Alex McDaniel
July 21, 2021 10:55 am ET
Yes, you canBELIEVEit: Ted Lasso, the Apple TV+ series that shocked the world and became a beloved hit in 2020 is coming back later this weekwith its Season 2 premiere.
So to celebrate, we’re doing a post a day until Friday about the Jason Sudeikis series that’s about more than a first-time soccer coach figuring out how to lead AFC Richmond. We started with the origins ofhow the series was born out of the NBC ads and the shortbread biscuits recipe.
There’s more than one moment in the fourth episode of Ted Lasso when I fall to pieces inside (and sometimes outside) no matter how many times I watch it.
It’s the night of AFC Richmond’s annual charity auction and the team’s owner, Rebecca Welton (played by the incomparable Hannah Waddingham), is running the show alone for the first time following a painfully public split from her ex-husband, Rupert. We already know Rebecca’s broader motivations at this point: She’s dead-set on burning her ex’s beloved football club to the ground after years of Rupert’s infidelity and the public humiliation that followed. What we don’t know is just how traumatizing her marriage really was or how it shaped Rebecca into someone fiercely determined to get revenge, regardless of how many innocent people she has to hurt to get it.
Rebecca is clearly at her breaking point by the time the auction begins. After finalizing preparations and wrestling with herself over whether a stunning black gown is something she can still “pull off”, she finds out the gala’s musical guest, Robbie Williams, has canceled at the last minute. To make matters worse, Rupert (Anthony Head) shows up at the gala — because of course he does — though he had RSVP’d “no” — because of course he did.
We already knew Rupert was a cheating liar, but it isn’t until a subtle comment to Rebecca that we start to realize the extent of the damage she’s recovering from in the aftermath of their marriage.
“Not too much champagne now, dear,” he tells her after she sips from her glass. “You’ve got to stay sharp for the auction.” It’s in this uncomfortable scene with Rebecca, Rupert and Ted (Jason Sudeikis) that we see her transform from a confident, commanding team owner to someone who suddenly can’t trust herself. She tells Rupert he should run the auction instead of her —”We both know they’d rather see you,” she says with no argument from him — and immediately leaves to collect herself.
There are many ways to emotionally abuse a person. Some do it with swift, painful blows to their target’s confidence. Some carefully gaslight their way into a position of dominance by reinforcing self-doubt at every opportunity. And some, like Rupert, do it with a dull knife, relying on years of tiny cuts of cruelty to slowly injure the other person until they no longer recognize who they are or how they’ve been so brutally wounded.
The show’s writers didn’t have to give us years of backstory about Rebecca and Rupert’s marriage for us to understand what she had gone through. Waddingham serves it up brilliantly during a tearful scene with Ted later in the episode:
“That man, he knows me. I used to think his blunt honesty was noble rather than what it really is, which is just the cruelest way of hiding his own insecurities.
“He’d say wear this, eat that. And I listened. But now I’m alone. I’m alone, Ted. Just like he said I would be if I left. I don’t want to be alone.”
And that’s when I break. Every. Damn. Time. Because Ted Lasso, in all its beauty and award-winning brilliance, isn’t always an easy watch if you’ve been abused by a partner and left to clean up their mess. While I, like so many others, fell in love with this show for all of its warmth and goodness, I can’t ignore how drawn I was to Rebecca’s character because so many of us have lived through her experience, and more importantly, lived to tell about it.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Waddingham recently said she drew on her own experiences in a past abusive relationship when performing the role. For those of us who’ve endured abuse only to further damage ourselves by seeking vengeance over healing, Rebecca represents the complex ugliness of recovery, how hurt people can hurt people in pursuit of peace.
For as much as this show does to deliver a model of kindness, optimism and forgiveness, it’s also explores human relationships in a way that shows you don’t need a clear-cut hero and villain to tell a compelling story about people — particularly a character like Rebecca who spends most of the first season driven by revenge. It’s why she hires Ted in the first place, despite his complete lack of experience. It’s why she’s initially able to resist his disarming personality and growing connection with the team despite their poor performance on the pitch.
It’s only late in the season, when Rupert cruelly shows up unannounced to tell her he and his new partner are expecting a child, that she realizes she’s never going to win at a game that requires hurting people, even if Rupert deserves to be on the receiving end of what he did to her.
Rebecca ultimately shows us there’s nothing pretty about processing relationship trauma and public humiliation — no magic scoreboard that can erase years of abuse if you have the upper hand. Even if she managed to destroy AFC Richmond, the thing Rupert (allegedly) loves most, it wouldn’t change what he did to her during their marriage or the damage he caused. And it certainly won’t absolve her of the responsibility to make amends with those she hurt when she was married or the people she’s hurting now by deliberately sabotaging a community’s beloved football club.
The catch is you can’t fully heal that kind of abuse without exhibiting the same vulnerability that led to being hurt in the first place, and that’s what we see when she finally comes clean to Ted about her intentions and gives him the freedom to destroy her reputation as a result. It requires more strength to do that than to act out of anger and spite. Anyone can pursue revenge. Not everyone can choose to surrender and start over.
That’s the pain and promise of Ted Lasso, a show buoyed by the power of personal connection. If Ted is intended to show us our highest potential as human beings, Rebecca shows us what happens when we’re so afraid of not deserving that connection that we’ll do anything to save face. She wanted so badly for her ex-husband to shoulder the burden of her own suffering. And it took being loved by good people to make her realize payback was only stealing her peace.
The beauty of Rebecca’s character lies in the complexity of who we can become as a result of being hurt, for better or worse. In a world where most of us out here are scared to death of being seen for who we are, Ted Lasso is a show that simply won’t let us avoid the pain of the human experience.
Instead, it shows us why that pain is necessary, why it matters, and why we don’t have to endure it alone.
