That’s part of what makes Ted Lasso so unusual.
On the surface, it’s a comedy about an American football coach who gets sent to England to manage a football team. This is, objectively, a terrible idea. Ted doesn’t know much about football, doesn’t understand the culture and has a relentlessly positive attitude that should probably be treated by the NHS. He also uses an alarming number of biscuits as a coping mechanism.
And yet, somehow, he became one of the most compelling characters television has given us in recent years, particularly during lockdown.
Because underneath all the jokes, Ted Lasso was asking a surprisingly serious question: What if being a good person isn’t about being right? What if it’s about being curious?
Ted’s great gift isn’t that he understands everyone. It’s that he wants to.
He asks questions, he listens and he notices. Most importantly, he doesn’t assume he already knows the answer. That’s why one of the show’s most memorable ideas became its simplest: “Be curious, not judgmental.”
It’s a line that’s become almost inseparable from Ted Lasso’s philosophy of life, and perhaps it deserves to be taken more seriously than we usually allow ourselves.
We live in a culture that’s become remarkably good at judging people. We judge politicians, celebrities and strangers online, sometimes because of something they posted three years ago. We judge people for the films they watch, the books they read, the words they use and the opinions they have, and then we wonder why everyone seems so angry.
There was someone else who was curious. Jesus. He was constantly asking questions. He didn’t simply tell people what they were. He asked them what they wanted, what they’d seen, why they were afraid and who they thought he was. He told stories that forced people to reconsider the assumptions they’d brought with them.
Perhaps most importantly, he kept sitting down with people other people had already judged. The tax collector, Samaritan, the woman at the well. The people who were sick. The people who were socially unacceptable.
Jesus had a habit of getting curious about people everyone else had already written off.
That feels pretty prescient because judgement is one of the easiest things to outsource to an algorithm. The algorithm already knows which side you’re on. It knows which opinions will make you angry, which stories you’ll click and what will confirm what you already believe because everyone has opinions. If social media has taught us anything it’s that people have a LOT of opinions. They seem to actually have replaced facts these days (something taken from Kitty Flanagan’s latest standup tour – Glad Game – which is amazing by the way).
It doesn’t necessarily make us more curious. It can make us more certain and certainty can be addictive.
That’s one of the reasons Ted Lasso feels strangely countercultural now. Ted isn’t naive, and that’s important. He’s often presented as relentlessly optimistic, but optimism isn’t really his defining characteristic.
Hope is.
Optimism assumes things will probably work out. Hope says they might not, but I’m going to keep showing up anyway.
Ted gets hurt, betrayed and things wrong. He has his own struggles, and he’s certainly not immune to anxiety, grief or disappointment. His positivity isn’t a denial of suffering. It’s a choice about how he responds to it.
That’s a much more interesting kind of goodness. Then there’s forgiveness.
Ted Lasso is full of people who have reasons to be angry with one another. Rebecca wants revenge. Roy Kent carries years of anger and regret. Jamie Tartt has spent much of his life behaving like an enormous football-shaped ego. Nate feels overlooked and humiliated.
Almost everyone in the show has something to forgive, and almost everyone has something they need to be forgiven for.
That’s where the show becomes surprisingly theological for me because forgiveness isn’t pretending that something didn’t happen. It isn’t saying that bad behaviour doesn’t matter. It’s refusing to allow someone’s worst moment to become the entirety of their identity.
Social media has created a culture in which people can become permanently defined by their worst moment: one bad post, one stupid comment, one terrible decision or one mistake made at twenty-three. The internet has a very good memory.
Grace doesn’t.
Grace remembers differently. It remembers what happened without insisting that what happened is the final word.
That’s why the characters in Ted Lasso are so interesting. They aren’t fixed. They change.
Jamie becomes more generous, Rebecca becomes less consumed by revenge, Roy learns how to express vulnerability without immediately shouting, and Nate discovers that ambition without humility can become destructive. Even Ted has to confront the fact that helping everyone else doesn’t mean he can avoid dealing with himself.
The show understands something that a lot of modern storytelling forgets: people are complicated.
Nobody is entirely good, nobody is entirely bad and people can change.
That last one might be the most radical idea of all.
We live in an age of labels, where people are sorted into categories: good people and bad people, us and them, successful and failure, in and out. Once someone has been placed in a category, we stop being curious about them.
Ted keeps asking us to look again.
Perhaps that’s why the show has remained so resonant. It offers a vision of community that isn’t based on everyone agreeing. The team doesn’t become a family because they stop annoying each other. They become a family because they learn how to care for each other despite their differences.
That’s a much more realistic vision of community, and perhaps a much more useful one for the church.
Because churches can be very good at talking about community. Actually being a community is considerably harder. Real community involves people who disagree, people who irritate you, people who disappoint you and people whose personalities are completely incompatible with yours. It involves people who don’t communicate the way you do, who make mistakes, who change and who need another chance.
That’s the messy bit but it’s also where the interesting stuff happens.
Ted doesn’t build community by demanding that everyone become like him. He creates an environment in which people can become more fully themselves and that distinction matters.
Leadership isn’t always about having the best answers. Sometimes it’s about creating the conditions in which other people can flourish.
Ted’s leadership style is almost absurdly relational which is what makes it so radical. He remembers things, asks questions, tells incongruous stories, notices when someone is struggling, celebrates other people’s success, gives people room and trusts them. He isn’t threatened when someone else gets the credit.
Perhaps the best leaders aren’t the ones who make everyone notice them. Perhaps they’re the ones who make everyone else feel noticed.
Which brings us back to that little sentence: Be curious, not judgmental.
It’s good television advice, good leadership advice and good relationship advice. Perhaps it’s not a bad summary of the way Jesus seems to have treated people either.
Maybe that’s why Ted Lasso works as more than a television comedy. It doesn’t offer us a perfect world. It offers us imperfect people who keep trying.
That’s the gospel according to Ted Lasso, not that everything will work out, not that everyone will like you and not that being positive will solve your problems, but that people are worth knowing, forgiveness is possible, grace can change people and community matters.
Follow Adrian Drayton on his Substack – The Long Conversation – where he writes about faith, culture and media and the questions shaping our common life.
