Ted Lasso – an Apple TV comedy-drama about an American football coach hired to lead a struggling Premier League team – has returned for a fourth season, this time with a women’s team at the heart of both the comedy and the drama.
I can’t wait. As a researcher of children’s literature – including comics, graphic novels, fantasy and science fiction – it’s hardly unusual for me to take TV seriously. But few shows have gripped me quite like Ted Lasso.
A few years ago, curious to see what the fuss was about, I watched the show. Then I went back and watched it again. Then a third time. Before long, my family began to wonder why I was behaving this obsessively. After some reflection, the answer suddenly hit me.
At heart, Ted Lasso is about a man from a broken family who leaves everything he knows for an adopted home (England) that is alien and hostile. We soon discover that his left-field appointment is part of a plan to sabotage his club – Richmond FC – while the media, and the team’s long-suffering fanbase, are almost relishing his imminent failure.
Of course, that doesn’t happen. Ted not only transforms the club but inspires those around him to embrace his philosophy of kindness, love, encouragement and positivity.
What had gripped me, I realized, is that this is also the plot of orphan girl novels – which happen to be one of my great loves and, more to the point, main research interests.
Orphan girl novels
These novels are a staple of North American children’s literature, which flourished from the mid-19th century. Classic examples include Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter (1913) and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908).
They follow a familiar pattern: an orphaned girl arrives in a new home that is reluctant to accept her, and she ultimately transforms those around her for the better. Replace “orphaned girl” with “middle-aged male sports coach” and you have Ted.
This is not just a playful comparison. Rather, as I argue in a new paper, the comparison illuminates both what the show is doing and the literary lineage to which it (arguably) belongs.
Using orphan girl novels to study Ted Lasso brings certain themes into sharper focus – particularly its concern with fatherhood. Several characters, especially Ted (played by Jason Sudeikis), struggle with difficult paternal relationships. This, again, is a preoccupation of orphan girl stories, which often feature absent fathers. In fact, Ted’s habit of finding positives in bleak situations recalls Pollyanna’s “glad game” – a strategy she learns from her father and uses to cling to his memory.
The “glad game” is not uncomplicated. It can also function as emotional deflection, burying grief and pain beneath strained positivity. This tension bubbles up powerfully in Ted Lasso’s second season, when Ted must confront his resentment over his father’s death by suicide before he can bring his glad game to others. Viewed as an orphan girl story, the show becomes not just about dads, but about coping – and the uneasy coexistences of love and resentment that shape so many people’s lives.
How Ted Lasso Reimagines Classic Literature
The comparison also works in reverse – using Ted Lasso to look at orphan girl stories afresh. A key concept in these books is “moral suasion”: the idea that love and affection can change people’s behaviour.
Over time, the original authors seemed to become concerned that this kind of discipline seemed rather manipulative. Montgomery, for example, had Anne of Green Gables influence the people around her by laughing, suppressing her longing for stylish dresses and, in one of my favourite examples, being really bad at praying. These characters inspire others without trying.
Ted, though, tries. Indeed, as a coach, it is his job to manipulate others’ emotions to get the best from them. This is especially evident in his relationship with gruff, resentful, all-but-washed-up Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), the ageing captain whom Ted deliberately manoeuvres into effective leadership.
In other words, Ted Lasso takes moral suasion and asks whether it can be a strategy of power. The answer seems to be that it can – if making someone “better” means making them a better version of themselves. Similarly, researchers have long wrestled with the fact that while the sentimental pull of orphan girl novels emanated from the girls’ outsider status, they were outsiders in a limited sense – white, Christian girls in a North America that marginalised other groups, especially Black people, with far greater brutality.
Belonging and Outsiders in Ted Lasso
Again, Ted Lasso confronts this half-truth, particularly through the character of Sam Obisanya. Like Ted, Sam – a struggling overseas signing – is an outsider at Richmond FC, but the show explores plotlines in which Ted cannot always be the author of Sam’s belonging, because the two are different types of outsiders.
I hope this comparative methodology can be fruitful for my field of children’s literature research, but also for other areas of enquiry. Placing Ted Lasso in the tradition of orphan girl novels invites us to think more deeply about what gives older books life beyond their intended readerships, as well as the social and emotional appeal of these characters and storylines.
I was reminded of the emotions at stake in such work recently, when a student wrote me a very moving letter comparing me to Ted. Whether I deserve the comparison or not, I certainly hope that being like Ted – or, for that matter, Pollyanna, Anne, or my personal favourite, Emily of New Moon – might help spread more kindness.
These stories are fantasies – but fantasies we want to be true. Then again, maybe the student was just pointing out that, also like Ted, I am also an American transplant who, after years of living in England, still doesn’t understand soccer. I mean, football…
Joe Sutliff Sanders, Associate Professor in Children’s Literature in Education, University of Cambridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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