Developed by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Joe Kelly, and Brendan Hunt – Showrunner Jack Burditt – Starring Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, Jeremy Swift, and Tanya Reynolds
Ted Lasso ended its original three-season run before I started this site, so I never had a chance to write about how much I loved it.
Ted Lasso was never really about football. For me, it was about realizing that the life you imagined for yourself isn’t necessarily the life you’re going to have, and figuring out how to find happiness while also reconciling that disappointment.
Ted was supposed to be happily married. Roy was supposed to be able to play football forever. Jamie was supposed to become a superstar. Nate was supposed to be the wunderkind. Rebecca had an idea of what her life and family would look like.
Over and over, characters had to let go of some version of who they thought they were supposed to be in order to figure out who they actually were. Sports provided the perfect metaphor. Everyone wants to win, but most people don’t. Only one team gets to be champion. Everyone else eventually has to figure out how to live with losing.
Ted Lasso understood that losing doesn’t have to define you.
What made all of that work was the show’s fundamental belief in people. Ted Lasso has always existed in a slightly different shade of our world. Racism, sexism, jealousy, selfishness, depression, and cruelty still exist, but people are also capable of recognizing their failures, changing, forgiving each other, and becoming better.
That’s a warmth I’ve always loved about the series. Television is filled with shows about terrible people we’re asked to find fascinating. Sometimes those shows are great, but it can also be exhausting spending hour after hour with characters I can’t relate to, empathize with, or even particularly care about. Ted Lasso is the opposite. I root for these people.
That doesn’t mean I thought the original run was perfect. Season three in particular felt overcrowded, as though the decision had been made to end the series and suddenly every remaining idea needed to be squeezed into the time they had left. So when a fourth season was announced, I wasn’t particularly worried about disturbing some sacred ending. I was happy to go back.
The first episode doesn’t do a tremendous amount, and that’s okay. It’s really there to explain why Ted would return after the way season three ended. It spends time reacquainting us with Ted, Rebecca, Keeley, Higgins, and some of the rhythms that made the series so much fun in the first place. The jokes come quickly, the chemistry is still there, and it didn’t take long before I remembered how much I loved these characters.
I particularly enjoyed seeing the episode lean into its Kansas City backdrop. Barbecue food, midwestern hospitality, bedazzled clothes. Watching our English characters like overwhelmed fish out of water was a lot of fun.
I especially enjoyed following Higgins through the Negro Leagues Museum. That scene was exactly the kind of thing this series has always done well, allowing itself to explore history and culture without making those moments feel disconnected from everything around them.
By the second episode, Season 4 begins establishing what might make this version of Ted Lasso different: women’s football.
So far, I’m impressed with how the series is approaching it. A less interesting version of this story would simply give us a bunch of shitty men who don’t believe women can play football and then spend the season teaching them otherwise. Instead, Ted Lasso seems interested in the larger inequalities surrounding women’s sports. The facilities aren’t the same. The money isn’t the same. The press coverage isn’t the same. Even the culture surrounding the locker room is different.
The women themselves aren’t being treated as interchangeable simply because they’re women. While the show has only scratched the surface with the team, you can still see different personalities with different ambitions, attitudes, and relationships.
Tanya Reynolds is an early standout as Alice Chilton and gets quite a bit to do in the second episode. I’m already interested in seeing how she fits alongside Ted and how the rest of this new team develops. We’ve already learned a lot about her character, and the show did a good job subverting expectations by making her more than just a female version of Roy.
That’s probably the most exciting part of these first two episodes. We have all these characters I already love, but suddenly there are a bunch of new people I’m looking forward to getting to know.
I don’t know if Ted Lasso has anything new to show us. But I’m not really sure that matters.
I like these characters. I like the humor. I like having people to root for. And I like spending time in this slightly kinder version of our world, where things don’t always work out and people don’t always get what they want, but there’s still the possibility that tomorrow can be a little better than today.
After two episodes, I can say that I’m very happy to have Ted Lasso back.
TV Verdict: All In
Leave a Reply