I complain about Ted Lasso a lot, but I have still always loved it. While season two spent too long allowing Ted to become so self-centered in his misery that he didn’t even notice Nate’s descent into pure villainy (which was out of character for both), and season three has been uneven in terms of its plotting and humor, the acting and the characters have remained charming and watchable.
This week’s episode, “We’ll Never Have Paris,” may have finally been my breaking point.
Ted Lasso was a show that gave us two wonderful, complex characters who happened to be women. Rebecca and Keeley were very different types of brash and bossy babes who nevertheless connected and became fast friends. While we were all falling in love with Roy and Keeley, the truth is that the relationship between Keeley and Rebecca was the deeper and more permanent bond all along. They supported one another in multiple ways. It was lovely.
Season one Rebecca was hell-bent on destroying her own team, but in the end her basic decency prevailed. Season one Keeley was a ray of relentless sunshine with such unexpected charm that even Bad Rebecca and Roy Fucking Kent couldn’t withstand it. We got to know Rebecca as a businesswoman, the owner of the team who could fix problems with a phone call. We got to watch Keeley grow from a low-level model to a woman with her own PR firm.
And now? Now Rebecca does nothing but sit in her office and mope about her ex-husband and her lack of children. Now Keeley sleeps with her boss and has her sex tapes released without her consent. Do we ever see Rebecca in a board meeting? Taking business calls? Doing a single moment of work? No, we see her going to a psychic and a fertility doctor and out to dinner with Keeley to talk about their love lives. Do we ever see Keeley running her new company? No, we see her flailing at a shoot while Shandy–a model on set–tells the client how to save money. We see her not knowing who her company’s main funder is, and then going on to sleep with that funder. Oh, and we see her talking to Rebecca about their love lives.
I’m not entirely sure Rebecca and Keeley even pass the Bechdel test anymore, and frankly I’m too afraid to check on it.
Season three Rebecca is at least still part of the team at AFC Richmond. Keeley has been isolated, starring in her own show, more or less. Every once in a while she comes to a game before running off again, but most of her scenes are about KJPR, her new company, and her adventures there. Except mostly those adventures have become centered on her affair with her boss, Jack. While that was stereotypically sexist enough–why must Keeley’s story focus on her love life even when it’s about her running her own firm?–this week’s episode took a big step further into misogyny.
Keeley’s sex tape was released online without her consent. Now she’s being shamed for making a private sex tape for her partner (Jamie, at the time)–not only by the internet, but also by Roy and even by Jack.
WHAT HAS KEELEY JONES, DELIGHTFUL RAY OF SUNSHINE, DONE TO DESERVE THIS?
Ted Lasso is a comedy, people! What’s funny about this? What is amusing or even interesting about slut-shaming a female character who has been written as a happily sexually liberated person? Are we supposed to be on Keeley’s side here? Or on the side of the rest of the world, thinking, as Jack does, “well, she shouldn’t have made that tape if she didn’t want it to be seen”? Because I can guarantee you that the clumsy after school special-esque locker room discussion about stolen nudes is not going to convince most Ted Lasso viewers that women who take nude photos are innocent victims. To believe that it will is to engage in naiveté of the highest order–it didn’t even ring true that the players were convinced to set aside all of their ingrained societal beliefs, because not even the influence of Coach Lasso could work that kind of magic. And I fear that the writers of this season truly think they’re making some kind of feminist point by putting Keeley in this position, when in fact they’re doing the exact opposite. All they’ve done is put a strong woman out front to be excoriated for the crime of being unapologetic about sex, while simultaneously reducing her plot to nothing more than her sexual relationships and their aftermaths.
Why, oh why, has Ted Lasso chosen a sexploitation plotline for a woman who has just become a CEO?
Two brilliant female characters, both businesswomen…one now focused on becoming a mother, the other being slut-shamed. Ted Lasso has relegated its women to the most stereotypical of female plotlines. From a show about empowering people to be their best selves, it’s a profound disappointment.
