Ted Lasso's Colin storyline fumbles the LGBTQ+ representation the show needs
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Ted Lasso season 3 spoilers follow.
What did we know about Colin (Billy Harris) before this season of Ted Lasso? He was the doe-eyed Welsh Richmond FC footballer who rarely entered the team's ego fray dominated by Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster). Instead, he was essentially one of the players to make up the numbers as part of the locker room scenery, with occasional moments of screen time to fill in shades of his character.
That is, until last week's episode, when the opening scenes revealed Colin is gay. The Premier League football player says goodbye to show newcomer Michael (Sam Liu) as he heads out to training and asks: "Sex when you get back from Dubai?" before the pair kiss.
The scenes confirmed a long-held fan theory dating back to a scene in the second season, when Colin clarified the spelling of Grindr – without the ‘e’ – to his teammates, as they discussed the egregiously copycat Richmond sponsor Bantr.
Yet when Michael pops up towards the end of the episode in Sam Obisanya's (Toheeb Jimoh) new hotspot restaurant, Colin introduces him to the boisterous team as a friend and "the world's greatest wingman". Colin's sexuality does not appear to be something he has shared with his Richmond mates, reflecting the bitter reality of professional football and its dearth of openly gay male players.
Yet Colin's decision comes under threat in the final scenes, when journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance), who has been following the team from pillar to post to write a book about their journey, spots Colin and Michael kissing in a shrouded alleyway outside the restaurant.
As the threat of Colin being outed rears its ugly head, the end of last week's episode left us wondering what Crimm will do with the information. If we were hoping for an answer to that question in the latest episode, we were spectacularly denied it.
In fact, if you had somehow missed the third episode and skipped straight to the fourth, you would be likely unaware that Colin is even gay. The latest episode makes a single oblique reference to Colin's sexuality as the team celebrate the addition of golden-footed god Zava (Maximilian Osinski), whose pitch prowess only starts to feel slightly ridiculous once we are shown his third bicycle-kick goal.
As sports pundits praise Zava, his Richmond teammates are similarly swooning. Isaac (Kola Bokinni) yells: "That's my guy!" and Colin replies: "No, you can't have him, he's mine." As the pair crack up laughing, a quiet and observing Crimm in the corner simply looks up at Colin with an expressionless face.
What will he do? We don't know. How are Michael and Colin getting on? We don't know. How is Colin coping with keeping a major part of himself under wraps? We don't know.
We don't know much from this episode because the show has decided to make only oblique references to the threat of Colin being outed. In a later scene, Crimm is in the manager's office after tracking down locker-room CCTV footage showing that it was silver-haired antihero Nate (Nick Mohammed) who ripped up the team's mantra BELIEVE! sign, after a fair amount of embarrassing wrangling with a wheeled desk chair.
Explaining himself to Ted, Crimm ominously says: "I guess you can take the boy out of journalism, but you can't take journalism out of the boy," perhaps hinting he could be planning to include details of Colin's sexuality in his fly-on-the-wall tome.
It wouldn't be the first time he's resorted to underhand and frankly unethical journalistic practices. At the end of the second season, he wrote an exclusive about Ted's pitch-side panic attacks and was then promptly fired when he told Ted his anonymous source was Nate – a big journalistic no-no.
But should he have been writing about Ted's mental health in the first place? Despite tipping Ted off, Crimm seems to be one to draw dubious moral lines.
While Ted Lasso has finally addressed its palpable absence of queer characters on the Apple TV+ hit, the approach so far leaves something to be desired. Despite being touted as a rose-tinted vision of a Premier League team, when it comes to its LGBTQ+ characters, Ted Lasso has so far let a character out of the closet only to push them straight into the fire.
Once again, a queer storyline on TV has become wrapped up in the cultural straitjacket of queer trauma storylines, with its ugly roots in the 'Bury your gays' television trope.
Colin's storyline on Ted Lasso comes weeks after Channel 4's major George Michael documentary Outed, which expertly unpacked the powerful force of the tabloid press in a horrifically homophobic climate.
Kevin Smith, founder of the publication that broke the story of Michael's 1998 arrest for lewd conduct in a Los Angeles public toilet, proudly recalled: "Your misfortune is our fortune."
While Ted Lasso has been plagued with LGBTQ+ omission in previous seasons, it now faces a reckoning over how Colin's story arc could unfold and whether it could only compound the culture of shame facing the gay community in football.
Ted Lasso co-creator Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard, said that while being openly gay in the sport is "still taboo", there are increasingly more players coming out. "It's just part of what's happening in football. We may be a fake football club, but we're trying to show a little bit of football reality here," he told Radio Times.
While the writers' decision for Colin to be in the closet as a footballer is understandable, the subsequent decision to position Crimm as a sword of Damocles above him does more of a disservice to the whole mission statement of Ted Lasso: to create an occasionally saccharine but mostly affable version of the notoriously unprincipled world of football. For a show that revels in rewriting modern-day realities, their decision to stick to the predictable script in this instance grates.
As Colin drove away from his hook-up with Michael last episode, he assured himself: "I am a strong and capable man." But it feels as if the show is already setting him up to push this self-assurance to some sort of crisis.
Ted Lasso is available on Apple TV+, with new episodes dropping weekly.
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