In defense of the show everyone loves to hate.

Ted Lasso, the Apple TV+ series about an American football coach charged with turning around an English Premier League soccer team, has been at the receiving end of a lot of big grumpy in recent weeks. Critics—and I mean a whole lotta critics, including in this magazine—have argued that the show has jumped the shark, crawling toward the finish line of its three-season run as just a mass of broken jokes and half-formed plotlines.

Kindly allow this brief dissenting opinion: Perhaps Ted Lasso isn’t broken—we are. The show hasn’t stopped working: It’s merely changed to meet the moment. Season 3 of Ted Lasso may not offer as many laugh-out-loud funny jokes, but I would argue that it gives the audience a view into something even more compelling: the experience of living with someone who is severely and chronically depressed, while also struggling with your own escalating depression. And if that isn’t necessarily fun or amusing for the viewer, well, it’s possible that that’s the point.

The series has always had an uncanny knack for giving us just what we needed, when we most needed it. The character of Ted Lasso (played by the show’s star and co-creator Jason Sudeikis) once led both sides of the Atlantic cheerfully and tearfully through the wasteland of COVID-19. It was a show about leading with kindness, about assuming humans were fundamentally good, and about how a stranger can come to town and teach the whole world to forget its pain, in the manner of a goldfish. Viewers and critics alike loved it.

But for this past season, the series has been accused of slogging from week to week without advancing a plot, changing not at all, and learning close to nothing. Characters that were once deeply connected to one another seem to have gone rogue, making choices that don’t make much sense and don’t even advance stories. While some may find that cause for complaint, it is, in fact, the only place that Ted Lasso could have gone now. The first two seasons of the show meticulously explored, in text and relentlessly in subtext, all the ways in which Ted’s relentless performative cheerfulness and optimism was always just a rickety defense mechanism that barely worked for him on his best days. If we learned anything at all from the work Ted was doing, especially in Season 2, it was that sometimes you are just too depressed to drag everyone along on your train of exhausting cheer. Season 3, with its deliberately meandering, atomized, and lonely plotlines, especially concerning Ted, reflects that state of being: being at war with oneself. And if you’re experiencing all that as a letdown, I’d remind you to take a beat to reread Hamlet, which is also very much a story about profound depression and stuck-ness.

Season 3 is so clearly a show about dealing with depression that virtually everyone is struggling with it for much of the remaining arc. Nate? Can’t get out of bed. Roy can barely take a step. Keeley is so sad you just want to sit and hold her hand. Jamie describes his entire soul as incapable of sustaining an erection; he’s lost his wings. And Rebecca can’t get within a mile of anyone’s grief without forcing a rictus smile onto her face. Through these characters, the series that was once tasked with bucking us up, dusting us off, and setting us aright, perfectly demonstrates what a toll that takes on the cheerleaders and the duster-offers.

Watching the (allegedly) final episodes of this show, one can’t quite shake the sense that Ted is sick to death of his former charming, funny, word-ninja self—but, also, that he is seething at us for expecting it. His message to us, much like his message to his mother on the show, is best summed up by: I love you. And fuck you.

The reason Ted Lasso remains as good as it ever was is that if, while watching, you are finding yourself bored, or confused, or craving more moments of adorableness, that should also serve as a reminder that sometimes being forced to perform all that in public is exhausting and depleting and unfair. I loved relentlessly chipper Ted Lasso, but I confess that I love this just-barely sleepwalking version of him even more. He reminds me that he held us up for a long time, and that doing so wore him down to a toothpick with a melting mustache. I’m happy to carry him along for a while, instead. He earned it.