A warning before you read further: if you haven’t seen episode seven, stop here. And if you’ve already written your critique of this season, I’d ask you to watch it before you defend that critique. Episode seven changes the frame.
I have written about Ted Lasso a few times. On this blog. In my first book, Better Places. I keep coming back to it because it keeps telling the truth about leadership, kindness, and what it takes to make a place where people can grow. And I tear up at it. I’ve admitted that before. My wife has caught me more than once pretending I wasn’t crying at a soccer show. I was.
This season I did something else, too. I winced. Not at the show. At myself.
What the Critics Are Saying
The critics have been hard on season four. TIME ran a review under the headline “Ted Lasso Doesn’t Know What to Do With Women’s Soccer.” It argued that Ted risks coming off as paternalistic, a “cringey, try-hard male feminist,” and that the show’s solution was to keep him on the sidelines, which keeps the players at a distance too. Other writers called the feminist storyline delightful but toothless. From the other direction came the complaint that the show built an entire season around women’s soccer and still couldn’t satisfy anyone.
I think all of them are watching the right scenes and missing the point. Or maybe the writers are holding their punch. I think they just started winding up to deliver it.
Someone in a fan discussion put it better than any critic I’ve read. The first season introduced the men quickly. We knew Roy, Jamie, Sam, and Isaac almost immediately. This season, the women arrive as a blur. Loud. Hard to read. Slow to become individuals. That disorientation, she argued, isn’t a writing failure. It’s Ted’s experience, and our audience is feeling something purposefully uncomfortable. He doesn’t know these women yet. He isn’t sure he’s allowed to. Neither are we.
When I read that, I recognized it. Because I have been Ted.
What I Got Wrong
As a white, straight, male CEO, for years my role told me to show up everywhere with all the answers. So I did. Including in the employee groups at my own company that formed around identities I don’t share. When I walked in, I often misstepped. I spoke too soon. I brought answers nobody asked for. I thought my good intentions would translate automatically into good impact. They did not.
When I stayed away, I was told I was staying away. I felt I could not win. And I’ll be honest, that feeling sometimes curdled into resentment I’m not proud of. Why couldn’t they see I was trying? Why was I always getting it wrong no matter which direction I moved?
It took me a long time to find the third option. Show up. Don’t arrive as an expert. Listen. And when someone politely asks you to leave the room, leave. Not wounded. Not offended. Just grateful to have been invited in the first place.
That’s what I see Ted doing this season. He’s curious, not certain. He’s careful at the locker room door. He doesn’t assume he can charm his way into belonging, the way he did with the men. He’s unsure of himself, and the show lets him be unsure. Michelle notices, and makes him a new Believe sign with the colors reversed. Same, but different, as Beard remarks.
The critics read Ted’s hesitation as the show not knowing what to do with him. I read it as the show knowing exactly what to do with him. It’s taking him out of the center on purpose. It’s making him, and us, a little insecure. Hopefully empathetic.
The Harder Middle
Here’s the larger thing I think the writers are after. The last ten years have often looked like a different version of this show. One where Ted barges into the locker room to save the women from their own lives. Well-meaning men, and well-meaning institutions, rushing in with programs and pronouncements and answers. And then a backlash that says: stay out entirely, it isn’t your business. Which has caused men to feel uncomfortable and, in our paternalistic culture, rejected.
Much of what we call the woke and anti-woke debate lives in that tension. Rush in or stay out. Rescue or retreat. Both sides skip the harder middle. Show up as a guest. Care without controlling. Be useful without being central.
I am still learning this. I get it wrong regularly. Just last month I caught myself offering advice in a conversation where I should have been asking questions. Old habits run deep, and mine were formed in decades of being rewarded for having answers. Unlearning that is slow work.
That is the Lasso Way. It always was. With the men, it looked like confidence, because Ted knew that room. With the women, it looks like humility, because he doesn’t. The value underneath is the same.
What Episode Seven Changes
Which brings me back to episode seven. That’s where the season stops circling. We finally see what these women carry just to play a professional sport. The costs are real, specific, and mostly invisible to the people who run the game. And Ted’s instinct is not to fix it for them. It’s to see it. To let it matter. To make room.
I won’t spoil the details for those who haven’t watched yet. But I will say this: the episode asks us to sit with discomfort. To watch someone we love realize how much he didn’t know. And to watch him choose curiosity over defensiveness.
That choice matters right now. We are living through a moment when many people, men especially, feel they are being asked to apologize for existing. And some of them are responding by retreating into anger, or irony, or proud indifference. I understand the impulse. I have felt it myself.
But retreat is not the answer. Neither is rescue. The answer is presence without possession. Showing up without taking over. Learning without demanding credit for learning.
Same, But Different
The critics who say Ted Lasso doesn’t know what to do with women are half right. Ted doesn’t. Not yet. That’s the story. The show is asking a question a lot of us have been fumbling with for a decade: how do you show up for people whose lives you don’t fully understand, without making it about you?
I don’t think the answer is to take Ted’s name off the show. I think the answer is to watch him learn. And maybe, if we’re honest, to learn alongside him.
Wins and losses still matter. But they were never the point. The point is people becoming the best versions of themselves. On the field, and off it.
Believe. Same, but different.
If these themes resonate with you, I explore leadership, belonging, and what it takes to build better places in my books, including Better Places and my upcoming Room to be Human on time, meaning, and the future of humanity. You can find them at my website. www.robertrasmussen.me
