'Ted Lasso' and 'Beef' Show Us Psychedelics Done Right on TV

Recent splashy episodes mark a welcome turning point for tripping on TV.

Spoilers ahead for Ted Lasso and Beef.

In a TV landscape full of dark, deranged, and difficult men, Ted Lasso has been a beacon of genuine goodness, though not without his own demons. That’s what makes it all the more remarkable when, in the most recent episode of Ted Lasso, the title character, the American coach of a British soccer team, laments that he craves inspiration, and his second-in-command, Coach Beard, offers him an unnamed substance that he promises will form “literal new pathways in your brain.” As they toast their mugs of tea, Beard adds, in case the psychedelic implications weren’t clear yet, “This is how you change your mind.” In a nice extra touch, Beard mentions that he got the ‘shrooms from “Kenneth the bus driver,” which I take as a reference to iconic ‘60s psychonauts Ken Kesey and his bus full of “Merry Pranksters.”

Ted and Beard go off on separate adventures in Amsterdam, and we follow Ted as he first visits the Van Gogh Museum and stares at the painter’s “Sunflowers.” A docent appears to give Ted exactly the life advice he needs, the first indication that the tea is kicking in: “One does not expect from life what one has already learned it cannot give. One begins to see that life is a kind of sowing time, and the harvest is not yet here. He was just a humble preacher’s son, and yes, he had his demons. But he never stopped searching for beauty. Because when you find beauty, you find inspiration.” Ted remarks that sunflowers are also the Kansas state flower. Maybe this is all really happening to Ted, but I have never experienced a docent this deep. It feels pretty ‘shroom-enhanced to me.

When Ted then hits an American-themed restaurant for dinner, he has an even more profound and unmistakable trip experience, assembling memories of the Chicago Bulls’ 1989 offense and the history of triangles to come to a new insight about his team’s strategy. (More on this in a bit.)

On top of America’s favorite fictional, Midwestern coach tripping on TV, recent weeks also delivered us Netflix’s splashy new series Beef (MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD) with a major dose of plant medicine. The show’s ten episodes follows a harrowing feud between two disaffected, ordinary-seeming 30-somethings, which starts with a road rage altercation and culminates with a spectacular kidnapping/robbery/shootout. But it ends by stranding the two enemies in the desert together and letting them trip to resolve their differences. Like Ted’s journey, Amy and Danny’s experience is presented in a way that feels both accurate and in line with what psychedelics do best: providing real insights and dissolving ego boundaries.

In short, in just the last month, two of streaming television’s biggest sensations gave us some of the best, and most positive, depictions of psychedelics’ powers to ever grace the medium, or even be committed to film. After decades of mostly avoidance—and an occasional dose of psychedelics as the subject of jokes or an agent of terror—TV appears to be suddenly getting psychedelics right. And this could go a long way toward widespread cultural acceptance.

The 1960s were the last time psychedelics were hovering on the brink of mainstream use—being studied, being used in therapy, and, of course, also vibing with hippie culture. But TV at the time did not put the substances in a favorable light overall. Dragnet had a guy burying his head in dirt and eating tree bark while flipping out on LSD; Hawaii Five-O did a Timothy Leary-inspired episode with a discredited university researcher; and Get Smart did the “evil character forcibly doses unwitting people” plotline, which appears to be statistically far more common in fiction than in real life. Some movies of the era, like Easy Rider, The Trip, and The Psych-Out, depicted psychedelics in a more nuanced and sympathetic fashion, though LSD often came off as just an element of the larger hippie culture, and films featuring it as a commentary on the Age of Aquarius overall.

In more recent years, as psychedelic research and use has become increasingly common again, psychedelic plotlines have begun creeping back into mass entertainment. But at first, things didn’t look much better than they had in 1960s TV: On 2021’s limited series Nine Perfect Strangers, a megalomaniac wellness guru surprise-doses her nine charges on a retreat via their morning smoothies, trying to literally force-feed them enlightenment, which is very much not in line with the golden psychedelic rule that you must have the right “set and setting.” On Yellowjackets, a teen soccer team stranded on an island after a plane crash accidentally ingests magic mushrooms, resulting in a hellish orgy of sorts. Again, not ideal set or setting. Even though half of Hollywood (by my informal estimate) is doing psychedelics regularly, there was an odd lack of serious exploration of their therapeutic potential; the best we could do was a throwaway joke on the (excellent and prematurely canceled) Hulu sitcom Reboot, during which Judy Greer’s character got lost in the woods while tripping.

TV can make a big difference when it comes to psychedelic acceptance. These are shows that allow us to spend extensive time with characters we love, and they can lead viewers to accept new ideas in ways few other media can. This is even more true now than it was in the 1960s, given how much streaming has allowed television to take over our lives. And Lasso and Beef introduce a concept very different from all of the 1960s depictions: regular, relatable folks working through their shit with plant medicine, not just some hippie stereotypes.

 As Ted Lasso goes, so goes America.

The specifics of Ted Lasso and Beef make them the perfect vessels for the serious exploration of psychedelics’ possibilities. Both are inherently concerned with mental health and feature scenes centering on therapy. Weird caveat: Both of them also fudge on whether psychedelics were “really” involved. Beard tells Ted at the end of the episode that it was a “dud batch,” and Beef’s Amy and Danny are actually high on some unidentified berries. I don’t know why either of these shows felt the need to be so coy—Jason Sudeikis, who stars in and co-created Lasso, has even said in the past that the character was partially inspired by, specifically, tripping on mushrooms in Amsterdam, while Beef creator Lee Sung Jin described Amy and Danny’s resolution as “like a vision quest or a ‘psychedelic trip in Joshua Tree’ sort of feeling.” Beef star Steven Yeun has also talked about doing mushrooms and LSD.

The trip sequences, which are stellar turning points for both shows and bear unmistakable signs of psychedelic journeys, are worth a closer look. Each offers a glimpse at different ways that psychedelics can help us.

Ted is alone on his journey, and also walking around interacting with people and places. This is possible, especially since he didn’t even finish the tea Beard gave him, so this would be a medium dose if we just assume psychedelicness here. When Ted is at the restaurant, we get major signs that he’s flipping in and out of “reality,” ordering food but thinking that one of the wait staff is his former assistant coach-turned-nemesis Nate and being handed a bottle of Arthur Bryant’s barbecue sauce—another sign of his Kansas home.

Soon after, he’s cast into darkness, where his vision is crystal clear: He sees triangles forming and dissolving and morphing, and he hears a voice that links the old Bulls game he was just watching to more mystical ideas. In 1989, Tex Winter—an assistant coach, like Nate!—invented the “triangle offense” for the Bulls, the voice explains. “Throughout history, many believed triangles had special powers,” it says, “from the Holy Trinity of Christianity to the Trikaya of Buddhism. There’s also that spooky eye thing on the back of the one-dollar bill. In some Native American cultures, the triangle symbolizes home.” Ted realizes he needs to use a triangle offense for his team. “You’re right,” Ted says to the voice. Tellingly, the voice replies, “Actually, Ted, you’re right.” This is how trips work: You give yourself the information you already have, put together in a new way.

Beef, on the other hand, has its two main characters stuck together, in an isolated place, while they trip. This allows a totally different experience not unlike turbo-charged couples therapy. Whatever they took melts their defenses, and they’re finally able to do what they should have done from the beginning, which is to talk honestly with each other. They start with standard stoned talk, like Danny musing, “How come Asians are all lactose intolerant?” But they soon dive into unvarnished truths when Danny tells Amy, “The day you honked at me, I was trying to return these Hibachi grills that I bought to kill myself. They wouldn’t let me return them. It’s like the world wanted me gone.” The message: If she could have known how much pain he’d been in the day they first clashed, their feud never would have started.

There are plenty of hints that this encounter is psychedelic, rather than just cathartic. Time jumps. They move closer together and farther away from each other without transition. They each hear the voices of people they love at some point. Danny mistakes Amy for someone who has arrived to rescue them. And in the most telling section, they begin to voice both of their thoughts in unison, and then they switch; Amy is speaking as Danny, and Danny as Amy. Their ego boundaries have dissolved because their default mode network, the brain structures that form our sense of self, has shut down, one of the main functions of psychedelics. The end of their exchange is as trippy as it gets, full of those kinds of thoughts that feel super-deep but sound like a Zen greeting card. “Wait, who am I?” “Any time you try to hold onto one thing, it slips away.” “It’s, like, empty, but solid.” “If God is everything, then we’re God.”

This is the kind of stuff you think and say when you’re having what psychedelics researchers call a “mystical” experience.

That’s exactly the kind of thing I hope to see more of when it comes to psychedelic plotlines on TV. How to Change Your Mind author Michael Pollan has talked and written about how hard it is to describe a psychedelic experience in a way that’s interesting to others—it’s like describing a dream. But both of these series showed it can be done in a moving way. I don’t want us to get into a deus ex psychedelia situation, using substances to push plots in unearned directions. Both of these shows, however, demonstrated that tripping can be used in a way that feels authentic to the characters’ journeys while providing them key new insights. Therapy has become increasingly common on television, and I think psychedelics can be used in similar fashion, allowing turning points that feel satisfying and authentic.

As usual, set and setting are key—not only for tripping in real life, but also for tripping responsibly on TV.