I remember seeing the NBC short about Ted way back in 2013 to promote that they were now broadcasting Premiere League soccer, and naturally I thought it was hilarious. Jason Sudeikis’s clueless but optimistic energy and classic Ted Lasso persona was pervasive, even in that four minute video, Ted found a place in my heart. Fast forward to 2020 and we were still in the thick of the pandemic, and I was desperate for a new show to make me feel better in spite of everything that 2020 brought us. I had finished The Good Place and on top of being one of the most meaningful show endings I’ve ever experienced, it left a meteoric hole in my heart that needed to be filled with another feel-good show, immediately. It was the pandemic after all and I think I can say without much exaggeration, we were all not okay.

August of 2020 the first season of Ted Lasso dropped and I devoured it. After I had seen each episode I would rewatch, and then kept Ted on as I fell asleep. It became a staple comfort of my life in the year that I experienced the most uncertainty to date. I recommended the show to everyone I was staying in touch with, and they all took to it as enthusiastically as I did. As time went on myself and my friends kept watching and it felt so good to be able to drop quotes from the show and for others to immediately pick up on what I was talking about. The show’s popularity is now undeniable, and so is my love for it.

But that’s not all the show is to me. It’s so much more than a really good, well-written show.

As a kid who grew up on tv I’ve learned a lot from it. A lot. From little stuff like how flammable and inflammable mean the same thing (Dr. Nick, The Simpsons), and to never vacation in Banff (Captain Holt, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and bigger stuff like how to talk to your friends about eating disorders and finally, what love looks like. The first tv character I fell in love with was JD from Scrubs. I was getting into my formative teen years and the on again off again thing he had with Elliot was feeding my puberty-driven feelings about love. My tv crushes changed over the years: Eric Northman, Richard Harrow, Villanelle, Daario Naharis, Joan Harris, Don Draper, and Jaime Fraser, to name a few. My tv boyfriends and girlfriends filled a void in my life that I didn’t know was there for quite a while, and it was so much easier to have pretend relationships with fictional characters who don’t talk back to you. There’s no vulnerability, no high stakes, no risk. They aren’t even real people, it was whatever I wanted it to be. I lived vicariously through my tv relationships because ultimately, and later on in my life, I realized that it was easier to envision fake relationships with fictional characters because it meant that I didn’t have to look inward. I didn’t have to see what was going on with me and discover that part of me were broken, bent out of shape, mishandled, you name it.

It took me a really, really long time to even admit that to myself, and then some more time to start to divorce myself and my expectations from the relationships I was living vicariously through. I wouldn’t say it was an unhealthy attachment that I had to my tv “boyfriends”, but rather it was because I hadn’t had a good model for how a woman is supposed to be treated by a man growing up, and these models provided more context for me that I didn’t receive in my more formative years. It sucks to realize that, and even mores to type it here. Once I started paying attention to this gap in my emotional development it forced me to start doing the work on myself that I needed to do in order to feel whole, in order to not feel like an incomplete person because I didn’t have a partner. I stopped seeing tv as an emotional escape to fill the emptiness inside and more as a compliment to the whole person I was filling myself out into.

Cue Ted Lasso. I watched it as obsessively as I did with any other show, but this time it felt different. There’s a main character with some deep personal work ahead of him and he’s not afraid to talk about it with his boss, the Diamond Dogs, or his therapist (!). He’s public about being broken, about needing help and support, and public about his feelings. For me he’s one of the first tv characters to be so public about having flaws and still loving himself. I wouldn’t agree that what I’m about to state is causative but rather correlative: Ted lasso helped me learn how to love myself, flaws and all. And like Ted, I have a long road ahead of continuous self improvement, but when there’s a tv character, or even a real person that’s out there who’s just as confused as I am about how to navigate life, it makes the road a little less lonely. He’s a model for how a man should treat a woman, and another thing I’ve also discovered is that those are alarmingly rare on tv.

I know there’s a lot of buzz that this is the final season of the show and if that’s true I will be sad that it’s ending, but I won’t be devastated about it like I was in the thick of the pandemic watching the end of The Good Place*. There’s no deep pit of despair that will revert to a vacuum of sadness inside me because a show ended, I filled that hole with love and appreciation for myself. I don’t need to depend on a tv show for companionship or validation. Like Kevin McAllister says in Home Alone, “I’m not afraid anymore!”.

I’m really happy to have found Ted Lasso, and I’ve loved every minute of watching it. I hope that if you haven’t already, you’ll give it a watch too. And if not, I hope you’re taking care of yourself and doing the work. To quote Ted, “Like the Man once said, the harder you work, the easier it gets.”

Thanks for reading! See y’all next week.

*Thank you again Maddy for supporting me through that unexpected panic attack.