Why Ted Lasso’s Radical Kindness Is the Perfect Balm for Right Now
On making the extra pass
I have attempted to do many things with my time over the past year — keep an apartment with two young children at a tolerable level of cleanliness, stay politically involved, earn money — but the primary thing I have actually accomplished during the past twelve months is to watch an Olympian amount of television. In that time, I have gone through many phases, many brief bursts of enthusiasm: for Japanese crime thrillers on the Criterion Channel, for political docuseries like City So Real and epic-length documentaries like Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall, for series that blend scuzzy realism and flights of fancy like Teenage Bounty Hunters, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, and The Boys. But what I have craved most of all, in everything I’ve watched, has been kindness.
The last year was many things, but perhaps chief among them has been a rolling tutorial in the varieties of cruelty. These displays have ranged from the people outside my front door who patently refuse to put on masks and keep others from getting sick, to the despicable malcontents assaulting and murdering Asian-Americans and other vulnerable minorities, to the political leaders spreading lies and misinformation and putting Americans’ health and democracy at risk. 2020–2021 has been dispiriting and…
