Publication Alert: Analyzing Nate in Ted Lasso
‘You are Nathan F*cking Shelley!’: Orientalism, White Saviourism, and the Radicalization of Nate in Ted Lasso
This was a really cool one: I recently published an analysis of Ted Lasso that I wrote with Dr. Adam Ali (Western University). We take a close look at the show’s portrayal of Nathan Shelley (played by Nick Mohammed), the loveable kit man turned assistant coach turned villainous rival manager turned loveable (and remorseful) kit man. We look at Nate’s story arc through the lens of Orientalism and how the character risks reproducing racial stereotypes and tropes of Muslim radicalization. To be clear, Adam and I both LOVED Ted Lasso, but couldn’t ignore our concerns with the show’s representation of its one Brown main character.
The piece was published as part of the Racism by Context collection with Oxford Academic Press. The media, entertainment and sport section of Racism by Context was edited by Dr. Janelle Joseph and Dr. Shakuntala Banaji.
Here is the abstract:
This paper analyses the representation of Nathan Shelley, a central racialized character in the Emmy-award winning television series Ted Lasso who becomes an assistant coach of AFC Richmond after being discovered by the show’s protagonist, Ted, but later betrays his mentor. It argues that Ted Lasso reproduces stereotypically gendered understandings of Muslim identity by portraying Nate’s character through a form of ambivalent masculinity and inept heterosexuality that reinforces Orientalist conceptions of Muslim—and ‘Muslim-looking’—men. These portrayals of Nate, and his eventual villainous turn, mirrors racialized understandings of Muslim radicalization in the post-9/11 era involving the construction of Muslim-looking subjects (but mostly men) as inherently suspicious. As such, Nate’s ambiguous Brownness and the show’s colour-blind writing of his character’s backstory combine to construct him as a vulnerable but risky subject whose proper development is dependent on Ted Lasso’s white protagonists. The show’s racial boundaries produced in Nate’s character arc, which reproduce colonial logics, draw civilizational differences between Westerners and development subjects, the latter of whom require intervention and modernization within the Western world. At the same time, this character arc amplifies Western anxieties about the ‘inherent’ riskiness of Brown, Muslim-looking men in the post-9/11 era. As such, this analysis of Nate unsettles Ted Lasso and casts a shadow over its progressive, ‘feel-good’ message of hope and optimism by demonstrating how the show promotes a racialized construction of Nate as an emasculated, dangerous, and ahistorical subject.