The Ted Lasso Power Rankings are a weekly analysis of who and/or what had the strongest performance in each episode. Most of the list will feature individual characters, although the committee does reserve the right to honor anything from animals to inanimate objects to laws of nature to general concepts. There are very few rules here.
Season 2, Episode 6 — “The Signal”
HONORABLE MENTION: Keeley (quiet week, still a delight); Higgins (mind your business, nerd); Jane (could very much see this maniac cracking the top ten at some point); Luca the Hot Idiot (sometimes I am envious of gorgeous dummies like him, just floating through life nude in kitchens); Nate’s ex-girlfriend Nadia Shookums (will take me a while to get over that name); Rebecca’s mom (get it together, lady); Secret Sandwich Switcheroo (the most dangerous game of all); Finn the Underwear Model (homewrecker)
10. Dr. Sharon (Last week: Unranked)
Things are about to pick up in a big way for Dr. Sharon, for reasons that have been predictable for a while now and that we will discuss about three sections from now, when we get to number seven. It will be nice to see exactly how Dr. Sharon goes about her job, how she operates, after a little over a month of her just kind of hovering around and popping up in various hallways for what appeared to be the sole purpose of unsettling Ted.
But for now, for this moment in time, let’s just state for the record that Dr. Sharon is probably a blast at a pub or a bar. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see her have that one drink. I bet she would have ordered, like, a dirty martini with extra olives and then done a karaoke version of “Purple Rain” that brought the house down. Dr. Sharon is an iceberg. We have not yet begun to discover what lies beneath the surface. I suspect it is much funkier than most of us are picturing.
9. Colin (Last week: Unranked)
Congratulations to Colin on cracking the top ten for the first time this season. And, one imagines, barring a truly remarkable series of events, the last. There’s lots of business to get to in these last few weeks. I just cannot foresee a situation where young Colin gets a meaty enough story to slide back in here, not with the various Ted/Roy/Jamie/Rebecca/SAM of it all. But it’s nice to have him in here now. And there’s no point in getting too far out ahead of ourselves. It’s nice to just live in a moment sometimes, you know?
So, good for Colin. He’s not a piece of shit. Not everyone can say that. It’s a great place to build from.
8. Sam aka LDN152 (Last week: Unranked)
Well, I do not think I saw that coming, the secret Bantr beau situation with Rebecca. Maybe I should have. The Ted thing was probably too obvious, in hindsight, and too clean. They kept nodding toward it and nodding toward it and if I wasn’t such a dense optimist I would have seen right through it. Of course it wasn’t going to be Ted.
And if it wasn’t Ted, then, yeah, Sam checks out, investigatively. He’s also a sweet man who loves corny sayings and seeing the bright side of things. He’s a catch, too, what with the whole “attractive famous single millionaire who is successful in his chosen field” thing, if you’re into that.
It is going to make for an awkward reveal down the line, in part because there’s an age difference there that I don’t think Rebecca expects (I bet Sam would happily date an older woman), and in part because the owner of a professional sports franchise dating a player raises all sort of conundrums related to ethics and power dynamics. I don’t know how that all plays out, not yet at least. The only thing I know for certain is that Higgins is going to absolutely shit his pants about it all. I kind of can’t wait.
7. Ted (Last week: 8)
See, here’s the thing about this show and the entire Discourse that almost swallowed it whole over the last week: It was always coming to this. Ted is, at his core, a little broken right now. The show has never really hidden that. He was sad on Christmas and temporarily pulled out of it with carols. He misses his family and he’s lonely and the team wasn’t winning. He discovered this week that his hokey Midwesterning actually hurt Jamie as a player. He got a disconcerting phone call. Most of this season has been Ted frantically heaving buckets of water out of his sinking lifeboat. We just missed it sometimes because he looked so happy while he was heaving. Always remember to check on your strong friends, too.
But now we’re here. Ted is sad and hiding out in Sharon’s darkened office after fleeing the pitch in the middle of the game’s most pivotal moment. He’s doing bad and he can’t hide it anymore. The lifeboat is headed toward the ocean floor and he’s flailing for a flotation device or maybe even a passing helicopter. Dr. Sharon is the helicopter pilot in this scenario. I bet she can pull off the sunglasses and helmet, too. Easily. She might even really fly helicopters in her free time. Very little could surprise me about this woman.
Next week will be interesting. There’s a lot to unpack behind that mustache. I’m both excited and nervous. I feel like karaoke could help. Maybe I just have karaoke on the brain after the Dr. Sharon section. Couldn’t hurt, at the very least.
6. Mina the Cleaning Lady (Last week: Unranked)
Would you watch a web series — not a full-length thing, like four or five little eight-minute episodes — where Mina met up with her friends for brunch/drinks and proceeded to gossip relentlessly about the things she saw in Rebecca’s house? I would. So would you.
Do not lie.
5. Rebecca (Last week: 4)
We covered most of the Rebecca situation in the section on Sam, so let’s just go to the bullet points to knock out what’s left:
- Not many people can pull off that style of hat without looking like a doofus, so I’m very happy for her that her bravery paid off that well
- I like that she invited all her friends out to grift lunch from her mom, if only because it is primo rascal teen behavior and that should always be recognized
- I hope she finds something more fulfilling in her love life than Luca The Hot Idiot, but in the interim, I mean, good for her, you know?
You know what? I hope she and Sam get married. There, I said it.
4. Roy (Last week: 2)
Coach Roy is a revelation. I thought I would be sad to lose him as a sports pundit, and I still am, a little, if only because it was so much fun to watch him raise that one eyebrow and then say something that was as profane and devastating as it was brief. But that loss was immediately cushioned by the thing where Coach Roy might be even better.
I mean, look at what we had this week, in our first real run at seeing Coach Roy. He fixed Colin with technical advice and he fixed Jamie with psychological advice. That’s… that’s a lot. It’s pretty much all you can ask for out of a coach. There’s a non-zero chance he ends up getting hired away by another team at some point. Think about that for a while this week. Think about how you’d feel about seeing Roy on the opposite sideline. I would hate it a lot!
For now, though, this is fun. It’s left me wondering if there’s any job I wouldn’t like watching Roy Kent do. Picture him as a sommelier at a fancy restaurant. Picture him as a high school teacher. Picture him as a fish and game warden in Yellowstone. Picture him as a tour guide in the Louvre. He’s a fascinating man. I love him.
3. Jamie (Last week: Unranked)
Two Jamie notes, which we go back to the bullet points for, because the bullet points are efficient and fun:
- He does this thing where you can see him like visibly inflate upon hearing good news and visibly deflate upon hearing bad news, and it is becoming one of my favorites parts of the show
- His accent delights me, the way words ending with a long E sound come out as an “-eh,” as they did in the above screencap when Roy made him call himself “an ugleh, ugleh boy”
I’m glad Jamie is back to being a prick. Sometimes. A tactical prick, if you will. It just feels right.
2. Nate (Last week: 3)
This marks two weeks in a row that we’ve seen Nate flourish, first at the restaurant and now at his job. I like that. I like to see Nate succeed, especially after all the trouble he had early in the season, with the yelling and the overdoing it in general, like an angry little Napoleon. It’s good that the team’s wonder kid has found a balance. Assertive Nate is a good development. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the spitting.
This marks two weeks in a row that Nate has spit before leaping into action. Last week, it was at himself the mirror. This week, it was on the grass before taking charge. It’s like it gives him strength somehow, like it’s the trigger that unlocks his confidence. I hope he does it all the time from now on. I hope he does it forever. I hope he meets a nice girl and they get married and he gets very nervous and so he spits on the floor of the church before saying his vows. I would like that. Maybe he and his old girlfriend Nadia Shookums can patch things up. I told you it would take me a while to get over that name. Nadia Shookums. Come on.
1. Coach Beard (Last week: 1)
Weird week for Beard. On one hand, the situation with Jane does not seem healthy in any substantial way and it’s getting to the point where it’s affecting his job, as we saw with the yawning and the thing where his coworkers are spending kind of a lot of time discussing if and how to intervene. It’s not ideal, both because it is dragging him down and because I like it when Beard is a mystery, not a mess. Fix it.
On the other hand, I do like that Ted uses him as like a human Google when there’s a question that needs answering (might try to sneak “flaneur” into a sentence later this year), and the GIF of him giving that thumbs down is going to be incredibly useful to me going forward. So…
Yeah. Still the king.
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