating someone else, and it’s a fundamental drag on the rest of the show to be spending this much time on him being away from the team. I thought it might help when everyone tells Ted he’s being an idiot, up to and including Rebecca (who doesn’t even get a storyline of her own for the second week in a row), but it didn’t help. It just made me even more confused why they couldn’t find a way to seed Ted going back to America that didn’t rip him away from the day-to-day operations of his football club.
This brings us to the central struggle of writing about Ted Lasso in this current moment. Given how much of a mess everything is, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of pointing out every problem, like the now recurring issue where it feels like the events of the second season (Nate’s behavior, Ted’s therapy) have basically been completely forgotten as we return to Season 1 conflicts (Nate’s lack of confidence, Ted’s marriage) it seemed we had resolved. But the nagging puzzle I find myself getting distracted by is trying to figure out why a once-good TV show would be making so many terrible decisions. What endgame could justify rushing through Nate’s redemption arc to the point where it seems like the writers think we should be rooting for him romantically and thinking that someone who treats his employees like absolute shit should be entitled to a supportive circle of bros? Is any conclusion worth reducing Rebecca’s life to a psychic’s prophecy and dealing with her coach’s insecurities with no regard for the actual business of running her team? And are they seriously implying that what would fix Ted’s life is his ex-wife miraculously deciding she’s still in love with him, and he can return to America having healed the broken marriage he came to Richmond to escape?
I know that not every viewer of a show like Ted Lasso is going to foreground these types of story questions in their response to the show, especially since it has its origins as a pandemic comfort watch back in 2020. But whereas I can understand how episodes like last week’s could be perceived as a “return to form” when you’re not pre-concerned about Sam’s storyline having no followup (it had none), there’s no such evidence to be found here, unless we count the Beard/Henry conversation about “Hey Jude” that suffers from, well, everything else about the Ted story around it. The show is in an unpleasant place that portends a disheartening future, and my trust in the show’s ability to find its way out of this forest of rotten trees is…well, it’s gone, is the thing.
Friend of the Newsletter Alan Sepinwall brought this up on Twitter just now, but it is bizarre that Trent has been embedded with the team for so long without encountering the Diamond Dogs. But in the show’s current narrative strategy, it seems like literally nothing meaningful happens for huge stretches of time between episodes, so I suppose the show is saying that the Diamond Dogs meet less often than we think, and also that Trent is purely observing the team and not conducting any interviews/discussions about team culture that he doesn’t personally witness?
How do we think we’re supposed to feel about Jake? Again, the show has really kind of brushed past the ethics of dating a former client, but in general he seems like a big dork, and I’m just waiting for them to reveal he’s a terrible person so that Ted and Michelle can reunite (in my world, we call this Lynn Johnstoning a Relationship—FBOFW-heads know what I’m talking about).
I had a conversation with some other critics about this on Twitter this week, but…what is Jade’s deal, exactly? Her mind games with Nate when he attempts to DTR are absolutely unhinged, and then the casual way she drops “boyfriend” honestly makes me wonder if she’s secretly filming him for her TikTok channel where she gets off on manipulating incels?
I’d love if the show could give Higgins a story about actually running the football club, but I did enjoy him running to the Diamond Dogs meeting. Fun bit.
I know that the showrunner of this television show likely hired a private investigator in the midst of his very public separation, but Ted’s suggestion that he do the same was…idiotic, and I hate that Rebecca even briefly entertained the idea before shutting it down.
Colin Watch: Overall, I thought the scene with the team debating looking at nude photos did a decent job of matching the players’ personalities to their opinions on the matter (Sam as the moral compass, Isaac as the Forceful Pragmatist), but I do think the leap to everyone deleting things was rushed to get to the Colin moment. I didn’t really grasp why Colin was so resistant to deleting them—does he not know about porn? There’s just not enough substance to his story to sell me on that particular moment, and it highlighted how inorganic the story was to generate that moment.
“The Great Awankening” isn’t particularly clever, but was it weird to anyone else that they seemed to ignore that “The Fappening” was a pivotal enough moment in internet discourse to have its own Wikipedia page?
“Give her a chance to surprise you”—I’m sorry, but the Rebecca I know would add the red flags from last week to the fact that Jack would even present that bullshit statement to Keeley and tell her to get the hell out of there.
On a related note, I love how they’re like “Hmm, we’re going to have Jack slut shame Keeley, but what if she also identifies her as a “friend” to her mate from uni, just to really clear the deck on her decency?” Honestly, what was the point of this? Help me understand. Please.
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