Oh, Good, Ted Lasso is Back to Being Ted Lasso Again
Oh, Good, Ted Lasso is Back to Being Ted Lasso Again
A rare recovery from a tailspin of a season.
Legend has it that Game Boy Pocket exists because of the Virtual Boy. Not because Virtual Boy was a slam dunk homerun hat trick of a game system, but in fact the opposite: 30 years later, that weird little system still stands as Nintendo’s least successful game console of all time. Its lead designer, veteran Nintendo tech visionary Gunpei Yokoi, supposedly deferred his long-planned retirement from the company specifically to head up Game Boy Pocket’s design simply because he refused to go out on a note as sour as Virtual Boy.
You don’t see redemption arcs like that in popular media too often. Usually when a final act falls flat, it deflates the legacy of the entire work, no matter how popular it was. Think Game of Thrones, whose final season did such a poor job of bringing the saga to a close that it all but erased the series from the collective consciousness, despite it having been the biggest thing in the world at the time. There have been follow-ups ranging from good (House of the Dragon) to great (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms), but those are prequels; every attempt to expand the story beyond the Iron Throne’s abrupt meltdown (e.g. Snow) has fizzled in development. Or Star Wars: it’s been seven years since The Rise of Skywalker, and we’ve had prequels, but there still hasn’t been a film or show that explores what happened after everything went down on Exegol. And does anyone even remember how much people used to like Lost?
That same fate could have befallen Apple’s Ted Lasso after its third and supposedly final season. The show’s first season became the streamer’s first real hit back in August 2020 thanks to its lightweight tone and feel-good vibes—it offered a bright spot of positivity during a very dark time in history. The second season built on its success, raising the dramatic stakes without losing sight of the breezy nature of the characters and dialogue. And then the third season arrived to bring the tale of Ted’s time coaching football in the U.K. to a definitive ending, and the world collectively said, “Ugh.” For a variety of reasons, season three of Ted Lasso lost the plot—or rather, it clung to the plot at the expense of all the things that made the show so appealing in the first place. Episodes stretched to twice the length of the previous seasons, stretching the lovable quips and banter thin while filling the leftover spaces with aimless subplots yet still somehow rushing individual character arcs to a hasty, unsatisfying conclusion. All the quirky incidental music in the world couldn’t cover up the fact that Ted Lasso had lost its juice and brought a beloved, upbeat show to a pretty miserable conclusion.
Surprisingly, the show’s fourth season—which began a couple of weeks ago after years of the creative leads flatly stating that there was no reason to develop a fourth season—has gotten off to a strong start, making Ted Lasso feel like, well, Ted Lasso. After a fake-out start that gave the impression that the show would shift its focus to the American heartland and undermine the title character’s fish-out-of-water charm, the narrative has shifted back once again to the U.K. Admittedly, Ted feels far less out of his element this time around (it’s hard to feel like an alien when the local football club has reverent posters bearing your likeness plastered across its stadium walls), though the dialogue still revels in contrasting his wholesome tidbits of homespun wisdom against the rest of the cast’s distinctly British mix of the highly proper and deeply vulgar. And it’s still an underdog tale, as Ted tries to turn the club’s women’s team into a force that the rest of the sports world takes seriously, though this time around everyone is rooting for him rather than setting him up to fail.
Most importantly, there are still signs that the personal trauma and depression that Ted’s sunny demeanor masks so effectively linger beneath the surface. Although he’s managed to achieve detente with his ex-wife and his son seems to support the idea of relocating to England, Ted still has his demons. That was the secret sauce that made the early seasons of the show so compelling: The realization that this screwball soccer tactician breezing his way through life no matter what obstacles it presents had plenty of pain beneath the surface. The third season got a little carried away with the drama and trauma, but Ted Lasso without some manner of emotional stakes would be no more enjoyable than the show’s all-drama iteration. A lot of Ted Lasso’s creative leads (particularly Brett Goldstein) have explored that same territory to brilliant effect on Shrinking, but there’s still plenty of space for Ted Lasso to make its mark.
And not just with Ted. Will Roy and Keeley get back together? Or will Jonathan continue disrupting their tender moments? Surely we’ll know more by the end of the season.