My Very Nigerian Problem with Ted Lasso

Sam Obisanya & Rebecca Welton fail to live up to the lofty standards set by Viola and Liam in Widows.

I watched a lot of shows during the 1st great lockdown of 2020.

A lot of it was stuff that I’d already seen like Scrubs, Chuck, Monk, and Avatar: The Good One- I mean, Avatar: The Last Airbender. Some of it was stuff that I hadn’t seen before like the American Office and 200 episodes of One Piece, but of everything that I watched during that period, nothing stuck with me like Ted Lasso.

The reasons why the Jason Sudeikis-led football sitcom resonated with so many are well-documented so I don’t need to get into them (super sweet and positive show during a time when everyone was miserable, fun characters, lots of heart etc etc). I even mentioned how its sincerity and earnestness were a big part of its success in my previous piece on Rye Lane (which you should watch/buy/support when it comes out on streaming sites).

However, the main reason I enjoy Ted Lasso so much is that I’m very drawn to shows about funny and ridiculous people who are also desperately sad and often lonely. It’s kind of my sweet spot and it’s the reason Monk is one of my favourite shows ever. Ted Lasso’s executive producer and writer Bill Lawrence (who also made Scrubs and, more recently, Shrinking) is an expert at this, bringing the laughter as well as the tears is kind of his bag so when I saw his name attached, I had a good idea of what I was in for.

For those of you who don’t know, Ted Lasso is the story of… Ted Lasso (Sudeikis), an American football (the bad football) coach who’s hired to manage an English Premier League football (the good football) team known as Richmond AFC, despite knowing absolutely nothing about the sport. Little does he know that his appointment is all part of an elaborate plot by recently divorced marble sculpture, Rebecca Welton who won the football club from her superfan ex-husband in the settlement and now plans to use Ted’s inexperience to bring her ex-husband’s beloved club to ruin.

This sounds like a zany and fun show, but that’s only because the writers thrive on subverting your expectations (in a good way, not a Rian Johnson kind of way) so they often start with some silliness, some transatlantic misunderstandings and then out of nowhere: pain. There’s a lot of pain in this show (had a random thought about how to French speakers this might look like I’m talking about the sheer volume of bread in this sitcom, maybe, idk I don’t speak French, but there are a lot of biscuits). Rather than treat Rebecca as the villain, the show delves into how she’s been hurt time and time again by an emotionally abusive husband, and how that hurt has caused her to isolate herself and take it out on undeserving people like Ted. Meanwhile Ted — despite being a constant source of levity and folksy American sayings that would make me side-eye any oyin I heard them from — is in his own world of pain, having accepted the job across the Atlantic to give his wife space as she slowly falls out of love with him and ultimately divorces him. So. Much. Bread. It’s great.

Season 1 explores this bread perfectly while also exploring a vast array of fun and great characters. Characters like Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, an aging footballer whose entire personality is just me in the morning when someone I don’t know like that catches me in the office kitchen and decides to overshare; Keeley, an adorably funny and straight-forward model-turned-CEO; Jamie Tartt, who is basically Jack Grealish’s inner monologue; Coach Beard, Ted’s enigmatic right-hand man; Nate, a d*ckhead; and, one of my favourites, Sam Obisanya, Richmond’s good-natured, young Nigerian winger. All of these characters have their own wants, needs, and fascinating storylines to make season 1 as dynamic as it is.

But season 2 is…

Yeah.

Let’s get into it.

I largely enjoy season 2 of Ted Lasso, I love the focus on Ted’s anxiety and his struggle with coming to trust his new therapist (played by Sarah Niles who between this, Riches, and Sandman pretty much owns TV); I enjoyed learning more about the individual members of the football team; enjoyed Nate’s descent into darkness as his own insecurities and craving for validation cause him to isolate himself; and I enjoyed Jamie’s storyline about redeeming himself and finally letting go of the weight of his abusive father’s expectations, it’s an arc that also contains my 2nd favourite exchange of the season:

Jamie: The second that I found out that George Harrison had died, I realized that I had to stop waiting for life to begin. Start taking chances. Living life to the fullest.
Holly: But George Harrison died 20 years ago.
Jamie: Yeah, but I only just found out.

Just gold.

However, there are a few things that I didn’t enjoy about season 2: the episodes seemed to lack continuity, with the consequences of major events (like Sam and the club protesting the club’s shirt sponsor) often being diminished or largely forgotten, the footballing side of things (the reason Ted is there in the first place) felt a bit inconsequential, and I really didn’t care much for Roy and Keeley’s relationship drama.

But by far, the thing I absolutely could not stand about season 2 of Ted Lasso was the sudden romance between Sam Obisanya and Rebecca Welton.

So…

It’s a very weird feeling when something you really really enjoy just has something completely awful at the core of it.

Like a really good album by your favourite artist that has a Kodak Black or Tory Lanez feature on it.

Essentially throughout the beginning of season 2, we see Rebecca obsessively messaging a special someone on Keeley’s new dating app, Bantr (which has absolutely no place being the shirt sponsor of the Premier League football team). Rebecca seems infatuated with her mystery man, they bond over poetry, he makes her laugh, he seems smart, profound, charming, and has an almost youthful exuberance about the world. There’s a small red herring that leads us to think that the mystery man might be Ted himself, but it’s soon revealed to us that she has, in fact, been talking to Sam.

Upon finally meeting her mystery Sam in person and realizing what’s happened, Rebecca is horrified, absolutely refusing to take things any further, listing reasons such as her being over twice his age and also his big boss, and… yeah… she’s correct.

Rebecca is older than Sam and has significantly more power than him in multiple ways, they should not date.

I would have been entirely content for this storyline to end here as a silly and zany misunderstanding that is never spoken of again, but the writers of Ted Lasso had other, much worse ideas. So the rest of season 2 sees Rebecca navigating her relationship with Sam as he also tries to figure out where his future lies, y’know because he’s like 20.

I cannot stress enough, how much I hate this storyline, it’s really really bad. I think Toheeb Jimoh and Hannah Waddingham are brilliant actors, I really enjoy the characters, their individual arcs, and their quirks, but I think this was a terrible idea.

I am literally someone who once felt that the icing for my freshly baked cake was too runny and thought it’d be a genius baking hack to mix in raw flour to thicken it, and even I know this storyline was a terrible idea (I was a kid, allow me).

I binged all 7 seasons of Gilmore Girls but I was barely able to sit through this storyline; I was able to sit through Lane Kim’s prospects in life getting progressively worse, the entirety of Stars Hollow treating Jess Mariano like he was a Black kid (my eldest sister’s observation) as well as Rory and Lorelai Gilmore being themselves, but I could not get through Sam and Rebecca’s relationship (although to be fair I fast forwarded a lot of Rory and Logan’s scenes together, maybe I’ll write about that later). I really hope I’m making it clear just how much I didn’t f**k with this storyline, it was like watching a slow, interracial car crash.

So I’ll start with the more obvious and surface-level issues I have with this relationship:

I think the massive gap in age and status (you can say there isn’t a gap in class because Sam has footballer money but… meh) means that there is a huge power imbalance in Sam and Rebecca’s relationship that just makes it super inappropriate. You can maybe look past the age gap (Sam is 21, and Rebecca is nearly 50), but quite frankly it just doesn’t seem like Sam is old enough or mature enough for it to be an equal partnership. Sam is written to be someone who is capable of wisdom beyond his years but ultimately has a lot to learn about himself and the way the world works, the contrast with the world-weary and hypercompetent Rebecca just makes this feel like a gross mismatch. I’m sure there are some who would say that it’s progressive to see a woman chase a much younger man because we let men get away with it (Rebecca’s husband even does the same), but to those people, I would say: those men are sus too and being sus, much like the patriarchy, is genderless (found a way to jam some bell hooks into this one too).

A lot of Sam’s arc in the show is about him growing up and maturing into the man he wants to be, being a more vocal member of the team, standing against corruption in Nigeria (which… okay sure, white writers), and making a decision about his status as an African footballer (we’ll get to that). All of these things separately are awesome story beats, but they all become a bit bogged down when having to contend with the weight of Rebecca’s story which finds itself almost entirely lacking in direction after such a strong first season.

Admittedly, the two characters have an interesting thematic connection, Rebecca is finally discovering who she is without her evil ex-husband after being on auto-pilot for years and then dedicating herself to a destructive vengeance quest in the previous season; meanwhile, Sam is discovering who he is for the reasons previously listed. It’s discovery and re-discovery coming together, with the big glaring issue being that Rebecca doesn’t really need Sam to re-discover herself and Sam absolutely does not need a white woman twice his age to discover himself (something he realizes at the very end of this ordeal kind of). These are two different types of discovery, and the difference between them is almost entirely down to life experience (and ethnicity a lil bit).

The idea that Rebecca needs Sam at all is just weird to me, while she is shown to be very lonely and unsure when it comes to her personal relationship, she’s still very formidable and has many more suitable people in her life to go on this journey with. Her apparent infatuation with Sam comes off more as a weary adult being charmed by the naïve hopefulness of a much younger person, and I really would have preferred if Rebecca’s storyline had focused more on her attempts to run Richmond AFC in a period where the club didn’t have much going for it (losing all of the Premier League money as well as the shirt sponsorship should’ve been a much bigger problem than it was). After seeing her obsess over her ex-husband in the previous season, it would have been nice to see Rebecca rediscover her hobbies and passions while navigating English football as one of its few female owners, the character needed more time alone before going right into another romance plot.

And then we come to Sam.

Aiiishhh.

How do I put this…

You may have noticed that in a previous paragraph, I referred to Rebecca as “a white woman”.

That is because Rebecca is, in fact, a white woman.

And I personally do not like the optics of a young Nigerian man naively pursuing a romance with his white, wealthy boss who is twice his age and that being portrayed as something that is ultimately fine, progressive even. (Some might ask, does race really matter where love is concerned? To which I would reply, yes it absolutely does.)

ESPECIALLY when Edwin Akufo comes into the picture at the end of the season.

Edwin Akufo (played by Sam Richardson who, apparently, might be distantly related to me?) is a Ghanaian billionaire who inherits a prosperous tech firm upon the death of his father. Edwin is shown to be a very charming man (Richardson displays a manic charisma that is the trademark of my family), he’s intelligent, generous, and doesn’t believe that billionaires should exist, therefore he hopes to distribute his father’s wealth into various enterprises. One such enterprise is an African superteam; Edwin wants to buy a club in Morocco, and fill it with amazing African talent, thereby putting African football on the global map, and, most importantly, he wants Sam to be a vital part of that team.

Now, to understand why I feel the way I do about this scenario, it’s important to understand a few things about me:

I am half-Nigerian and half-Ghanaian,
I love football,
I grew up during a period where Nigerian players were prevalent in the Premier League (literally used to do Yakubu’s celebration in the playground whenever I scored a goal, it was easier than Obafemi Martins’),
I am one of the millions of people who will beef Luis Suarez on sight if I ever catch him outside.

So you can bet I’m team Akufo, leave everything behind and join him, Sam.

I’m mostly joking.

This part of the storyline — although somewhat tacked on — has phenomenal potential, we know that Sam is often homesick as a Nigerian who fairly recently moved to England (there’s a lovely scene in S1 where Ted organizes a surprise birthday party for him complete with a Nigerian flag cake and luxury chin-chin that is probably inferior to Tabitha’s), we know of his desire to be a Nigerian footballing legend, and his feeling of responsibility towards his homeland is established during this season. The perfect conflict for this character would be to have him choose between these things and his new home, his career at Richmond, his friends, and the new role he’s forging for himself as an African voice within English football.

So yeah, Rebecca does not need to factor into Sam’s choice at all, in fact, she kind of muddies it.

While Sam’s exploration of his identity and political activism has some small impact in the following episodes, this much more interesting side of his arc is overshadowed by the romance, as are the multiple aspects of his life that Sam has to consider before making his decision. We’re robbed of this potentially ground-breaking story and instead treated to a lot of umm-ing and ahh-ing over his Ebon-ing and Ivor-ing with Rebecca.

It’s also a bit typical to me that Ted Lasso, a show that prides itself on being very progressive (to the point of being invited to the White House to talk about mental health for some reason), doesn’t seem to notice how this storyline is a bit iffy on multiple levels. There are multiple points in the season where Rebecca informs other characters of her fling with Sam, and I kept expecting one of them to point out the glaring issues with it, but no one does and the whole thing just feels kind of off to me.

In a show as prone to subversions and broken stereotypes as this one is, it’s funny that the prominent Black athlete finds himself in a situation as old as time, one that can be best summed up by the 2002 blaxploitation spy parody, Undercover Brother:

Side note — I just discovered that this movie was made by:

Spike Lee’s cousin, Malcolm, who also directed the Best Man franchise, Girl’s Trip and Space Jam 2,

The guy who wrote two of the Austin Powers movies and would also go on to write The Boss Baby,

And the guy who would go on to write f**king 12 Years a Slave??? and win an Academy Award for it??? Whaaaat?????

Back on topic… yeah… hate this storyline.

Aside from its problematic implications, what seems like a clear power imbalance, and the missed opportunities for both characters, I also really don’t like how it ends.

At a ceremony for her recently-deceased father, Rebecca has a somber conversation with Sam in a closet where she breaks off their thing because she’s afraid that Sam will hurt her (which is fair, he is a Yoruba boy after all), and because she must take time to find out why that scares her after he reveals that the idea of being hurt doesn’t scare him (again, rich Yoruba boy in his early-20s, it’s really not that hard to figure out).

This scene is pretty rough to get through, mainly because it’s a bit like watching a middle-aged white woman dump a Black boy who is simply too young and naive to understand why they can’t go to 4th base (kissing and holding hands obviously). Jimoh really sells Sam’s spark and youthful enthusiasm, while Waddingham sells Rebecca’s weariness and fear from years of past experience and this is kind of the exact problem. Rebecca’s fear of being with another hurtful and controlling man falls flat when it’s aimed at Sam, who it’s hard to imagine would emotionally hurt her in any substantial way, not just because of his personality, but because it’s hard for me to imagine him having the power, status or maturity to affect her in that way. I can’t help but think this would be much more effective if Rebecca experienced this with someone her own age, someone who is more her equal and is, therefore, more of a risk to her than Sam who, again, has little to no power or control over her.

We then move on to the penultimate episode of the season where Sam meets Edwin and is forced to decide whether or not to go to Morocco with him and be the future of African football. Edwin essentially takes Sam on a date, wooing him by taking him to a museum that he has bought (pledging to send one of the paintings back to Nigeria where it was made), before setting up a temporary Nigerian restaurant where he delivers his final pitch to Sam as the two debate on whose jollof is better (Nigerian, but with basmati imo, hot take I know). He has a phone conversation with his dad (Sam’s dad is beautifully affectionate and honest about his emotions, it’s a beautiful Nigerian father-son combo that it would have been nice to see more of) who is very keen for him to go, and the episode does a really good job of making it seem like this could be a very good option for Sam.

So what counterargument does the episode present Sam with? What could possibly beat a tailor-made Nigerian restaurant and a billionaire museum date?

It’s Rebecca, waiting outside Sam’s front door. An episode after she (wisely) dumped him.

Rebecca’s pitch is simply this: she won’t ask him not to go, but she hopes he doesn’t. And then she leaves. Yeah, that seems about right for a storyline as half-baked as this one.

In the final episode, Sam is still torn over what to do, and his father advises him to look to the universe for a sign. Sam follows his father’s advice and sees a young, Black boy playing football in the park wearing a Richmond jersey with Sam’s name on the back, and this seems to be what makes up his mind to stay (I get the feeling that the togetherness of the team in the wake of securing promotion back to the Prem and standing by Ted as his anxiety attack is leaked to the press might also have been a factor).

Sam tells Edwin of his decision, and Edwin reacts less than well.

Now I’m a bit torn on this one. On the one hand, I really liked Edwin’s portrayal as such a progressive, charming, and intelligent African man, it was a refreshing change of pace to see one of us depicted in such a way, and it was disappointing to see his mask not only slip but be totally ripped off in an embarrassingly over-the-top and dragged out display of sour grapes towards Sam’s decision.

However…

Hooooowever…

Some of his lines in this scene are funny as sh*t, oh my God:

Edwin Akufo: (yelling) You Nigerian motherf**ker! You Yoruba trash. Who the f*ck do you think you are, wasting my time? You medium-talent piece of sh*t.
Sam: …Medium-talent?

Now we can argue about the optics of a Ghanaian man labeling a Nigerian man as Yoruba trash in a show written mostly by and mainly for white people (wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that tirade was improvised anyway).

But the way cousin Richardson said that line… my goodness.

I’ll link it below just so you can see:

An Emmy-worthy performance.

When asked why he chose to stay, Sam simply says that he didn’t do so because of his feelings for Rebecca (good), he stayed because he realized that it’s best for him and his own personal journey, and he needs to stop caring about what others think about him. And… sure? Okay? Didn’t realize that this was the conclusion we were building toward for him, but, we’ll take it. The Sam of season 1 was the victim of bullying (mostly by Jamie) and was often guilty of overthinking and being too hard on himself, so I guess caring about what others think could potentially come into that? It’s a stretch but, again, we’ll take it.

Sam ends the season by purchasing the fake restaurant that Edwin took him to and resolving to turn it into a thriving Nigerian eatery, which has a lot of potential for his next storyline.

All-in-all, while season 2 of Ted Lasso did its best to ramp up the romanticism within its characters, doubling down on the wholesome, good-natured writing that made it the highlight of everyone’s lockdown, I can’t help but feel like this was a huge swing and a miss. It was a pretty weird experience to see so many reviewers lauding it, but I guess that’s the nature of opinions.

I’m very glad that nothing came of the relationship, but it’s just a shame that a season where Sam was featured so prominently didn’t do more to expand on his experience as a Nigerian player in London and the legacy he wants to leave for himself. I personally would have preferred it if the season of television that heavily featured a young Nigerian man didn’t focus mainly on him pursuing a relationship with his white boss who doesn’t really fit all that well with him, but that’s just me.

( SPOILERS FOR THE 3RD EPISODE OF TED LASSO SEASON 3)

And, although it does seem like the relationship will be at least briefly revisited in this new season with Rebecca slightly still pining over what might have been with Sam, I really do hope that we focus on Sam’s relationship with his cultural identity through his restaurant and his adorable ( Nigerian) chef who is also closer to his age (and already has infinitely more chemistry with him than Rebecca did, but maybe that’s just my biases talking).

Sam Obisanya is a special character, and I really hope his story has a special, and very Nigerian ending.

Also, Logan is trash but he’s rich and Rory is an incredibly shallow person who could not enjoy life without some kind of proximity to wealth, so yh Logan was the right man for her.

Jess was the best man (away from her), but Logan was the right one.

F**k Dean though, Dean sucked.

Originally published at http://jjwi13.wordpress.com on March 30, 2023.