Review: Ted Lasso, "Follow the Anger" | Season 4, Episode 8

“It seems fucking obvious, doesn’t it?” 

When Game of Thrones was on the air, there was a whole conversation about the challenge of juggling its various storylines. While obviously not the first serialized show on television, it was certainly distinct for how wide-ranging its characters became, creating episodes that were jumping between disparate locales and story arcs.

One of the ways TV would normally address this challenge would be thematic connections: an episode might have three stories—A, B, and C—but they might be linked by a common idea, or emerge from a shared origin. But although there were occasionally episodes of Game of Thrones that tried to unite multiple stories under a single thematic idea, it was more rare than you might expect based on how other prestige TV shows would write using theme as a central engine. In a Grantland feature ahead of the third season, Andy Greenwald confronted showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss about this, and infamously quoted them as “sneering” at the idea: said Benioff, “themes are for eighth-grade book reports.”

Ted Lasso loves a theme, historically. Ted is a man of mantras and metaphors, and the coaching frame of the show means that these often become lessons that can carry across storylines. In fact, I could argue in retrospect that one of the reasons the show struggled in its second and third seasons was that its narrative became more complex, spread across more characters, but its lessons kept trying to wrap everything up in a bow.

We see the echoes of this show in the corner of this story dedicated to the Lady Greyhounds. Since last week’s episode, I even saw someone on social media who added a custom “Yes & Baby” bag tag alongside their existing “Be a Goldfish,” and “Follow the Anger” picks up this ball as we discover the team adding new “and” post-it notes to the Believe sign in the locker room. Played alongside a montage of a long streak of wins, it’s a sign of the momentum the (still a bit uneven) focus on the women’s team last week generated, and the episode predictably kicks off by threatening it with Gemma’s injury. You can see it coming from a mile away, but it creates an anchor for a reflective story for the team and those around them.