Nathan Shelley (ur.Nick Mohammad) first introduced in Season 1 Ted Lasso like a kind person that Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) and his henchmen from the Richmond crew are chasing for fun. Nate is the team’s outfitter and is often the punching bag for the younger members of the team. But when TedJason Sudeikis) becomes the team’s coach, he begins shaking up Richmond in a serious way, including helping Nathan deal with harassment and learning to stand up straight. Throughout the first season, Nate plays a positive role with the team, and by the end, he is fully integrated into the team, not only as a friend, but with a promotion to assistant coach. Nate seems to be on the rise, but the second season proves that his trajectory is far from what we might have expected.
Nate is an easy punching bag in the first season because he’s incredibly insecure. He feels like he never lived up to his father’s expectations, plays a minor role on a poorly performing football team, and is turned into a dressing room laughing stock almost every day. Nate is used to being made to feel less, and he internalizes the feeling. So, in Season 2, we see insecurities wrestling with his growing sense of ego. His newfound position and recognition leads him to only look for more. As he tells Ted at the end of the season, he was made to feel special and now he wants more. And as we see his performance worsen over the course of the season, we see his behavior manifest itself in a toxicity that begins to harm not only himself, but those around him.
For a show focused on football, one would expect the toxic elements to come mainly from characters like Jamie Tartt, who showcase a more stereotypical image. Excessive masculine bravado, the objectification of women, and a lack of connection to one’s emotions are some of the first things one thinks of when one hears the words “poisonous masculinity.” But Nate is not like that at all. Nate is sensitive, often doubts himself, and can’t seem to find a date to save his life. His toxicity comes from the fact that he considers these things to be mistakes. Nate is not a toxic alpha male, he is a tormented Inchel who wants to blame the world for everything that happens in his life.
There was a feeling that something off about Nate since the start of the season. And when Roy joined the team as another coach, the tension was evident from how awkward and unhappy he looked when he saw him on the field. But, nevertheless, Nate continued to do everything he could. However, this came to a head when Ted had to leave the match due to a panic attack and Nate gave away the last teams that won Richmond’s game. After an interview in which he accidentally called himself “Wonder Child”, his name caused a bit of a buzz and Nate became obsessed with what people were saying about him online. This confirmation he felt from Ted in the first season was now yelled at him a hundred times by random users on Twitter, and it only inflated his ego. He began to believe that this recognition was not just something he worked for, but something he inherently deserved.
Nate’s toxicity often manifests itself in a sense of entitlement. He worked hard in the first season and earned his role as assistant coach, but he seems to think this new role means he needs to be treated differently. He makes comments to Roy (Brett Goldstein) and Trainer Beard (Brendan Hunt) about how he thinks Ted takes full responsibility for the moves they come up with. And when Ted later explicitly names Nate’s move after him, he reverses the argument and instead says that Ted only does it so that if the move goes wrong, people will blame him if anything goes wrong. Nate keeps trying to turn his relationship with Ted into an antagonistic relationship to justify the anger he has for him simply for what he has always done.
Nate is especially offended by the fact that Ted is paying so much attention to others this season. Whether it’s the other members of the team or his own mental health, Nate sees such inattention as disrespectful to himself. His uncertainty tells him that Ted was only using him, although any observer could tell how wrong that assumption is. He feels that he is no longer special, so he takes it out on Ted through coldness, rudeness and deceit. And when that’s not enough to satisfy Nate’s insecurity, he betrays Ted’s trust by leaking news of his panic attacks to the press.
Nate began to fight his insecurities by externalizing them. He used to internalize them, and this further reduced his self-esteem, but with the help of Ted, he was able to gain confidence in himself. Now he uses that confidence to take it out on other people. They hire a new picker, and Nate makes it his mission to treat him as badly as he was treated when he was in the same role. Externalizing his negativity gives him a sense of power. He wants to keep fighting for his new place in the pecking order, which means he doesn’t want to keep up the playful and fun relationship he developed in the first season. Where he used to toast team members with a sense of camaraderie, now it’s much more aggressive. There is no more playfulness. When the team custom-makes Richmond’s Baby Wonder jersey for him, he doesn’t see it as an act of inclusion, but as a disrespect to himself. Nate has become more emotionally withdrawn because he sees any act of humor or childishness as an attempt to return him to his “rightful” place in the pecking order, done only to belittle him.
In the middle of the season, Nate unsuccessfully tries to book a good table at a restaurant for his parents’ anniversary. When he goes to RebeccaHannah Waddingham) and Kili (Juno Temple) about this problem, hoping that Rebecca can book a table for him, instead she offers him advice on how to set himself up for being assertive. Rebecca demonstrates how she makes herself feel big and tall in order to feel strong, and then Nate comes up with his own version of it. But it’s only in this act that we can see him using this technique through a more distorted lens. For Nate, to cheer himself up means looking in the mirror and spitting on his reflection. The act is visceral, rude, a kind of stereotypical masculine display that you don’t expect from Nate.
To make matters worse, Keely takes Nate along to buy a new suit (since the one he now has was bought by Ted as a gift, much to his chagrin) and he takes a step towards her. Nate has always been a respectful guy who has fought women, but with his newfound toxic masculinity rearing his head, he’s starting to see their rejections as less harmless. When Keely pushes him away, he goes to the locker room to do his mirror psychological exercise, telegraphing not guilt but anger. Now that he considers himself a stronger person, he feels entitled to an answer. He is frustrated when Roy doesn’t want to hit him because of the incident, because he doesn’t take it as Roy’s trust in him as a person, but as a snub against his own manhood.
As a viewer, you really want to keep making excuses for Nate. We’ve seen how kind he can be, how smart his tactics are, how much he’s had to suffer in the past, but at some point we can’t help but notice or explain his actions. His insecurity is no excuse for his terrible behavior. He rejects the team’s gift of a custom t-shirt, he kisses Keely against her will, he tells the media about Ted’s personal medical issues, and joins a rival club owned by Rebecca’s ex-husband, all in an attempt to regain a sense of power. And by the end, when all these events unfold, we realize that Nate is no longer the friend we knew, he turned into a villain of his own free will.
Nate is a perfect example of how toxic masculinity can manifest itself in many different ways. His sense of selfishness and bravado is inherently tied to this sense of failed masculinity, which he overcompensates with his aggression, shown in his act of spitting at his own reflection to set himself up. His insecurities turn into barbs that he directs outwards. Nate Shelley starts the season as our sweet friend but ends as a traitor and enemy. His superiority/inferiority complexes, paradoxically, come to the fore, sending him into a self-destructive spiral that erases everything good we thought we knew about him. A little power and respect was enough to turn Nate into a completely different person, because he stopped thinking of these things as something to work for, and began to see them as something he owed to him internally. Nick Mohammad was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Show for the role, and his work with Nate in his villainous arc this season was absolutely enough to earn him this nomination. We saw Nate in a completely different light in Ted Lasso Season 2, showing how much a person can change when they are boiled in their toxic and negative emotions.
Source: Collider
