‘You are Nathan F*cking Shelley!’

Abstract This paper analyses the representation of Nathan Shelley, a central racialized character in the Emmy-award winning television series Ted Lasso who becomes an assistant coach of AFC Richmond after being discovered by the show’s protagonist, Ted, but later betrays his mentor. It argues that Ted Lasso reproduces stereotypically gendered understandings of Muslim identity by portraying Nate’s character through a form of ambivalent masculinity and inept heterosexuality that reinforces Orientalist conceptions of Muslim—and ‘Muslim-looking’—men. These portrayals of Nate, and his eventual villainous turn, mirrors racialized understandings of Muslim radicalization in the post-9/11 era involving the construction of Muslim-looking subjects (but mostly men) as inherently suspicious. As such, Nate’s ambiguous Brownness and the show’s colour-blind writing of his character’s backstory combine to construct him as a vulnerable but risky subject whose proper development is dependent on Ted Lasso’s white protagonists. The show’s racial boundaries produced in Nate’s character arc, which reproduce colonial logics, draw civilizational differences between Westerners and development subjects, the latter of whom require intervention and modernization within the Western world. At the same time, this character arc amplifies Western anxieties about the ‘inherent’ riskiness of Brown, Muslim-looking men in the post-9/11 era. As such, this analysis of Nate unsettles Ted Lasso and casts a shadow over its progressive, ‘feel-good’ message of hope and optimism by demonstrating how the show promotes a racialized construction of Nate as an emasculated, dangerous, and ahistorical subject.