How much should we demand consistency from our TV characters’ behaviors, and when can they do something unexpected?
That’s the question this week’s episode of Ted Lasso attempts to answer — that is, if the big swerves a few characters take were motivated by artistic intent, rather than a lack of attention to storytelling detail. Gemma (Abbie Hern), Michelle (Andrea Anders), and Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn) all do things in Episode 6 that either don’t track with how they’ve acted up until now, or come off in ways that Jason Sudeikis, Jack Burditt, and the writers didn’t intend, to troubling effect.
Gemma is perhaps the most glaring example, specifically her tension with Alice (Tanya Reynolds). Throughout this season, the Richmond Ladies assistant coach is often framed separately from the group, observing but rarely participating. We had yet to discover whether Alice’s isolation was completely by choice, or if it was the fallout of something that had happened with the team in the past. Was Alice’s insistence that she know nothing about her players’ personal lives (and vice versa) merely a naïve philosophy, or a self-protective shield against getting hurt? Her past with Gemma offered hints, but nothing definitive.
Alice’s breakdown in Episode 5 toward Gemma and the rest of the team suggested that we might have received some answers this week as to what made Alice tick. Alas, it was not to be.
What do we get instead? Alice tries on 14 different outfits for the team’s New Year’s Eve party on the moored yacht of Zelda Southport (Tracey Ullman). Alice’s girlfriend Camille (Rebekah Murrell) looks on, chuckling and shaking her head. “Nobody even wants me there”, Alice laments. Camille insists that she just needs to show a bit of herself to the players, and all will be on the path to forgiveness. A spouse is often a refuge for unconditional love and support, but if she knew the way Alice had spoken to the players after the FA Cup match against Chelsea, would her advice have simply been to recite an ancient axiom from Marcus Aurelius? Alice probably has more repairing to do than to just stop acting like the victim (though that is a good place to start).
Flash forward to Alice’s arrival on the yacht, the awkwardness underlined in red ink, thanks to Zelda writing Alice out of the story of Richmond’s early successes. When Gemma catches her outside, they have a moment of real connection. Gemma doesn’t act at all like she had in previous episodes. “It’s just weird being around you again, in a good way,” she says. Gemma tells Alice she was an asshole when they played together. “I think I still am,” Alice confesses. Gemma acts surprised to hear this. “The team hates me,” Alice says. “They don’t hate you,” Gemma replies. “They’re just figuring you out. You’re intense. Sometimes, people need a minute with ‘intense’.”
“Intense” doesn’t go nearly far enough to describe Alice’s behavior up until now. Alice has been petty and vindictive toward Gemma, and downright cruel to Shannon (Shannon Hayes) at least once. Gemma has barely concealed her contempt for Alice, but suddenly, she expresses disbelief that Alice would self-describe as an asshole. We are now meant to believe that things aren’t bad between them; they’re just weird, in a good way.
Those outside of sports may be taken aback by the aggressive way a coach like Alice might speak to players, and that approach certainly doesn’t happen as frequently as it used to. But it does happen sometimes, and sometimes, it’s what some players want to hear to get them motivated. Were a coach like Alice Chilton to really exist, however, she wouldn’t be described as intense, nor would players need time to figure her out. They would think she was an asshole.
The persistent problem that Sudeikis and crew have created for themselves is one of behavioral dissonance. Characters don’t have to always act in ways that they’ve acted before, but it is incumbent upon TV writers and producers to ensure that they behave in ways that are understandable. Gemma’s 180-degree reversal on Alice’s behavior is not understandable, based on what the audience has been shown through six episodes. It does, however, represent the fulfillment of a perceived need by the writers to land on another moment of conflict by episode’s end, when Lizzie (Faye Marsay) admits that the players do, in fact, like Alice, and Alice reacts by lashing out at Gemma again.
The writers are so locked into making Alice another version of Nate from Seasons 2 and 3 that they have created a litany of incoherent behaviors in the people who react to Alice, in order to slow down and speed up dramatic conflict. We have been given nothing to demonstrate why the players might like Alice, or why Gemma would think it was “weird in a good way” to be around her again. There was the moment of care that Alice expressed toward a player who tore a knee ligament in episode 2, but that came and went without any other ballast to counter all the nasty shit she has said to Gemma, Shannon, and the rest.
Alice was clearly hurt by someone or something in her younger years, and her method of coping has been to hold everyone around her at a distance, lest she get too vulnerable and risk further emotional injury. But even that loses some of its coherence when we see the highly loving, caring relationship she has with Camille. Is it really so easy for Alice to be emotionally functional in one environment and deeply dysfunctional in another? Maybe, but the show expects us to roll with it as a matter of course, rather than working to earn that level of nuance and ambiguity.
Speaking of things that don’t make sense, Sudeikis and Burditt really thought they could yadda-yadda the decision made by Michelle to move with Ted and Henry (Grant Feely) to London. I questioned the speed and ease with which Michelle made that decision all the way back in Episode 1. I wondered if the show would unpack more of what Michelle had been going through that would lead her to undertake such a massive life change only a few seconds after Henry relayed Ted’s pitch to do so.
We certainly learn plenty about Michelle’s post-divorce state: so scared, guilt-ridden, and lonely that she romantically pursued her and Ted’s former couples therapist, not vice versa as Ted had believed in Season 3.
That still didn’t explain why Michelle decided to pull up stakes, and one half-expressed comment about being stressed at work in Episode 1 wasn’t enough. The proactive reason we get in this week’s episode —she’s writing a book about Mark Twain’s time in Europe — is one of the most “fixed with a simple line of dialogue” cases I have ever heard. I even went back through Michelle’s appearances in past seasons just to see if I had forgotten a reference to her desire to become a writer. I found none. Sudeikis and Burditt may not have intended it, but Michelle seems to have moved 4,000 miles with her son on a whim.
Episode 6 somehow manages to throw in a third character whose behavior reads as nonsensical at best and creepy at worst. I laid out in Episode 5 how Matthijs came off as an emotionally manipulative jerk to Rebecca, even if the show intended to communicate that his feelings were reasonable. We continue to head down this path, making Rebecca an anxious, guilt-ridden mess who wants to track Matthijs’s phone all New Year’s Eve like a jealous wife. After putting her through all of that, Matthijs shows up at the stroke of midnight, saying that he turned off Find My Phone because he “didn’t want to ruin the surprise.” Instead of taking responsibility for his part in all of this, he gets to be the gallant boyfriend ready to sweep Rebecca off her feet.
This is another card in the shitty boyfriend playbook: make you feel guilty for perceived misbehavior, make you second-guess your own feelings and actions, push you toward overstepping, and then make a grand romantic gesture without actually apologizing. It sucks that Sudeikis and Burditt aren’t good enough to apply the necessary shading to Rebecca’s and Matthijs’s relationship problems, so what we get is a shitty boyfriend the show thinks is a knight in Dutch armor.
GAME NOTES
- The novel Camille is reading is A Spy in the House of Love, Anaïs Nin’s 1954 tome about a sexually liberated woman whose extramarital affairs make her question her own sense of identity. Subtext, anyone?
- There aren’t many good jokes on Ted Lasso, but the writers clearly tore themselves into a subject about which many of them are intimately familiar: the demonic cravenness of the superrich, as represented by Zelda’s New Year’s bash. One man wants to buy Mady’s blood. Another wears a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts but is the richest one at the party. Nigel Farage and Tony Blair are swirling about off-camera. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor tries to crash the proceedings. Once the Eyes Wide Shut masks come out, the team high-tails it out of there.
- Lovely to see that big himbo Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) swing in for a guest appearance. He and Roy have really become an adorable platonic couple.
- Roy is clearly conflicted about his feelings for Keeley now that he’s been dating Dr. Erin Beaumont (Laura Haddock), and once he blows out his knee after a rousing dance to House of Pain’s “Jump Around” with Jamie, he tells Erin that he loves her. The only problem is that he’s pumped full of drugs and he says, “I love you, Keeley.” Keeley is naturally eavesdropping just outside the door, and has already shown Erin that she knows Roy’s medical history inside and out. Can we PLEASE can it with the manufactured drama and just have these two make out again?
- An instrumental version of “Dopamine” by Robyn playing underneath the episode’s concluding montage? Not even this show’s weak-tea dramaturgy can ruin that banger. (One Night Only came awfully close.)
Evan Davis is a contributing writer to Decider. He hosts Expected Own Goals, a podcast about women’s soccer.