‘It’s the hope that kills you’: Challenging cisheteropatriarchal possibilities of romance, friendship and care in Ted Lasso
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leading up to the Ted Lasso (2020–23) series finale in May 2023, fans anticipated whether various white, heterosexual romantic relationships on the show would come to fruition. When the finale finally aired, there was considerable disappointment at the lack of romantic conclusions for their characters, rather than satisfaction in the friendships that were developed over the show’s three seasons. Yet, queer and feminist theorizations of friendship position friendship as central to the human experience and valuable in analysing the social impacts of cisheteropatriarchal norms. In our analysis of social media posts, we employ feminist queer analysis to critically examine the interplay between the show’s portrayal of friendship and fans’ reactions to these plotlines that were shaped by cisheteronormative imaginaries of what types of relationships we should expect in television while the show defied romantic comedy tropes to focus on friendship. We argue that the romance-focused fan reactions obstructed the full spectrum of possible relationships, platonic and romantic, that were developed throughout the show’s run. When taken together, these relationships deepen our understanding of the ways that Ted Lasso can be taken as an illustration of the importance of friendship and care in our everyday lives, which should be treated with the same gravity as romantic relationships in popular culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".