The potentially-murderous Ted Lasso fan knows how to play the game
Here is an incomplete list of things Daphne Babcock has made me want to do: stop watching the news, get a trainer, take an edible in a baroque Italian square, enter into a marriage reliant on a balance of trust and manoeuvring. She makes me want to move to Italy . I am, most likely, learning all the wrong lessons fromIn the show’s second season, Daphne is introduced as the wife of Cameron , who is on holiday with his college friend, Ethan and his wife, Harper .
Daphne is the most compelling character in that rejigged framework, because she understands the game so well. Cameron’s going to party with the locals?. There’s unresolved sexual tension in the group hang? Fine, she’ll go be flirty with a masseur that looks like Timothée Chalamet and avoid their nonsense altogether. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
, may ring true with many of her generation, but she takes it a step further. “Husbands murdering their wives, happens a lot on vacation,” she tells the table, before setting out death by scuba dive. “He will just unplug her oxygen while she’s underwater. Happens more than you think.” That only makes her more of a joy to watch, and in a show that delights in discomfort, she’s the character who really pushes things too far on purpose.