So in season one, you get to know Nate Shelly, the team kit man. He's this shy, affable, sort of nobody. He loves his job, he loves football, he loves the team, and he's invisible. There is beat after beat after beat showing how he's just this big nothing burger.
The team owner Rebecca thinks she’s never met him, and doesn’t know his name. The players regularly treat him like garbage. At one point he accidentally gets locked inside the luggage compartment of the team bus.
But Ted never treats him like that. From the minute Ted meets him, he’s kind to him. And in his kindness, Nate blossoms. And other people around Ted and Nate see Ted do this and learn from him. Nate goes on to become an assistant coach. He’s really smart, really knowledgeable about the game, and his suggestions really help the team get better.
Then in the second season, this other thing happens.
When Nate becomes assistant coach at the end of Season 1, there’s this moment of surprise, where Nate thinks he’s being sacked. And he lashes out, says something really terrible to Rebecca. Which is quickly dismissed as a mistake, once he realizes he’s been promoted, and everyone laughs.
But it’s the seed of something much darker that comes to pass during season two.
The team hires a new kit man, Will. And right away, Nate takes issue with pretty much anything and everything Will does. Which seems both petty in a funny way, and funny in a petty way.
It's really smart writing though because after the first couple of times it happens, you get the sense that there's really something else much more troubling going on here.
Nate is incredibly shy and has very little self-confidence. He struggles to be respected trying to make a reservation in an everyday restaurant for his parents’ anniversary dinner.
Rebecca teaches him how to be confident by psyching himself up. And when he does it, the way he does it is sort of gross and a perversion of what she taught him. He's really mean to himself.
Later in the season you see him around his father and something starts to become quite clear. His father is an unkind bully. He diminishes Nate's accomplishments, talks down to him, treats him like an unruly child.
And Nate, in turn takes it out on people when he can too. He's incredibly cruel to players who used to tease him, and downright abusive to the new kit man Will.
As the season goes on, this gets worse and worse. Nate spirals out of control, becoming saturated in a mixture of anger, aggression, self loathing, addiction to attention, and an ever-growing need for validation.
If you get something truly astoundingly awful that I'm not going to tell you because you have to see it for yourself.
So I really love this show, and I get a lot out of it. It's a kind of comfort food to me that I watch over and over. In part, that's because it helps me feel close to Spacey. Which I really need right now, because of what he's going through.
But the really smart writing in this show also shows me something else that sometimes I struggle to elaborate to others.
Everyone around us affects us. We affect everybody else too. Nate becomes more and more cruel because that is what is taught to him by his dad. He's perpetuating the cycle of unkindness and abuse.
Ted short circuits that cycle, but he's only one guy and he has his own issues to deal with. So along the way Nate gets a taste of what it is to be valued, but it's not enough to overcome the negative messaging he was raised with and continues to receive.
Nate is not the only person in the show who have to deal with stuff like this. One of the players, Jamie who is an absolute Ace, a star is also a prima donna and an asshole. And his dad is an abusive piece of shit.
Jamie manages to get away from it, and better himself but it's clearly an uphill struggle for him too.
I want to think that Jason Sudeikis, the star of Ted Lasso, and one of the people who write the show is showing us all this as something of a cautionary tale.
I think that the show at its’ heart is about the choice between kindness and cruelty.
It's really a powerful choice.
