Medievalists Love Ted Lasso
(Matt and David do anyway)
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Last year, as season two came to an end, we met in Minnesota, went to a little cabin on a little lake, caught and cooked fish, drank whiskey and bourbon, and… wrote about Ted Lasso.
As medievalists, we had a lot to say.
Although the show’s superficial focus over the first two seasons has been on Ted as a “nice guy,” that’s not really what the show is about. It isn’t a happy-go-lucky dramatization of optimism, but about the work and necessity of building communities in which we draw strength from one another. The show’s tension and success stem not from its oft-touted emphasis on kindness, but from its ability to embody something that in the past would have been called caritas.
The Latin word caritas is most often translated as “charity,” but a better meaning is “love” – a certain kind of love, though, one that’s selfless, that puts others first. The “love” of the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13 (that it is “patient,” “kind,” etc.), the staple of so many Christian weddings, for example, is translated from caritas in the Latin. This is a type of love that thinks more about others than oneself. As the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas explained, it’s simply to “wish good to someone.”
This is the problem/ benefit of spending decades thinking about a time, a place, a set of ideas, a history. It becomes the lens through which you encounter so much of the world, which can narrow your viewpoint or - as we hope happens in this essay from 2021 - expand your horizons.
Season 3 of Ted Lasso launches. Over the last few days, we’ve both watched advanced screeners of the first few episodes and independently came to the same conclusion: This season is about trying to deal with the past, and more specifically the stories we tell about that past.
For CNN we write (with a few minimal spoilers for episode 1):
As historians, we like to tell our students when they’re confronted with a puzzle - with a problem of what something means - that it’s always best to return ad fontes (“to the sources”). We do this because the stories people tell about the past, whether it be about a nation or a romantic relationship, pile up over time. This is the core of what history is. Pushing away all those layers won’t necessarily get us to a particular truth about what something means, but it will help us understand why and how certain stories have been told about an event. History doesn’t rule our actions entirely, but it does shape at least in part how we got to where we are and why we think our choices are so constrained.
Season Three of “Ted Lasso” shows that there’s a specter haunting west London - the specter of the past. Ted is still tormented by his decision to come to London. Rebecca continues to be haunted by her relationship with Rupert. Keeley is bedeviled by her new job and relationship with Roy. And Nate cannot escape his past actions towards Ted at the end of last season.
In other words, we’re incapable of watching anything and not being medievalists at the same time. We think it’s a feature, not a bug, and since you’re here on Modern Medieval, we hope you do to.
Read the essay here and please share it through your social media networks.
Thanks for reading Modern Medieval! Subscribe for free to receive new posts every week.