What ‘Ted Lasso’ teaches us about friendship

Long before Jason Sudeikis portrayed Ted Lasso and won hearts with his sunny optimism and the show's emphasis on camaraderie and human connection, UCLA's legendary coach John Wooden taught that the strongest teams are built on trust, friendship and genuine care for others.

You don't need a "Believe" sign taped above your door or a daily pink box of homemade biscuits to appreciate the new season of "Ted Lasso" - or its continued lessons on why we need one another on the field and in life.

To hear more about the humanity behind the humor, we spoke with Jaimie Krems, associate professor of psychology and the co-founder and director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research.

Why do stories like "Ted Lasso," which are ultimately about human connection, resonate so much globally?

Friendship might look different around the world. And it does. We even have different words for it, different rituals, different required levels of closeness to be called a "friend." But the concept is what we'd call a human universal. Nearly every human being who has ever lived has had the wiring for friendship. And it's not just humans. Other primates, cows, vampire bats, dolphins, lions … friendship is evolutionarily old.

Problems like who to trust, who has my back, who gets me - friendship problems - are species-level problems, and stories that dramatize them travel well. The same is true for love and romance.

"Ted Lasso" is unusual in that it takes those friendship problems seriously. We have an enormous vocabulary for romance: dating, flirting, courtship, breakups, anniversaries. For friendship, we have almost nothing. We don't even have agreed-upon words for the stages of becoming friends. A show that gives friendship that much narrative real estate is filling a genuine cultural gap.

Besides "Ted Lasso," what are your favorite TV depictions of friendship?

"The West Wing," easy. That's some of the best work on friendship that exists. The first few seasons of "Grey's Anatomy" had that magical but grounded relationship between Christina and Meredith - they were each other's person. Obviously "The Golden Girls." "Shrinking" is what I wish my local friendships looked like.

Whether it's the World Cup or the teams on "Ted Lasso," what is it about sports that has the power to bring so many people together?

Sports is a low-stakes arena for running some very old mental software. Humans have always had to answer one question fast: Who is on my side? Our minds are literally built to track this - friendship - and, more generally, coalitions. Friends and other teammates are how we survived illness, injury and other hardships. And knowing who was not on our team was valuable as well. What makes sports unusually powerful isn't just that lots of people care about the same thing. It's that everyone knows everyone else is watching at the same moment, and everyone knows that everyone knows. That common knowledge helps create a shared reality, and shared reality is one of the key ingredients of feeling understood.

On "Ted Lasso" and in life, why do most people root for the underdog?

Well, there are also the fair-weather fans too, right? In my field, we call them bandwagoners - people who side with the likely winners. But the way our brains think about friendship isn't built to look for the strongest, biggest, likeliest winners as much as we look for the people who value us the most - our likeliest allies. If everyone always sided with whoever was winning, nobody would ever have a reliable friend. Your friend would abandon you the moment you were down. The whole value of an ally is that they stay with you even when you're down. Because of that, humans have a built-in instinct to push back against bandwagon behavior, and this often takes shape as an instinct to support the outmatched party.

Another great finding in social psychology is that even young children have accurate intuitions about who will win fights: They expect bigger people to win over smaller people, but all else equal, they also expect hungrier people to win over less hungry people. Wanting it more - which underdogs often do - matters.

Can our "friendships" with fictional characters like Ted Lasso and company feel meaningful in the same way as our real-life friendships?

They can feel meaningful. Those feelings are real, and they're produced by the same cognitive machinery that processes real-world friendships and, in turn, translates connection into improved physical health, mental health, life satisfaction and so on. Nothing in our evolutionary history prepared us for a face that appears in our home weekly, tells us its secrets and never lets us down. So our minds do what they do with any familiar, self-disclosing, reliably present person: They file it under "friend."

The short answer is that we simply don't know if "parasocial" relationships - these one-way bonds we have with fictional characters, celebrities or now AI chatbots - give rise to the same benefits to health and well-being. Parasocial friendships seem like a fun supplement and a lousy substitute.

What should everyone know about the UCLA work being done around friendship?

Friendship is one of the most consequential relationships in human life and one of the most badly neglected by science. We have decades of rigorous research on romantic love. On friendship we have a sliver. And that gap is opening at the worst possible moment. People are marrying less - and later, when they do. For a growing share of people, friends are the primary relationship. We are asking more of friendship than any generation before us while understanding it less than any other relationship. That's the gap that we want to close through the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, a multi-faculty effort to understand and strengthen adult friendship, and the first center in the world dedicated to it.

Friendship is associated with better physical health. Mental health. Longevity. Economic mobility. Productivity at work. Even how quickly a community rebuilds after a disaster. It's also our best defense against loneliness - and loneliness is not just private suffering; it's a civic problem linked to radicalism, authoritarianism, terrorism, even with the erosion of trust in other people and in institutions. And yet friendship is essentially invisible in public policy. We have marriage laws. We have family leave. We have housing designed around households. We have essentially nothing designed to help a person make and keep a friend. We are living through a loneliness epidemic and a friendship recession simultaneously, and we've left the most obvious remedy entirely off the table.

Friendship may be the single most overlooked public health asset we have. We need to study it, understand it and build the tools to help people have it.

Lastly, in honor of Ted's famous look: mustaches, yay or nay?

Long story, hard nay.