BE CURIOUS NOT JUDGMENTAL
A breakdown of the dialogue behind Apple TV+'s hit series "Ted Lasso"
Danielle Cruz · December 10, 2021
Originally based on a popular commercial launched to promote English Premiere League matches in the United States, “Ted Lasso” (2020-) is a comedy series centered around an American football coach and title character Ted Lasso. Ted, a middle-aged, mustached, Midwestern man, is hired to manage a professional English soccer club called AFC Richmond despite having no experience in the beloved sport. While on the surface, the show seems like a goofy series about a fish out of water as Ted navigates a whole new career and culture, “Ted Lasso” has gained critical acclaim in the depth of its writing, often blurring the lines between comedy and drama as it explores themes like relationships, grief, and trauma.
In its freshman season, the show even shattered records for a comedy series, earning a whopping 20 Emmy nominations and going on to win 7 of them. Sports series have long been known to lose fan interest quickly — much more so when the sport is one that's not particularly favored in this country... So, how did Ted Lasso go from a one-time commercial to a fully developed comedy series? What exactly makes “Ted Lasso” so moving and so special?
Here, I seek to explore these questions by revisiting and more closely dissecting the show's dialogue, revealing trends behind the plot journey and character development. To do so, I analyzed all 22 episode transcripts from the series' two seasons so far, mapping dialogue to more data-driven visualizations. I hope that in interacting with this project, fans can gain an even deeper appreciation behind the genius and the nuance behind the show’s writing.
Released in August 2020, “Ted Lasso” is said to have come at a time when audiences needed it most. Five long months into the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us can relate to feeling disillusioned, downtrodden, and dejected with the current state of the world. Cue Ted Lasso with all of his laughter and positivity, and viewers really took to the show — especially at the start of its second season, released in July 2021.
Although Ted knows quite literally nothing about the sport that he’s been hired to coach (as seen in his many questions about the sport’s basic rules like offsides, for instance) and although the entire town of Richmond seems to be rooting against him (repeatedly calling him a “w*nker” in everyday conversation), Ted plows forward with optimism and his many Ted Lasso-isms. He encourages the struggling team to believe in themselves despite hanging on the edge of relegation and supports others through their trials while somehow navigating his own divorce and separation from his family back in Kansas. And through it all, Ted manages to keep dancing and laughing, slowly thawing the cold and toxic environment at AFC Richmond. At a time of such division and uncertainty, Ted models a beacon of light in the darkness, providing viewers a comforting, escapist alternative from reality.
However, not everyone is convinced by the rainbows and sunshine that Ted seemingly always has to offer. Critics point to Ted’s overbearing, perhaps unrealistic optimism as one-dimensional — how much can a show really offer if it only goes as deep as a few mushy and maudlin cliches like belief and hope?
What, then, does the emotional breakdown of “Ted Lasso” dialogue actually look like?
In this line chart, we present the emotions conveyed by the script for each episode in seasons 1 and 2.* Hover over each episode to see the specific anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness values and major plot points associated with that episode.
* Season 2 was originally slated for ten episodes in total such that writers planned a ten-episode seasonal arc. However, Apple later asked for twelve episodes, leading to the addition of two stand-alone episodes S02E04: Carol of the Bells and S02E09: Beard After Hours, which do not contribute to the plot. Thus, these two episodes have been removed from the emotional arc analysis.
The percent values in this chart were generated by IBM's Watson Natural Language Understanding model. I first pre-processed each episode transcript, adding structure to certain paragraphs of text and replacing censored words with the actual expletives. Then, I fed this text to IBM’s Watson, which detects “anger, disgust, fear, joy, or sadness that is conveyed in the content or by the context around target phrases specified in the targets parameter.” Details recapping the major plot points in each episode come from the "Ted Lasso" episode descriptions on Wikipedia. While emotional detection isn’t a perfect analysis of plot, it does give a better sense of how layered each episode is.
Looking at the joy and sadness arcs in isolation, we notice that both are actually quite closely aligned for the majority of season 1. Although season 1 is often lauded as the lighter, more happy-go-lucky season of the two, the sadness detected in the dialogue then is higher much more consistently than in season 2. In fact, the sadness detected is surprisingly low during particularly gloomy episodes like S01E10: The Hope That Kills You, when the team loses to Manchester City and gets relegated out of the Premiere League; on the other hand, the sadness detected is surprisingly high during particularly hopeful episodes like S02E08: Man City, when the team makes it to the FA Cup Semifinals.
Perhaps this speaks to one of the key juxtapositions in the show — that when the team is achieving its highest successes, Ted is often experiencing his lowest points such as loneliness and divorce. Here, we can see his struggle with joy vs. sadness, as he keeps trying to mask the depression peeking out from underneath. It’s only later in season 2 when sadness spikes and we see that in that Ted’s toxic positivity can surface in unhealthy ways.
That said, it’s not only sadness which spikes. After almost one-and-a-half seasons of almost no disgust, anger, and fear detected in each episode, they suddenly all spike as well. This reflects the eruption of conflict between Keeley and Roy, Roy and Jamie, Rebecca and Sam, and most of all, Nate and everyone which are left hanging by the end of season 2. Viewers will have to wait until 2022 to see how such uncertainty might resolve.
Behind this emotional strife and conflict is a theme central to the show — that “everybody has their reasons.” That is, pure evil is rare, but more often, people have reasons for why they are the way that they are. Even the characters which seem to lack any semblance of redeeming qualities have their reasons; maybe they experienced trauma and hurt in the past which has caused them to act out now.
In seasons 1 and 2, the show has most often explored this via father-child relationships and how they influence characters’ development in the present-day. Through characters’ stories about their dads and conversations with them, we viewers gain glimpses into a host of different father-child relationships spanning a range of healthy, toxic, and complicated ones.
Here, we’ll analyze just how positive or negative a role different characters’ fathers play / played in their lives and how they continue to influence them today.
For this chart, I extracted every instance where a character expressed a distinct thought about their dad or had a conversation with him. Here, we present the sentiments of those thoughts, sorted by overall average sentiment score. Hover over different circles to view when each conversation happened and what each character said to / about their fathers.
I combed over all 22 episode transcripts to find each time a character expressed a distinct thought about their dad or within a conversation with him. Some utterances are grouped by individual lines while others are grouped by a cohesive conversation.
Similar to the emotional arcs data, I also used by IBM’s Watson Natural Language Understanding model to generate these sentiment scores. Note that there is some bias in these scores, in that terms like “dad” may have inherently positive sentiments that skew certain lines to more positive than they might’ve been.
Here, we see that Sam by and large has the healthiest relationship with his dad, as every conversation with and about him reflected a positive sentiment well above 0. Of all the selected characters, Sam is the only one whose average sentiment regarding his dad falls positive. Throughout both seasons, we see Sam’s dad’s influence on him — they call regularly throughout Sam’s day and Sam even has pictures of them in his locker. Even more, one of the very first things we learn about Sam in S01E02 is about his memories with his dad. Hovering over each of Sam’s data points, it’s clear that his dad is always there to advise him on tough decisions and express how proud he is of him. It’s no wonder Sam is such a kind and caring presence at Richmond.
On the entirely opposite side is Jamie, whose every conversation with and about his dad reflected a negative sentiment well below 0. The comparison between Sam, Jamie, and their fathers is made explicit in S02E08: Man City (cleverly titled), when we see Sam laughing and celebrating on the phone with his dad whereas Jamie has his father's contact name as “Dad” (with quotes) in his phone. This isn't without reason: Jamie’s dad is overwhelmingly negative, constantly belittling his son and even publicly taunting him when Richmond lost the FA Cup semifinal. Perhaps this shines a bit of light on why Jamie was so cocky and off-putting in season 1. He had his reasons: he didn’t want to seem vulnerable.
While yes, every character may have their reasons for acting out, what do they do upon realizing their mistakes?
This brings us to another aspect of “Ted Lasso” which feels so refreshing in times of negativity and division: the show’s focus on accountability and apology. Through Ted’s guidance in season 1 and Dr. Sharon’s therapy sessions in season 2, many characters learn to confront the trauma that they’ve experienced and caused them to put up walls of hostility toward others. We consistently see characters redeeming themselves, and it’s these sorts of storylines that felt especially welcome throughout the past two years.
For example, in S01E04: For the Children, we quickly learn the importance of accountability in romantic relationships, as Keeley insists, “accountability matters,” while breaking up with a still cocky and self-centered Jamie. The writers only continue this thread as the series progresses, even devoting an entire episode to asking for forgiveness in S01E09: All Apologies, where many storylines find resolution as characters finally apologize to each other after almost an entire season of deception.
When taking a closer look, though, who do we see apologizing to whom, and how? What are the relationship dynamics surrounding these apologies, and how do characters respond to accountability?
In this edge bundling graph, we model every single apology given throughout seasons 1 and 2. Hover over each of the characters to view the apologies that they either received from someone (red) or gave to someone else (blue).
Click on each character to view the specific apologies that they were involved in, extracted from episode dialogue.
To gather this apologies data, I read through each of the episode scripts and noted each time a main character made a sincere apology. Here, we define an apology as one that (1) is sincere, (2) is given by a main character for something that they genuinely did wrong (i.e. not just as a courtesy or filler word), and (3) drives plot and/or character development. In addition to recording who apologized to whom, I also recorded the genders of both the person who was apologizing and who was apologized to, as well as how they responded to the apology.
In this visualization, the opacity of edges between characters indicates the number of apologies between those two people, such that darker shades correlate to more apologies. Unsurprisingly, Ted, our emotionally aware protagonist, has the most apologies, having received 10 apologies and given 19 — most often to women like Rebecca and Dr. Sharon and to those in positions of less power like Nate and AFC Richmond players.
When considering relationship dynamics and accountability, gender and power play a large role in positions of power between characters. Men traditionally hold the power while women are seen as more submissive; in addition, men traditionally avoid vulnerability as a sign of emotional weakness. Ted, however, challenges both in his consistent willingness to admit when he’s wrong.
Even more, it’s not just Ted who challenges this. Of all the apologies, 24 were man-to-man, 18 were man-to-woman, 12 were woman-to-man, and 2 were woman-to-woman. While this is somewhat skewed since the number of characters who are men outnumber those who are women, it’s still refreshing to see men most often taking accountability for their actions.
Another example is Jamie, who was notoriously the most universally hated player on AFC Richmond throughout season 1. Constantly bullying the kitman Nate, berating other players, and blowing off Ted, Jamie was a skilled soccer player, but a painfully arrogant and cocky one at that.
Season 2, however, focuses on Jamie’s redemption — he returns to Richmond seeking to right his wrongs and must prove to his teammates that he’s a changed man. He starts going to therapy with Dr. Sharon and breaking down the walls that he’d built up as a result of years of his father’s emotional abuse, finally taking accountability for his mistakes. Thus, we see that Jamie only has blue links indicating his apologies to others throughout season 2 as he makes amends with his teammates.
One last area of high concentration is between boyfriend and girlfriend, Roy and Keeley. Notice how opaque the link between them is. There are a total of 10 apologies between the two — more than any other duo of characters — signaling a healthy relationship where each can hold the other accountable. Being a bit older than the other players at Richmond, both Roy and Keeley feel more mature and want to do this relationship differently and more honestly. In S01E04, we learn that Keeley is seeking a partner who values accountability in a relationship, and this visualization suggests that she’s finding that in Roy.
In this article, we’ve uncovered just how “Ted Lasso” goes far beyond your average sports flick and dives deeper into universally human themes.
As we saw across the three visualizations, the cast of characters at AFC Richmond have come a long way since this foreigner named Ted first landed at their doorstep and fought his way into their hearts. They’ve learned to confront the pain from past trauma and to take accountability for where it might’ve misled them. However, as reflected in the emotional spikes at the end of season 2, the story for these characters is still far from over. There is much left to be resolved, particularly with characters like Nate, who ended the finale with betrayal and still hasn’t overcome “his reasons” like Jamie has.
Until then, we’ll just have to wait for season 3 and trust that Ted’s philosophy to “be curious, not judgmental” will ultimately rise above.