Ted Lasso Was Not Nice

Since the start of the show I’ve seen people refer to Ted Lasso as nice. “The show about being nice,” “The show whose core is that being nice will get you places,” and so on. And it is all wrong.

Ted, as a character, can be disarming, he can be hokey, pleasant, cheesy, and yeah he can be nice. But it isn’t anywhere close to the core of the matter. Rather, Ted Lasso is about embracing personal accountability for your actions. It’s a show about extending the grace you want to others when they also take personal responsibility for their actions.

Forgiveness can only be extended when the reason for seeking it is understood by the person asking. That self awareness is what allows for personal growth.

In short: Ted Lasso is about kindness, not niceness.

It is a critical difference, and one we need to stop landing on the wrong side of.

If you watch Ted Lasso you’ll quickly see that characters become friends, bond, and grow closer as they take ownership of their mistakes, and ask the same of others, extending kindness to them when appropriate so they can do so.

Being kind not necessarily nice, builds a better world. Being kind is noticing when someone isn’t doing ok, and helping them have a better time.

Being nice is simply asking how someone is.

Nice is cloying and often used to paper over issues. Kind is doing the work.

And the show itself wrestles with this through many characters. Roy Kent is a ball of sheer anger. The furthest thing from nice you could find. He is also extraordinarily kind. To everyone but himself. He formed his anger as a shield and keeps himself at a remove with it. He forgot how to shut it off, or that he deserved to. So he is kind to his friends, while still being brusque. But never kind to himself. It’s the acceptance that he needs to work on himself, and find that kindness, that pushes the character forward fully.

Ted is in the same boat, but flip anger for niceness. He will endear himself to people, though he is also deeply kind and caring. Except, again, not to himself. And the show, really, is as much Ted learning to be kind to himself, as it is the people in his orbit learning to be kind to themselves and each other.

And the gateway to it, again, is accepting responsibility for your own actions.

So, yes, when tons of people brush the show aside as “A show about being nice” it rubs me the wrong way, because it misses the point, though funnily enough, it misses the point the same way some folks in the show do, thinking Ted is just blithely nice and put him in that box and never give it another thought.

As Ted says, the point is to be curious, not judgmental. Otherwise you can miss out on a great deal of life.