Ted Lasso: The story of two men searching for an absent father's love
Why people like Ted create people like Nate, and dads create villains and heroes
There is perhaps not a more well known villain at the moment than the greatest disappointment to ever hit the Ted Lasso fandom around the world: Nate Shelley.
The signs aren’t subtle when you go back and look at them: Nate, the team picker-upper is also a hanger-onner. He is mean spirited, often critical. When he is called out on his antics (mainly by Beard), he never stands up. Ted runs away from uncomfortable feelings until eventually he finds refuge in therapy. Nate literally spits in their face.
The eventual wonder-kid is originally costumed expertly to accentuate his boyishness. Close cropped, non-descript haircut, tracksuits dispensed by the team. You can picture a closet full of free t-shirts mostly crammed into drawers and one or two pairs of jeans a size too big. The suit Ted bought him is the only thing Nate has on a hanger in his closet. “No, my mom bought me this,” he says in response to a dig at a nice pair of pants. He lurks in the background muttering, his confidence in his knowledge obscured by his inability to break through the noise of the louder people around him.
In contrast, Ted is an adult. He also dons the Richmond uniform, but his is a classic sweater over a button down, khakis instead of sweatpants. His hair is well kept, his mustache is impeccable. When Ted swoops in to save Nate from his own timidity, it seems that he is rescuing a genius from unearned obscurity. He gives him the tools he needs to accept the mantle of grownup: a new suit, a real job, friendship with other adults.
But what Coach Beard sees before the rest of us can is that Nate likely earned his obscurity through a life of bad decisions and angry outbursts. The reality is that Nate is not a child. His hair famously turns silver over the course of the seasons, accentuating his descent from the limelight of Ted’s love. But it is also an acknowledgment of a dynamic that was there all along.
Jason Sudeikis, 47 now, is only a few years older than Nick Mohammed, 42 now. The contrast in their years grows less and less intense as the dynamics in their personalities come to the forefront of the duo’s relationship. The story of Ted and Nate is originally cast as the hapful discovery of the Wonder Kid, but what the audience and Ted learn in tandem is that Nate was never a child, and he wasn’t ready to be saved.
Dead dads and dads that kill you slowly
The polar relationship between Ted and Nate reveals itself over the course of seasons. Nate, we learn, has a father who refuses to nourish him. Nothing is never enough, and Nate both understands how unfair this is and desparately wants to find the exception to the rule.
We watch him make decisions that all ultimately give him the opportunity to turn around to his dad and say, “What about now? Are you proud of me yet?” In the first scene where we see Nate spit at the face in the mirror (which by the way, does he clean up? I just cannot get over the idea of somebody else coming and having to deal with that), a restaurant hostess seats Nate and his parents at a table toward the back of the restaurant rather than in the window seat.
The slight is noticed by both Nate and his father, and Nate uses the lessons Keeley and Rebecca taught him earlier in the day to get the table he wanted all along. His father is seemingly pleased but refuses to acknowledge that to Nate. A swing and a miss.
The fact that Nate’s father never gave him what he needed created in Nate what I like to call a “giant black hole of need.” Compliments, accolades, praise all go in but they can never satisfy the want of a father’s love.
We see this as Nate climbs the ladder, becoming the Wonder Kid, getting the praise, and seeing the search for more and more through his endless scroll of Twitter compliments and insults from random strangers. The praise from these anonymous users are little life rafts keeping him afloat as Ted is consumed by his own world rather than the project of Nate Shelley, but his ego is never satisfied. When an insult comes in amid all of the positive, he has no fortitude to handle the pain and all he is left to cling to is his own emptiness.
The explosion between he and Ted (clipped below if you want to get your heart broken all over again) is the moment when Nate finally surfaces this emptiness (the black hole at the center) but faults it all to Ted instead of to his father and to his own lack of self awareness.
“You made me feel like I was the most important person in the whole world,” Nate says, “and then you abandoned me.”
There is a love that parents and caretakers can give that no one else can. Not only can they say, “You are special,” but they say, “You are more special than anything else in the entire world to me.” Many of us spend their whole life looking for this love if they weren’t didn’t find it in their original family.
Nate is still on this search when Ted finds him. Nate thought that Ted could give him that love by just seeing him, but the black hole of need crushed that acknowledged specialness into something twisted and wanting. It wasn’t enough to be special to Ted, he desperately wanted to be the most special one. He needed Ted to see him as more important and more valuable than all of the other sheep in his flock. But Ted, just as anyone in his place, is uncapable of giving Nate that love because it’s not his to give.
Ted is motivated by his father’s absence just as Nate is. But the circumstances of his death, a tragic suicide by who we come to find out was a kind man, completely change the way Ted moves through the world. Where Nate turns the project inward, looking for ways to turn the lights on brightly enough to be seen and adored by his father, Ted spins outward, unwilling to look at his own pain in his desparate quest to save people who can be saved.
How do you feed a black hole?
In my life, I did in fact know a Ted Lasso. Her name was Lacey Collis, a classmate from kindergarten on. She was this light of joy and optimism who made you feel like the most special person in the room when she spoke to you. When I was about fifteen, I happened to watch her one day from across the cafeteria and recognize the look on the face of what I knew to be a random girl at a random table. It was a star-struckness, a comfort and happiness that comes from feeling the warmth of the sun.
In that moment I understood that I was not uniquely special to Lacey, but rather just one of the people who’d been caught in her wake. The reality that I had not been picked out from everyone else hurt in my chest in a way that I had never felt before. It was jealousy, sure. But it was also this feeling that Lacey had lied to me by making me feel like I was chosen.
“If she is also receiving the sunlight, then the sunlight is not as meaningful”,
I believed at the time.
“If she is also receiving the sunlight, then the sunlight is not as meaningful”, I believed at the time. Lacey had her own sadness, just as Ted has his. But what she understood that I didn’t then is this: There is enough sunlight for us all, and that if we count on someone else to reveal it to us then we spend much of our life in the dark.
This season we see Nate under the tutelage of the show’s more cartoonish villain, Rupert Mannion, a billionaire whose greatest strength is finding what is broken in people and mending or poking as suits his needs. Rupert sees Nate’s black hole in a way Ted is too naive to recognize. While he needs Nate, he’s willing to play the role of supportive father and cheerleader, awarding him with a car and with accolades and enough praise to keep the engine running on his team.
I cannot find it in myself to hate Nate, maybe because I’ve stood where he’s stood and understand how at a different point in life I could’ve been the villain in that story. We’ll all watch to see how Rupert reveals himself to be his own kind of liar. I hope he finds his own way into the sunlight and a way to believe in his own specialness without any of his dad’s surrogates involved.