Ted Lasso Season 4 debuts August 5 on Apple TV.
Three years after a Season 3 finale that sure did feel like a series finale at the time, Ted Lasso is back for a fourth season after all. In the modern streaming world, it’s become far too typical for a three-year gap between seasons to become something of a norm. At least Ted Lasso is accounting for this prolonged break in a bigger way, with a semi-reboot approach that feels more akin to a show being revived 10-15 years later rather than one we last saw the same year Oppenheimer was in movie theaters.
The third season ended with Ted (Jason Sudeikis) returning home to America and realizing it was time to stop being the semi-deadbeat dad he’d become, given his young son was back in Kansas City while Ted had been overseas coaching AFC Richmond. Season 4’s premiere is notable, because it’s actually entirely set in Kansas City. Ted is surprised when Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), Leslie (Jeremy Swift), and Keeley (Juno Temple) show up on his doorstep, hoping to recruit him to return to London to coach the new AFC Richmond women’s division team.
The premiere was shot on location in Kansas City, giving it a markedly different visual landscape than your typical Ted Lasso episode, and it makes the most of it. And there’s plenty of comic mileage drawn from making Rebecca, Leslie, and Keeley the fish out of water for once, as they take in these new sights and sounds. The cast all slip very comfortably back into their characters, whether it be the sweet and funny sisterly connection Waddingham and Temple exude, or the lovably dorky demeanor of Swift’s Leslie.
As for the title character, series co-creator and EP Sudeikis still wears the smile and stache of Ted like he was born for it. Ted’s gotten through the mental health issues that plagued him early on, but we find him at a restless point of his life, working as an assistant manager at a supermarket. He’s still maintaining his usual sunny disposition, but clearly without a true sense of fulfillment. Of course, there’s not a lot of dramatic tension as to whether he’ll accept the offer to coach again — there’s a whole season’s worth of episodes to fill, and we’ve seen the trailers — but the premiere does a solid job of showing how Ted gets to the point where he can admit that’s what he wants to do.
Pushing things on the credibility side though is how the premiere deals with the fact that Ted not only wouldn’t want to leave his son Henry (now played by Grant Feely) again, but wouldn’t want to ask to separate Henry from his mother, Ted’s ex-wife Michelle (Andrea Anders). The solution feels far too easy and convenient, awkwardly handwaving what would likely be a very difficult conversation in real life.
Given the nature of the premiere and how focused it is — no other series regulars appear beyond the four mentioned above, and we never actually see London — it’s hard to be sure how much it will reflect the remainder of the season. But the approach it takes is promising as far as its willingness to lock in on just a few characters and interconnected situations.
While Ted Lasso never lost its kindhearted center, Season 3 was notably overindulgent and often felt lacking in form after EP/co-creator Bill Lawrence stepped back as showrunner. This was demonstrated by its incredibly overlong episode runtimes, which frequently hit a full hour or more in the midst of a show that began with half-hour installments. The amount of subplots and side stories got out of control to the point that we somehow were following the inner workings of two different restaurants at one point on a series that was meant to be about a soccer team.
As we prep to meet AFC Richmond’s women’s team, it’s definitely going to be odd adjusting to saying goodbye to the entire team we’ve spent the last three seasons invested in, and I do worry that it will feel even more difficult to move on thanks to the show still being set in the same location as before with most of the same support staff in place. It likely would have been an easier transition to send Ted and a few key players to an all new part of the world for a cleaner break from what came before, but even as we prep for these big changes, the premiere does give hope that Sudeikis and new co-showrunner Jack Burditt have learned that less can be more. Ted Lasso needed to feel more reined in again… albeit with a 47-minute runtime. Hey, that’s still short by Season 3’s standards! And while we have yet to meet the new team, the prospect of returning to the Season 1 feel of Ted and his team getting to know each other and once more starting from a true underdog perspective is a welcome one.
