Apple’s Sports Dramedy Returns, Shakily

It would surely take a real a-hole to hate on Apple’s Ted Lasso. As of the latest season — the fourth, following a third that played coy to the very end about whether it might be the last — it remains perhaps the most insistently warmhearted series on television, full of kindly heroes who are open of mind and generous of spirit.

Every new person is just a new friend waiting to happen. Every new challenge is an exciting opportunity to extend oneself or someone else a bit of grace. In a world where cruelty so often seems to be the point, it should be a balm for the soul, a fortifying reminder that common decency still matters and always will.

And yet, I must confess, what this latest outing brought up in me was not my better angels but my inner grump, growing ever more impatient with the whole endeavor. Unimpeachably well-intentioned but frustratingly hollow, the long-delayed new season mostly serves to confirm that the Richmond way may have run its course.

Perhaps I’m being harsh on a season that, in fairness, I did not actively despise. (I did warn you I was a jerk.) Where season three frustrated with its aimless pacing, its unruly plotting, its self-congratulatory strain of goodness, new showrunner Jack Burditt (30 Rock, Modern Family) dials back the worst of the show’s excesses.

The five (of 10) episodes sent to critics average a still-kinda-long-but-basically-reasonable 45 minutes. Our hero’s general vibe has been scaled back from nigh-saintly to merely very nice. All the male players — save Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, now Richmond’s coach — have been jettisoned from the show, taking their many half-baked storylines along with them.

The problem is that, having rid itself of its messier elements, Ted Lasso has replaced them with…well, not much of anything, really.

The season follows Ted (Jason Sudeikis) as he takes charge of their inaugural women’s team, none of whose members at this point have gotten ample or interesting enough screen time to leave a real impression. (I’d keep an eye on Jude Mack’s cheerfully unhinged goalie Boots, Faye Marsay’s maternal Lizzie and Abbie Hern’s prickly Gemma, though.)

The only new face that does demand a lot of attention so far is a prickly new assistant coach, Alice (an excellent Tanya Reynolds). Seeing as she’s the single most interesting part of the new season — not least because she’s the only lead who’s yet to succumb to the Pluribus-ian hive mind of Lasso-style positivity — it’s easy to want to lend it to her.

The challenge to be overcome this time is not some scheming villain or a more talented rival team, but the dully abstract concept of an unjust system: In the face of sexist male fans, skeptical executives, an indifferent sports media and a shameful lack of resources, can Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) and Keeley’s (Juno Temple) new passion project of a team possibly prevail?

It’s a timely plot, what with the recent surge of interest in established organizations like the WNBA and the NWSL as well as nascent ones like the PWHL and the WPBL, and undeniably a noble one. Ted Lasso knows it, sprinkling in speeches about how much it matters not just for little girls but little boys, older women and really people of all ages and genders to see that women can play, too. (And if you think it strange that such a proudly feminist endeavor has put a man in charge, there’s a whole episode-two subplot explaining, not very convincingly, why in this specific case it’s actually fine.)

But it’s one thing to label a thing important. It’s another to make it interesting. Ted Lasso succeeds at the former, but falters at the latter. In keeping the players and fans at arm’s length, at least for now, the show misses a shot to make the stakes feel personal — to show us what makes them so passionate about this sport, to reflect on the paths that have brought them here, to take stock of their own private hopes now that they’ve arrived. It might yet, and I hope it does; for my money, the most fun I had this season was watching these women bond or butt heads with equal raucousness.

Mostly, the series’ focus remains on its core cast. But rather than use the in-universe three-year gap to flip to a new chapter in the characters’ lives, it simply returns them to a familiar status quo. Assistant coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) remains trapped in a toxic on-off dynamic with Jane (Phoebe Walsh), despite having married her in the previous finale. Keeley and Roy are “really really good friends” who want to be more, but are kept apart by mechanisms that have only ever existed in the minds of screenwriters desperate to stretch out a will-they-won’t-they. Rebecca’s dragging her feet on a commitment to her hot pilot, Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn), again seemingly just so the series can milk this storyline as long as it can.

As for Ted, Sudeikis still shines most in the moments when we see sadness or worry peeking through his relentlessly upbeat façade. But the creaky pacing of this season — it takes a full episode for Ted to even begin to consider taking the job, all the better to deliver on what I can only assume is a lucrative partnership with Kansas City’s tourism board, and then two more before he’s assembled a full coaching staff and team — can’t hide the fact that the show doesn’t seem to know what to do with him when he’s not giving inspirational, metaphor-laden speeches.

Because really, where is there even left for Ted to go? In the first season, he was met with resistance on all fronts to his unorthodox methods of coaching, his ignorance of the sport, his sheer Americanness. By the end of the third, he’d so fully converted everyone to his brand of empathetic leadership that even Trent Crimm (James Lance), his toughest media critic, has written a book touting his wisdom.

The Ted that knocks on Rebecca’s door this season is not a fish out of water but a legendary hero returning to a kingdom he’s remade entirely in his image. Ted himself would never say so, of course — he’d aw-shucks the notion via some convoluted reference to a beloved ’80s movie. But he might as well let himself weep, for there are no more naysayers left for him to conquer.