'Ted Lasso' Still Has Work To Do With This Character in a Season 4

5 days ago 6

Apple TV+'s Ted Lasso had its fans guessing about the future of the Emmy Award-winning comedy-drama even before its Season 3 premiere. There is confirmed to be significant excitement among Jason Sudeikis and his team regarding another season. Season 3 of Ted Lasso ended with quite a few drastic creative decisions that would end up affecting the future of the Apple TV+ sports comedy series. With Ted (Jason Sudeikis) returning to the United States and Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) taking up the mantle as AFC Richmond's new coach, a lot remains uncertain about the future of the central characters of Ted Lasso. While original cast members such as Hannah Waddingham, Jeremy Swift, and Goldstein are expected to return playing their familiar characters, the one character that needs to return in Season 4 has to be Nick Mohammed's football coaching prodigy Nathan "Nate" Shelley, who deserves a second and better chance when the series returns once again.

‘Ted Lasso’ Season 3 Short-Changed Nate's Character Arc

In Season 3, Ted Lasso continues the story arc for Nate that the series painstakingly put up through the Season 2 finale. At the end of Season 2, Nate exited AFC Richmond and joined the rival club, West Ham. Season 3 continues to hype up Nate's role as the season's "big bad." With Nate openly mocking Ted during a press conference in the season's opening episode and AFC Richmond players finding out in Episode 4 that Nate tore down the "Believe" sign in half, Nate is definitively placed as the biggest antagonist of the season considering how Rebecca's (Hannah Waddingham) developing character arc left little for Anthony Head's Rupert Mannion, Rebecca's ex-husband, to wrestle for. Considering that Nate shared a very close and special relationship with Ted (something that Rupert did not), it seemed rather obvious that the tension between Nate and Ted would become the talking point of the season.

Moreover, Nate's character is also given an emotionally turbulent journey as he continues to question his choice of leaving AFC Richmond with such hostility running through him. However, as Ted Lasso Season 3 continued its forward march toward consolidating the endless story points it had created earlier, it ended up sacrificing Nate's complex journey in favor of an easy resolution in the form of Nate quitting West Ham and quite casually being welcomed back into AFC Richmond. All things considered, Nate's terribly fateful ending in Season 3 only demands that the writers bring back the show's possibly smartest and beautifully vulnerable character to give him the ending he deserves.

Nate Never Received the Closure He Deserved in Season 3

Nate wearing a suit sitting at a desk smiling and looking back in a scene from Ted Lasso.

Nate’s character arc was one of the many storylines that Ted Lasso writers rushed toward a dead end. In Season 3, not only does Nate and Ted’s relationship undergo significant stress, but Nate also ends up cutting off ties with AFC Richmond, setting up a crucial storyline that was more interesting than anything else put forth in the concoction that was Season 3. However, the climax of Nate’s character arc did not receive a glorious end as much as the setup did. He had an unceremonious exit from West Ham and had to less-than-warmly be accepted back to AFC Richmond, thanks to Ted and other teammates.

Nate did achieve some progress in terms of reconciliation with his father, with whom he shared a strained relationship, but ultimately, the complexity of the situation and Nate's emotional status, which led to his exit from Richmond, was left unaddressed. At Ted's insistence, Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) agrees to forgive Nate and offers him the job back, but this ending denies Nate the right to explain his part of the story, with as much conviction that forced Nate to quit AFC Richmond in the first place. In the end, Nate's reconciliation with Ted feels like a half-hearted attempt at providing Nate's story with some closure.

Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent in Ted Lasso Season 3 speaking during a press conference

Nate (Nick Mohammed) recognized by the team

For a character as complex and good as Nick Mohammed’s Nate, his eventual ending in Season 3 felt like a rather unsatisfying one. Considering all factors, while the show allowed Nate to rise up momentarily, it almost feels unfair to the character that Nate was portrayed to be a weak and prideful man, who ended up making his friends his enemies, for no good reason. By placing the character in an inferior position, Season 3 of Ted Lasso unwinds all the effort it put into giving Nate a journey completely detached from AFC Richmond. However, at West Ham, instead of rising as a character worthy of standing strong on his own feet, Nate appears to be a man driven by his ego and insecurities only. For a show with a story revolving around sports, Ted Lasso treats the one character with possibly the best sporting mind among the show's roster of characters, quite transactionally.

With Ted possibly still in the United States in Season 4, Nate could be the one finding the limelight at AFC Richmond, given he has the brains to push Richmond to great heights (as he has shown with West Ham), with Roy Kent leading the charge. Also, a return will allow the character to flourish and explore his own journey, without being rushed by the complications of a season imploding on the back of its many experiments. Just like many other characters in Ted Lasso, Nate's journey can reach its logical, satisfying conclusion if the character can be allowed time to flourish independently, at his own pace. Not to mention that in a "sports" show where everything almost works magically through the power of belief, Nate is very much needed to prove that sports also demand strategic thinking and game awareness — all factors that Ted Lasso rarely dwells on in the pursuit of delivering its broader message.