In defense of Nate Shelley

Spoiler warning:

• If you watch Ted Lasso but haven’t watched the Season 2 finale yet, and you don’t want to spoil the ending, stop reading until you’ve seen it. 
• If you don’t watch Ted Lasso but plan to, stop reading until you’ve seen it. 
• If you’ve not seen Ted Lasso and don’t plan to, well, why *are* you reading this?
• If you’ve already seen the Season 2 finale, or you haven’t and don’t mind spoilers, read on. 

OK, with that out of the way …

Like just about everyone who loves Ted Lasso, I gasped in shock when Trent Crimm texted Ted about Nate’s backstabbing at the end of Episode 11. I gasped again when Nate revealed himself to be Darth Vader to Rupert’s Emperor Palpatine at the end of Episode 12. 

But I was surprised by the overwhelming empathy I felt toward Nate as the credits rolled. The feeling grew after I read a few analyses of the episode and the season. In doing so, I came across a Twitter meme. It listed the virtues of every other main character — Be badass like Rebecca, be curious like Ted, be passionate like Keeley, be real like Roy, be kind like Sam, be loyal like Beard — and concluded with a foreboding “But don’t be like Nate. Don’t ever be like Nate.”

I can’t in good faith defend Nate’s actions throughout Season 2. But I will defend his humanity. I find him more realistic and relatable than just about any other Lasso character. Because, like Nate, a lot of people in this world have a crippling lack of confidence in themselves. I know this because I’m one of them. 

When you don’t have confidence in yourself, you’re always looking outward, not inward. Your reward receptors only fire when you receive recognition from some person or entity outside yourself. Your self-worth is determined by whether and how others interact with you, respond to you, include you, love you. And so your entire existence is the pursuit of affirmation and acceptance. 

This isn’t an entirely useless quality. It drives you to be a hard worker — in school, in your job, and in your relationships. You’re productive and efficient. You’re reliable and trustworthy. You routinely go the extra mile — often an extra two or three miles, because you believe that the more you do, the more valuable or indispensable you’ll become to someone else. And that’s all you really want. 

But this kind of existence obviously isn’t sustainable. You can’t control the way other people feel or act. There is no magical guarantee that if you put forth enough time, enough energy, enough work, that someone will recognize you, or care about you, or love you. When you don’t receive the affirmation or acceptance you’re seeking, it hurts. It can literally, physically hurt. And because you have little or no self-confidence or self-worth to nurse you through that hurt, you simply turn — just like Nate has. 

You measure yourself not against a goal you’ve organically set but what you see out there. Better cars, better jobs, better partners, better houses, better bodies, better lives. In every category, you don’t measure up, and you tell yourself — consciously or unconsciously — that this is why you’re not getting the affirmation or acceptance you’ve worked so hard to secure. For a lot of people, that leads to a place of anger and bitterness. You begin to mentally keep score. You start an imaginary list of grudges against the very people from whom you seek affirmation and acceptance. Nick Mohammed, the actor who portrays Nate, posted a breakdown of this dynamic after the Season 2 finale, and you can see how Ted Lasso’s writers expertly drew up this scenario for him. 

Nate’s scorebook has overwhelmed him. Every slight, no matter how unintentional, is a papercut that’s become a hemorrhage. No matter how much he’s tried, no matter how much he’s given, in his mind he’s still that nerdy, anonymous equipment manager, living in his parents’ house, unrecognized and unloved. And it’s driven him to the dark side — to West Ham, and to Rupert Mannion, the only purely evil character in the Lasso cinematic universe. 

It’s a foregone conclusion that this decision will trend poorly for Nate. And it’s equally as foregone that the show’s magnanimous title character will find some way to redeem Nate before the curtain falls on the series. But in real life, there isn’t usually a Ted Lasso on the other end of an interaction like this, willing to forgive you for the knife you willingly plunge into their back. In real life, the kind of damage Nate does is permanent. 

I’ve come dangerously close to doing exactly that kind of damage to my life. I struggle every day with a combination of low self-esteem and moderate anxiety. This condition leads me to often catastrophize situations and take just about everything personally, but perceived rejection or lack of reciprocation cuts the deepest for me. I’ve been in and out of therapy for and on a variety of different medications to help maintain control of the powerful depression and anger this can cause for more than two decades. I don’t always do the best job at it – but it’s what’s kept me from engaging in Nate Shelley-levels of self-sabotage. 

I think what frustrates me about the Nate hate is that, in a season that normalized so many forms of mental illness and struggle, his is depicted as “evil” or “wrong.” How I wish Ted Lasso’s writers had allowed Nate some time on Doc Sharon’s couch — to give him a chance to break through and grow just as Ted did. Maybe Sharon would have asked him the questions that one therapist asked me several years ago, and which I use to this day whenever I feel overwhelmed by rejection or my paralyzing inferiority complex: 

What is the story you’re telling yourself? 

Is it absolutely true? 

How do you know?

Maybe then Nate would have realized the story he was telling himself wasn’t backed up by facts but by feelings. Maybe he’d have had the courage to ask Ted for a few minutes to speak behind closed doors. He could have shared his insecurities: How much it hurt him for Roy to be added as an assistant coach without a discussion about it. To see the team re-sign Jamie despite his advice not to. To struggle with a new leadership position and career path while feeling ignored by the person who’d brought him to this completely new world.

Maybe then Ted would have made clear to Nate the situation on his side of the table: His seeming indifference wasn’t personal but a function of the issues he himself was dealing with. He was trying to shepherd a lot of young men in pain through a challenging time in their lives, and he didn’t know that Nate was struggling, too. That the reason the photo Nate gave him for Christmas wasn’t in his office was because it was on a shelf in his home, right beside his son’s. 

Had an interaction like that have happened, how different would the ending of Season 2 have felt? Would we see Nate as less a villain and more a sympathetic tortured soul, just like Ted and so many others on the show? Yes, I get it: The writers needed a narrative cliffhanger to bridge to Season 3, and what they’ve written for Nate is a compelling one. But it’s also scapegoated him. It’s missed an important opportunity to send a message that a low self-confidence/high anxiety combination is a real, legitimate mental illness – one that can cause harm not only to the sufferer, but to others. And that, by seeking help, people who struggle with these challenges can avoid self-sabotage – just like Ted can as he seeks help with his grief. 

So as we ease into this intermission between Ted Lasso Season 2 and Season 3, I ask: temper your judgment of Nate. You, or someone you know, is probably more like Nate than you realize.