Positive masculinity or toxic positivity? Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso as a capitalist utopia

Abstract

Ted Lasso (2020-present) follows American Football coach, Ted Lasso, as he transforms the waning English Premier League team, AFC Richmond, through his relentless optimism and his mantra of ‘believe’. The show has been praised by critics for its emphasis on kindness and particularly for its exploration of ‘positive’ and ‘vulnerable’ masculinities. It is placed front and centre not just in promotion for Apple TV+ but also for the broader Apple brand which is heavily integrated into the show’s storyworld. Through a textual analysis of the series, this article critically examines Ted Lasso’s representations of masculinity and homophobia within the context of professional football. We argue that Ted Lasso subtly replicates the corporate identity of Apple in which real-world issues are selectively harnessed and distorted to create a utopic world-vision. Despite a celebrated veneer of ‘positive masculinities’ the show still exists in service of a sporting culture that is overtly steeped in hypermasculinity. Instead of challenging sports-based homophobia as it exists in the real-world, the show minimizes its existence at the (almost total) expense of including gay characters and storylines. In ‘dismantling’ toxic masculinity through such shallow means, we contend that Ted Lasso is ultimately symptomatic of a show sublimating its narrative wants to Apple’s corporate needs.

Introduction

In 2021, Josh Cavallo, a midfielder for Adelaide United (an Australian Football/Soccer club), came out as gay (ABC, 2021). At the time, he was the only active openly gay male footballer playing professional first division football. For those not engaged with the world of professional football, this might come as a surprise. There is an abundance of first-division football leagues in the world that comprise thousands of players—how is it that Cavallo is the only active player who is openly gay? Alas, a quick Google search makes these questions feel incredibly naïve. If you are looking into homosexuality in professional football, it is likely you will come across the aptly titled Wikipedia page ‘Homosexuality in Association Football’. The first line of the article simply states, ‘homophobia has been widespread in men’s association football’ (Wikipedia, 2023). As the article continues, it reads less like a typical entry and more like a long, dispassionate list of hate-crimes and instances of homophobic abuse perpetuated by players, coaches, and fans alike. In the time spent researching this article, the page has already been updated to record fresh instances of homophobic abuse.

Football’s institutional responses to the prospect of LGBTQIA+ players have not been much better—they can typically be characterised as either timid, non-existent, or outright antagonistic. During Pride Month, it is well known that some corporations will engage in the practice of ‘rainbow washing’ (Bitterman, 2021), referring to the appropriation or corporatized use of the rainbow flag for the financial gain of a business. As Alex Bitterman puts it:

This practice compromises the coded meaning of the rainbow flag and rainbow motif. Rainbow washing weakens LGBTQ+ symbology, making the rainbow flag simply LGBTQ-friendly decoration in mainstream space. (Bitterman, 2021: 125)

‘Rainbow washing’ is perhaps too kind a description of the way FIFA (the governing body of world football) and major European leagues have responded to LGBTQIA+ issues. Of course, there have been successful initiatives like the English Premier League’s (EPL) ‘Rainbow Laces’ initiative (Stonewall, 2023) and the Australian A-League’s Pride Round (Lewis, 2023). Sadly, the moment these initiatives hint at causing even the slightest economic inconvenience for the game, they will be stopped. In 2021, Hungary introduced controversial anti-LGBTQIA+ laws that were widely condemned throughout the European Union (Connolly, 2021). In response, the city of Munich planned to illuminate the Allianz Arena in rainbow colours for an international match against Hungary. That was, until European football’s governing body (Union of European Football Association) blocked the rainbow lighting, stating that it would ‘contravene rules about political and religious neutrality’ (Connolly, 2021). Similarly, in anticipation of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the captains of seven European football teams publicly stated their intention to wear OneLove rainbow armbands during matches. In Qatar (the host nation) homosexuality is illegal and punishable by up to three years in prison (Syed, 2022). In response, Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, warned that any players wearing the armband would be met with an instantaneous yellow card and possibly be sent off the pitch. As a result, no players wore the OneLove armband (Syed, 2022). Given this context, it starts to become clear why—out of the world’s 26 topflight football leagues—Cavallo is the only openly gay player. Professional football is rife with institutionalized homophobia and a general apathy towards global LGBTQIA+ issues.

It is in this context that the comedy-drama Ted Lasso (2020-present) first premiered. The roots of the series have always been commercial in nature. Originally, the character of Ted (Jason Sudeikis) was developed as a part of a 2013 NBC campaign to promote the EPL to North American audiences (Kassing, 2022). After the viral success of the campaign the character was then reset for the purposes of a fully-fledged TV-comedy. In the Apple TV+ original, Ted Lasso is an American Football coach who is hired by a wealthy divorcee to coach the fictitious EPL team, AFC Richmond. Ted Lasso is arguably Apple TV+’s most successful program to date—at the time of writing, it has received 61 Emmy nominations and 11 Emmy wins. The show has been involved in highly successful commercial collaborations with the FIFA World Cup and the FIFA video game series. Moreover, it has been subsumed into Apple’s broader marketing efforts—for example, Apple CEO Tim Cook often live tweets episodes of the show, and cast member Nick Mohammad has appeared in Apple’s ‘Privacy on iPhone’ campaign.

Perhaps most intriguing, though, is the pop-cultural discourse surrounding the show. The show’s emphasis on ‘kindness’ and exploration of so-called ‘positive masculinities’ in the space of professional football is widely discussed and praised by critics and fans alike. Its ethos of examining men’s mental health issues through a non-judgmental lens has also made political waves. In 2023, cast members were invited to speak at a White House press briefing and held a meeting with President Biden to discuss mental health awareness (White, 2023). It is this framing of the show that inspired this research. Do the ‘positive masculinities’ of Ted Lasso extend to reckon with the institutionalized homophobia of pro-sports? Built from a textual analysis of the series, this article argues that, no, it does not. Rather, Ted Lasso’s commercial integration into the Apple brand stifles any serious exploration of masculinity or LGBTQIA+ themes. Ultimately, Ted Lasso simply replicates corporate rainbow-washing techniques and does not offer any serious challenge to institutionalized homophobia in professional football. This article contends that the show’s commitment to building positive masculinities through the denial of the realities of EPL football amounts instead to a toxic positivity.

Ted Lasso: A philosophy of kindness?

In 2021, The New York Times published an article that identified the distinct shift in the tone of popular TV comedies. Poniewozik (2021) argued that ‘in broad terms’ the last 20 years of TV have seen a ‘shift from irony to sincerity.’ The ‘cutting-edge’ comedy of the 2000s (think Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-present), Office (UK) (2001-03), Peep Show (2003-15) or Veep (2012-19)) would often feature obnoxious and oblivious protagonists. The audience was not meant to identify with them, rather we were to laugh (or cringe) at their expense. As Poniewozik puts it, these shows made their case ‘ironically and negatively’ (2021). This contrasts with the type of TV comedy that has emerged more recently. Contemporary TV comedy is typically much more direct—they are ‘big-hearted’ and have main characters you are meant to identify with. This is perhaps best exemplified by shows like Schitt’s Creek (2015-20), Pen15 (2019-21) and Loot (2022-present); while characters in these shows have broadly comedic and anti-social behaviours, they tend to be sublimated in service of heart-warming narrative conclusions. Tanya Horeck argues that these programs can be termed as ‘kind TV’—they appeal for not only their ‘gentle, easy viewing qualities but also, I would argue, for their strong vision of care’ (Horeck, 2021: 35). Ted Lasso is often understood as the ultimate exemplar of ‘Kind TV’ and as Poniewozik puts it, Ted Lasso might be ‘the essential face of comedy today’—an evaluation substantiated by its impressive Emmy sweeps.

The moral messaging of Ted Lasso is very direct and usually delivered unambiguously through its lead characters that place emphasis on kindness and empathy. Typically, this is the quality of the show that is given the most attention in its coverage and promotion. As the first season premiered in 2020 (during global COVID lockdowns) Ted Lasso was often written about as though it was a palate cleanser to depressing global conditions. In an ABC article about the show’s success, Hannah Story writes ‘It turns out that a sweet comedy about men and women trying to be good was exactly the antidote we all needed for a year and half of rolling lockdowns’ (Story, 2021, original emphasis). Moreover, an article written for The Salvation Army Website suggests that, during lockdown, there was a ‘dire’ need for Ted:

Ted Lasso is about the possibility of kindness in broken people, even if they happen to be on the brink of personal and professional disaster. The show reminds us to lift our gaze beyond the immediate demands of the moment and to have a heart that swells for others. It also reminds us you can’t force the magic to happen. (Toh, 2021)

The pop-cultural ubiquity Ted Lasso has achieved across its run has even been affirmed through intertextual references in contemporary television: in S2 E1 of Mike White’s The White Lotus (2021- present), Harper’s (Aubrey Plaza) deadpan utterance of ‘I don’t watch Ted Lasso’ positions her cynical, intellectual character against her optimistically vapid travel companions.

The show’s emphasis on kindness and positivity has also been integral to how Apple has promoted it. The character of Ted was originally conceived for NBC’s campaign promoting their coverage of EPL in America (Kassing, 2022). While advertising for Season 1 of Ted Lasso played up the comedic fish-out-of-water premise as established in the original NBC campaign, later marketing was almost entirely focused on messages of positivity. In anticipation of the 2022 World Cup, Apple placed a series of billboards in the hometowns of American soccer players that were stylised as personal letters from the character of Ted Lasso to the individual player. These billboards offered words of encouragement to the players and put the show’s ‘kindness philosophy’ on full display. More recently, in a teaser for the show’s third season, Frank Turner’s uplifting song ‘I Still Believe’ plays under a montage of characters writing the word ‘believe’ on cardboard paper—the word a distillation of Ted’s coaching philosophy. We can also see this emphasis on optimism in the show’s official X account which takes on the persona of Ted. The bio reads ‘Father. Coach of @AFCRichmond. I have a real tricky time hearing folks that don’t believe in themselves!’ The account will frequently post in-character quips, share positive sports stories, and write tweets along the lines of ‘I believe in believe’.

All this is to say that, through promotional efforts, there is a strong association between Ted Lasso and positivity. Apple (and the various media outlets covering the show) are ensuring that it is understood as a ‘philosophy of kindness’ first and a TV comedy second. But what are the implications of this philosophy and how does it impact the type of cultural work the show can do? As we will argue throughout this paper, this philosophy is one-dimensional working to play a supporting role to existing corporate structures.

Cultivating a capitalist utopia

While Ted Lasso’s generic message of ‘be kind to others’ is quite direct it lacks substance and comes across as vague on closer inspection. Much of the show is concerned with individual acts of kindness—characters helping each other out to overcome their own personal problems. There is little done to meaningfully challenge the hegemonies of professional sport. In fact, there is little acknowledgement that the spaces and institutions that Ted Lasso operates in are often themselves not very kind. We contend that this kind of vague moral messaging appears well-informed by Apple’s overall corporate identity. The function of the Apple TV+ streaming service being but one limb of an overall mega-company limits their catalogue’s capacity to critically engage with real-world issues through their storyworlds.

The interplay between corporate identity and textual meaning is particularly pronounced in the contemporary streaming landscape. Lobato and Lotz (2021) have argued that we need to rethink our understanding of competition in subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services. SVOD competition is so often discursively understood through the narrow prism of ‘the streaming wars’, where it is assumed that each service is competing against each other with the singular goal of having the most subscribers. However, if we take a closer look at the landscape, we can see a diverse range of commercial motivations at play:

Caricatures of competition—for example, narratives of Netflix ‘displacing’ the BBC, or a battle royale between American tech giants such as Amazon, Netflix and Apple—are misleading. While services vie for the time, attention, and sometimes payment of viewers in their target markets, the metrics that really count in each category of funding are distinct, and not a zero-sum dynamic. (Lobato and Lotz, 2021: 97)

Lobato and Lotz argue that we can draw a distinction between at least three categories of video service:

Those where video is the primary or only activity (Netflix), those where video forms a part of a wider set of media activities (Disney+, Stan) and those where video activities are secondary to the larger business objectives of the parent company (Apple, Amazon, and Google/Alphabet). Lobato and Lotz, 2021: 97)

This article is interested in the final category that Lobato and Lotz have described. The value of Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime to their parent companies is somewhat indirect and their viability is not purely defined by their ability to generate revenue. They provide benefits to other business objectives like, in the case of Apple TV+, data collection and expanding hardware sales. This supportive role that Apple TV+ plays in a much larger commercial structure then raises questions about the programming the platform is producing. Specifically, how might the platform’s original programming support the broader Apple corporate structure?

Despite their mainstream success, Apple have regularly worked to position themselves as an ‘outsider’ brand. Their marketing has often targeted young creatives with the pitch usually emphasizing the utility and potential of their products when put in the hands of those who ‘challenge’ the status quo (Xiong, 2021). The company is well known for aligning their brand with innovative figures and transgressive imagery: the Apple logo itself is a reference to Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden (Shields, 2000). Apple’s corporate positioning is perhaps best distilled in the infamous ‘Think-Different’ campaign from the late 1990s and early 2000s. TV spots featured a series of black and white images of famous 20^th century innovators like Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi. The final image shown is that of the Apple Logo with the caption ‘think different’. Apple have often positioned themselves to be a socially progressive company, whether this is implicitly—through including images of civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr or Mahatma Gandhi—or explicitly, like through their public support of LGBTQIA+ communities during the 1980s and 1990s (Shields, 2000). It is not hard to imagine that, if he was a real football coach, Ted Lasso would fit quite comfortably into the ‘think different’ montage. He enjoys sustained success through his commitment to a coaching philosophy that is, on the surface, a direct challenge to the status quo of professional football. Despite this veneer of transgressive kindness, in the following section we will demonstrate how Ted and his storyworld instead uphold many structural, systemic issues of professional football by embodying Apple’s very corporate identity. Ted Lasso is a sort of utopia in which—with the help of iPhones and MacBooks—anything is possible if one just ‘thinks different’.

Perhaps the clearest example of the compatibility between Apple’s corporate identity and Ted Lasso’s moral messaging is in S2 E3, ‘Do the Right-est Thing’. The episode begins with star player, Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh), agreeing to participate in a promotional campaign for one of AFC Richmond’s major sponsors, the fictional Dubai Air. Thinking nothing of it, Sam sends a light-hearted iMessage to his father telling him ‘Free tickets for you and Mom [sic]’. Sam’s father quickly responds by scolding Sam and making him aware of the fact that Dubai Air is responsible for multiple oil spills in Sam’s home country of Nigeria. He tells Sam, ‘To see you choose to be a shill for a corporation that has ruined the lives of so many breaks my heart’. As such, Sam resolves to renounce Dubai Air—in the locker room before the team’s next match Sam covers the Dubai Air logo on his uniform with black tape. In a show of unity, the rest of the team do the same thing. Predictably, this protest has consequences as Dubai Air are less than pleased and they offer an ultimatum—either AFC Richmond fire Sam or Dubai Air end their sponsorship of the club.

This dilemma brings the messy question of corporate sponsorship of professional sport to the fore. Is it possible for football clubs to obtain corporate support ethically? Fortunately, Ted Lasso is quick to provide a clear answer to this question—yes. After they are dropped by Dubai Air, AFC Richmond immediately finds sponsorship from a more ‘ethical’ fictional company, a dating app called Bantr. Rather than reckoning with the institutional and existential implications of corporate sponsorship in sport, Ted Lasso instead maintains the status quo. Yes, companies can be bad, but they can simply be replaced with ‘better’ and more ‘ethical’ ones instead. In the storyworld of Ted Lasso, corporate sponsorship is shown to be susceptible to corruption from ‘bad’ companies rather than being inherently problematic. Of course, this is a worldview that suits Apple very well. They have worked hard to position themselves as a ‘progressive’ company cut from the same cloth as Ted Lasso’s Bantr. The show’s philosophy of kindness solves its plot dilemma with a lateral move rather than any innovative dismantling.

With the Dubai Air example serving as an illustration of Apple’s corporate ideology, there are further, quite crude examples of the show being used to bolster Apple’s hardware sales and public image. Apple devices and services are prominently featured in each episode of the show. In a popular video for Wall Street Journal’s YouTube page, Kenny Wassus catalogued every time an Apple product was shown on screen (Wassus, 2021), finding that, on average, Ted Lasso featured one Apple product every minute. In a single 29-minute episode of Ted Lasso’s first season, there would be around 36 shots of Apple products. Moreover, the products themselves are integrated into prominent storylines. Ted’s relationship with his son is played out almost entirely over FaceTime, meanwhile almost all written communication between characters is facilitated through iMessage. Of course, product placement in TV and film is nothing new and there have been plenty of examples of texts that feature more egregious closeups of products. However, in the case of Ted Lasso, Apple is woven into the very fabric of the show’s storyworld. Product placement in Ted Lasso is less about discrete products, than an overarching-brand identity. The world the show creates is, in part, a world where Apple is the only tech company that exists. There is an overwhelming presence of MacBooks, iPhones and AirPods; Apple is integrated into daily communication, and the competitive free market appears to have been settled. Through this integration we can start to see potentials for what scholars refer to as ‘wishful identification’ (Hoffner and Buchanan, 2009; Shoenberger and Kim, 2019). Typically, this term refers to when real-world products are associated with a character who possess positive attributes that audiences may emulate through consumption. In the case of Ted Lasso, however, Apple products are positively associated with the show as a whole. As a brand, Apple becomes integral to Ted Lasso’s all-encompassing philosophy of kindness and its belief in ‘believe’.

‘Positive’ masculinity?

So far, this article has argued that the brand of wholesome humour enacted in Ted Lasso and its optimistic inclusion of capitalist ideologies through storylines works to turn the textual universe of the show into a kind of utopic vision according to Apple. Indeed, the show has been lauded from the outset for the character dynamics it works with; for example, how Ted coaches with kindness and empathy, how Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) carves out a meaningful space as a woman in a male dominated industry or how the mental wellbeing of its characters is a narrative priority. The ease with which narrative tensions are resolvable through this formula—how quickly Ted improves AFC Richmond’s culture, and how Rebecca is able to build her ‘boss bitch’ confidence—suggests that Ted’s optimistic worldview is a key to success (and with the diegetic appearance of Santa Clause flying overhead on his sleigh in S2 E4 one could even go as far as to call Ted Lasso’s setting an alternate universe).

Without wishing to negate the value of these storytelling imperatives, there are some challenging implications in how this approach corresponds to real-world issues of the culture it depicts. While it is by no means attempting a documentarian expose into the actual workings of British football leagues, this real-word context is still harnessed as the recognisable setting in which Apple’s utopia is built. Therefore, we can logically ask (a) how this utopic vision corresponds with real-world issues of the space in question, and (b) who is included within this vision, and who is not included?

For Seasons 1 and 2, there are zero out or closeted gay men identified in Ted Lasso’s regular cast of characters. Extending this vision to the totality of its textual universe of Seasons 1 and 2, in S2 E5 an older gay male couple is glimpsed as a part of a lovers’ montage of AFC Richmond fans (set to Nat King Cole’s ‘L.O.V.E’). There are three spoken overt references to male homosexuality across these two seasons. In the opening sequence of S1 E1, Rebecca calls in the current AFC Richmond Coach, George (Bill Fellows), to fire him: as he enters, he asks ‘I love what you’ve done to the place, did you do it yourself or get some poof to help you?’. In S2 E3, Keeley (Juno Temple) is spruiking the fictional dating app Bantr to the teammates, and upon spelling it out, Colin (Billy Harris) asks ‘Ah, like Grindr?’. This draws quizzical looks from the team and a beat of silence in the scene, but is then moved on from without fuss, and is elaborated on no further. And, in S2 E6 Keeley tells Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) that his girlfriend Jane (Phoebe Walsh) once followed her ‘all the way home just to ask if Beard was shagging Ted’.

There are some limited insinuations of non-heteronormativity in the depiction of Keeley and Rebecca’s relationship. For instance, as their friendship is being cemented, S1 E7 produces the following exchange when Keeley pretends to misinterpret an invitation to an away-game as a romantic advance:

Keeley: I just want to say up front that I’m really flattered you asked me to come this weekend.

Rebecca: Oh, come on now.

K: But, hey, we’re both single. I think you’re super-hot. If I’m gonna dip my toe back in the lady pool, I can’t think of a finer body of water to do it with than you.

R: No. Keeley, I think you’re confused.

K: I was, at first. Then I was like, ‘come on, Keeley. Blow off some steam and have some wicked sex with your new friend.’

R: [stunned silence]

K: I’m fucking with you. [chuckles]

R: [laughs] Oh my god. I thought you were being serious. Could you imagine?

K: Oh I have.

Keeley often compliments Rebecca’s physique, as in S1 E3 when she learns of a nude paparazzi shot that Rebecca had suppressed of her and begs to see it, thereupon gushing over Rebecca’s body. Though there are suggestions of romance in their relationship, it is always understood in-universe as a close, platonic female friendship, rather than that of romantically involved lesbians or bisexual women, and with no relative male relationships exploring a comparable homosocial tone. Although Ted and Coach Beard’s relationship could potentially be queer coded (as the previous quoted misunderstanding demonstrates), it only manifests on-screen as terms of endearment and a psychic shorthand between the two, rather than overtly sexualised dialogue as with Keeley and Rebecca.

Pockets of the sporting world appear to be somewhat behind the rest of society in terms of gay acceptance. In Australia (the authors’ writing context) there have been recent efforts by sporting organisations, like Football Australia, to address issues of institutionalised homophobia following newfound media scrutiny. As introduced earlier, in 2021 Adelaide United’s Josh Cavallo became the only openly gay professional men’s A-League football player in the world. Cavallo’s announcement has served as the impetus for many local and international clubs to explicitly incorporate inclusivity and acceptance as a part of their codes, and games have been policed more heavily for homophobic slurs being used among crowds. This is meaningful progress (albeit some decades overdue) and, with continued and concerted effort, may result in the professional sporting space enduring as a safe and accessible arena for queer players to participate in, which it currently is only in limited instances. Elsewhere in Australian sport, in the time following Cavallo’s coming out, a basic push for a ‘Pride Round’ or pride-themed jerseys in our National Rugby League was met with player boycotts, and a suggested capitulation (or dog-whistle) of a ‘Respect Round’ in which the league promotes ‘respect for everyone’s views’ (ABC, 2023). The professional league of Australian Rules Football (the AFL) has been reported as ‘the only major professional sporting code in the world’ where no past or present male players have ever identified as gay or bisexual (Milligan, 2023).

As noted by Raewyn Connell, men’s sport serves as a microcosm for the strict policing of gender boundaries. In these spaces, hegemonic masculinity is enacted through an (often violent) policing and persecution of any traits that are perceived to be ‘feminine’ (Connell, 1987: 182). More specifically, in his far-reaching analysis of gay male athletes in American sport, Anderson (2005) makes several useful points that help contextualise the tension between Ted Lasso’s utopia and its real-world referent. Firstly (and from a 2005 context), he writes of both casual and pointed use of homophobic language amongst teammates and sporting cultures, with the use of slurs a shorthand to belittle an athlete’s performance by way of drawing suspicion onto their hypermasculinity. The locker room, as a mostly male and erotically-coded space of team-building, is strategically sublimated through vehement homophobic discourse. Coaches have a particular power to set the dynamic of a team in this context; as almost-exclusively former athletes themselves, they are empowered to recreate the playing conditions, in which they found success. A coach’s expressed or implied attitudes to social issues are particularly formative to an athlete’s assessment of coming out to their team.

Alongside Rebecca’s office, the training pitch and the local pub, the locker room of Ted Lasso (and its attached managers’ office) is its primary narrative setting, where some of Anderson’s identified dynamics are retained while others are discarded. The crass use of ‘poof’ by the club’s former coach in the pilot episode suggests a team culture upheld prior to Ted’s introduction as typically exclusive and hypermasculine; other than this, however, there is no homophobic discourse to speak of across two seasons, either amongst teammates, institutional figures, or fans. Besides the three aforementioned utterances, and one brief glimpse of unnamed, nonspeaking background characters, the entire notion of gay male sexuality remains otherwise unexamined. Heterosexuality is contrastingly dominant and visible from the outset: in the pilot episode, Keeley is introduced by entering the locker room, and her then-boyfriend Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) tells her to leave ahead of him so that he can ‘watch [her] arse’, to which the teammates whoop and holler in heteronormative approval. Beyond this argy-bargy tone, Ted Lasso’s characters are defiantly forthright about their sex lives, but within the confines of heterosexuality. For example, in S2 E3 Rebecca’s friend Flo (Ellie Taylor) makes it clear that Ted’s personality meant that he was ‘so eager to please’ during sex, or when Keeley shares of her and Roy’s (Brett Goldstein) plans for ‘sexy Christmas’ in S2 E4.

Upon assuming the mantle of club coach, Ted makes immediate moves to improve the locker room culture by instilling team spirit and respect amongst the players and achieves speedy success; in S2 E3 journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance) even says that Ted is ‘known for creating a great environment in the locker room’. Indeed, with the absence of homophobic rhetoric and Ted’s defining character traits of inclusivity and acceptance, AFC Richmond would be an ideal professional sporting context in which a gay athlete could confidently come out and anticipate support.

While Ted’s influence imparts unity and trust, however, it is clear that other traits of toxic masculinity that pervade sporting contexts remain unchallenged. This is observable in S1 E7, when team ‘kit man’ Nate (Nick Mohammed) is given the opportunity by Ted to give a pre-game team assessment. His motivational roasting demonstrates the casual misogyny accepted amongst players and coaches, as when he tells one player ‘I’ve noticed of late that you’ve being playing like a big, dumb pussy’. Tenets of typical hypermasculinity like aggression against enemies and dominance over women are still prized, such as Nate telling team captain Roy ‘it’s your anger that’s your superpower—that’s what made you one of the best midfielders in the history of this league… you used to run like you were angry at the grass—you’d kick the ball like you’d caught it fucking your wife’.

This sequence ostensibly marks Nate’s rise in the club (and arc towards series antagonist for the first portion of Season 3), eventually being promoted to the coaching squad. After starting in the narrative from a lowly position of being taunted and hazed by the players, he then perpetuates this abusive hierarchy by bullying his replacement kit man, Will (Charlie Hiscock), across Season 2. Notably, he also singles out Colin for opportunistic belittling, culminating in an aggressive spray in S2 E7 that Coach Beard calls ‘personal and weird’. Nate ultimately apologises to Colin in front of the team, which instigates a wholesome group hug, although he finishes the episode reverting to menacingly threatening Will in private.

These overtly problematic aspects of Nate’s pursuit of hypermasculinity are treated as blips on the radar of his overall character arc, usually resolvable by the episode’s end. He ends Season 2 a villain, but his ultimate redemption is swift, and framed as a character who got swept up by ego and self-importance. The ready acceptance, however, of his casual misogyny or his belief in the hierarchical order of the locker room are unchallenged—his curt approach to coaching serves as a necessary counterbalance to Ted’s, assuring his value at AFC Richmond. Ultimately, Nate’s role in the story supports the conventional wisdom that some amount of hypermasculine aggression is necessary to cultivate sporting success.

‘What about team showers?’ —Ted Lasso’s late-game inclusivity

There is something of a stark split between Seasons 1 and 2 of Ted Lasso and its 3^rd, possibly final, season: episodes were longer, with writing working much more towards ‘drama’ storylines than its ostensible ‘comedy’ origins. Season 3 also introduced some key LGBTQIA+ storylines. Keeley enters a brief same-sex relationship with her boss (Jack, played by Jodi Balfour), AFC Richmond player Colin (who uttered ‘Grindr’ and was targeted by Nate in Season 2) is revealed to be closeted, and journalist Trent Crimm has an enlarged role in which we learn he is gay.

Colin’s arc is the centrepiece here. He is confirmed to be gay in S3 E3 and is seen kissing a man by Trent. When the team plays in Amsterdam in S3 E6, Colin skips out on the group’s plans to go to a gay bar by himself disguised in a hoodie. Trent follows him, and after Colin tries to exit the situation Trent assures him that he already knows, has done for months, has not told anyone, and that there ‘must be a good reason for that’. We later catch the end of Trent recounting his coming out story, and Colin offers:

Well, my whole life is two lives really. You got my work life. Like, no one at the club knows. I’d like to think they wouldn’t care, but it’s just easier that way. Then you got my dating life—some guys think it’s hot, other say they don’t care, but eventually they get tired and move on. Then the club bought in Dr. Sharon [Sarah Niles], and she helped me realise that I have an ache. An ache for both my lives to be my only life. I don’t want to be a spokesperson. I don’t want a bunch of apologies. All I want is for when we win a match to be able to kiss my fella the same way the guys get to kiss their girls. And I know we can’t fix every ache inside of us. But I shouldn’t have to pretend it’s not there either.

Later, in S3 E8, team captain Isaac (Kola Bokinni) snatches Colin’s phone and discovers nude pictures of men. In S3 E9, Isaac refuses to speak to Colin. During a match, Colin has a pass intercepted by the opposing team, which Isaac reprimands him for by swearing and shouting at him to the point of having to be restrained by other team members. When leaving the pitch at halftime, Colin and Isaac hear an AFC Richmond fan shout from the stands that they are ‘playing like a bunch of F—’; the slur (that Sam later refers to as ‘the other ‘F word’’) is cut off by a sad music beat and a cut to Colin obviously hearing and ignoring it. Isaac charges into the stand and attacks the fan (shouting ‘what did you say to me?’), receiving a red card.

The team starts speculating that Isaac is gay. Colin then speaks up to say ‘Isaac’s not gay’—the scene cuts away, resuming after Colin has come out. Everyone affirms that they are ‘cool’ and that they ‘don’t care’, but Ted jumps in to say that they do care. He tells a convoluted story about an old friend who was teased in childhood because he was a fan of the wrong sports team—the point of the story being that Ted should have cared and should have been supportive. ‘Did you just compare being gay to being a Denver Broncos fan?’ asks Colin. Ted affirms:

The point is Colin, we don’t not care—we care very much. We care about who you are and what you must’ve been going through. But hey, from now on you don’t have to go through it all by yourself.

The team goes on to win and Colin is declared the man of the match by the commentors for his assists; ‘the Welshman played like a man reborn’. Isaac later shows up at Colin’s house, clarifying that he was hurt that Colin had never told him—which Colin attributes to his own unfounded fears of non-acceptance and that Isaac is bad at keeping secrets. The two end the episode hanging out again—Isaac asks Colin questions about ‘tops and bottoms’ and team showers (‘if I had to shower with a bunch of girls all the time I’d defo get boners’), although cannot quite bring himself to return Colin’s platonic ‘I love you, boy-o’. In the season finale, when AFC Richmond win their crucial match and the pitch erupts in celebration, Colin kisses his partner out in the open—although with this serving as a speculated series finale (culminating in Ted’s return to America), whether the inevitably international ramifications of this gesture were considered remains to be seen.

There are aspects to Colin’s story that demonstrate some insight into the lives of gay athletes in ways that correspond to Eric Anderson’s aforementioned research (2005). Colin expresses anxiety at the prospect of non-acceptance, speaks of a double-life, and actively participates in the hypermasculine heterosexist banter of the locker room to compensate for his lack of fitting in. It is somewhat more worrying, however, that this was the storyline to begin with. In a utopic world where systemic shortcomings of football as an institution—corruption, sexism, racism—are rendered as the faults of ‘bad’ individuals who don’t ‘believe’ as Ted teaches, why is overt and covert homophobia introduced into the storyworld in its third season? The show frames Isaac’s intimidating and exclusionary aggression at Colin across S3 E9 as yet another misunderstanding that is eventually resolved—rather than a very real confirmation of Colin’s fears of the negative repercussions of coming out. In prior seasons, Colin was actively identified by Nate as a target of ridicule and contempt to affirm his sense of power within the team’s hierarchy —ostensibly for Colin’s limitations as a player, but now come Season 3 with a reading available of Nate’s intuitive homophobia. But, in the storyworld, Colin was the architect of his own limitations: by remaining closeted, he was failing to ‘believe’ in his teammates, and coming out was what was needed to unlock his true potential as a player.

Was this sufficient as representation of a coming out story within an elite sporting context? For a show finding immediate critical success and cultural salience, waiting until Season 3 to affirm the existence of gay characters in the cast reads, to the authors at least, as cowardly. It displays a tacit acceptance of the convenient ambivalence to LGBTQIA+ issues that elite sports too-often project. In creating a utopic version of football culture to enact its story, Ted Lasso considers queerness as a complication to overcome—a plot beat rather than an intrinsic quality of a storyworld.

Conclusion

Toxic positivity can be understood as a ‘denial of reality’ and a way to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about the world around us (Kaufman, 2021). Despite its efforts to grapple with such heavy topics as men’s mental health and corporate sponsorship, Ted Lassos underlying approach to the realities of EPL football invites such a denial. Ted Lasso’s utopia is one of wholesome characters and of simple solutions. Bad corporate sponsors like Dubai Air are discarded for the good of the team’s ethic. But, thankfully, a good corporate sponsor like Bantr is ready and waiting to fill the financial void. Rebecca’s aptitude as a woman in sport is constantly undermined by her demeaning ex-husband and by unserious questions asked of her by sports journalists. However, her crisis of self-esteem is surmountable whenever she remembers (or is reminded) that she is, after all, a ‘boss-ass bitch’.

So, in this world, what is one to make of toxic masculinity and cultural homophobia? Ted, his colleagues, and his team, serve as beacons of a new archetype of masculinity in TV comedy—one where many of the physical, aesthetic, or behavioural ideals of typical hypermasculinity are still upheld, but to relentlessly positive ends. Roy’s defining characteristic of anger is tempered by situating him in a hobby yoga group of middle-aged women who drink rosé and gossip; Jamie Tartt’s God-complex resulting from his sporting prowess is neutered by his need to be accepted within a broader team, and his arrogance is reframed as an in-game tool for winning at football. But for all the typical traits of toxic masculinity that are re-contextualised in the service of a positive comedy, Ted Lasso retreats from interrogating homophobia as a by-product of the real culture that these characters are borne of. Instead of challenging sports-based homophobia as it exists in the real-world through the show’s utopic prism, they instead erase its existence for two out of three seasons. When it is finally brought to the fore of the story, Colin’s apprehension over his hidden life is framed as unfounded, despite actual in-text aggression and ostracism that remains uncritiqued.

We contend that homosexuality in sport serves as a neat demonstration of Apple TV+’s approach to unflattering storytelling. Failings of elite sports as an institution are ignorable or are reducible to character-based misunderstandings and redemption arcs. This suits the corporate needs of a storyworld in which Apple products are so heavily integrated. The characters must not only ‘believe’ in themselves, but in the unambiguous good of the world that they occupy.