TED LASSO S4 Review: Same Old, Same Old, But Not Quite

The first season of Ted Lasso was a perfect binge.

As I noted in my review of Season 2: "I was pleasantly surprised by the clever dialogue, brimming with insightful and witty cultural observations, that elevated Ted Lasso into the upper stratosphere of streaming series. Arriving as it did in the midst of the worldwide pandemic but having nothing to do with the pandemic, it felt like a warm embrace from a trusted friend."

I very much enjoyed the first six episodes of Season 2, which were made available in advance, and prompted my review linked above. As the season wore on, though, I became increasingly aware that the episodes had been expanded from their formerly quick-paced 30-minute length, often running up to 40 or more minutes, perhaps in order to process its increasing dose of dramatic situations, which did not always mix well with its comedy.

Season 3 expanded the running time of each episode further, and continued the show's evolution from a brisk, witty 30-minute comedy into a comedy-drama that sometimes lumbered with its increased dramatic weight. "It's a lot of disparate moving parts, and they don't all mesh together smoothly," as I wrote in my review of the first episode, and that proved increasingly true over the course of 12 (?!) episodes.

The Season 3 finale, which premiered in May 2023, concluded with former fiery star player Roy (Brett Goldstein), who had retired and become a fiery assistant coach with the team, installed as new fiery head coach of the Richmond professional football club. The show's perpetually cheery titular character (Jason Sudeikis) returned to Middle America to coach his son's soccer team; Ted's assistant married his sweetheart and they also remained in the United States.

The End. But not so fast.

Even though, for all intents and purposes, the series concluded after three seasons, someone took note that, in the season finale, Keeley (Juno Temple) gave the Richmond club's owner, Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), a proposal for a Richmond women's team. And that serves as a starting point for the next season.

Ted Lasso S4
Season 4, Episode 1 is now streaming on Apple TV, alongside all 34 episodes of the first three seasons. Subsequent episodes of the 10-episode season will debut every Wednesday. I've seen all episodes in the first three seasons, as well as the first four episodes of Season 4.

Season 4, Episode 1, written by co-developer Joe Kelly, picks up three years later. Ted Lasso is still in Middle America, and is now a cheery assistant manager at a large grocery store in Kansas City, Missouri. Ted is on cordial terms with his ex-wife, with whom he shares custody of their (still) soccer-playing teenage son, who occasionally acts out in public, causing some minor disturbances.

One day, Rebecca, Keeley, and club operations manager Higgins (Jeremy Swift) arrive in town. For reasons that are never explained in a satisfactory manner, Rebecca offers him a job as the first coach of the Richmond women's team, which will soon start playing.

Never mind that Rebecca apparently never seriously considered hiring a woman for the job. (It's Ted! I know him, and blimey, I really grew to like him! He brought me a treat every morning! Everyone loves Ted!) Never mind that he's never coached a women's team before; after all, he had never coached a British football team before, and look how that turned out!

After the team's brain trust spends a tourist's day in Kansas City, Ted declines the offer. Thinking it over, though, Ted asks his ex-wife and son if they would be OK moving to London with him, and they agree that it would be 'a nice change of scenery.'

It might have been easier if the producers had simply said, 'Look, the show was a big success, Apple very much wants the show back, and we have this dangling thread from the season 3 finale that would be very, very funny if we developed it further: a male coach returns to England to coach, get this, a women's team! Ha ha!'

Because Ted already acclimatized to England over the course of three seasons, there's not much left for him to learn about England. Instead, in Episodes 2 through 4, the humor spotlights the differences between teams of different sexes: Men have it pretty cushy, even if they are lower-level teams, while women's teams must scrap for every piece of equipment and every bit of space for them in their facilities.

It's a rich field to explore and analyze from a business standpoint. Yet the jokes that are inserted rely on years-old stereotypes, featuring 'battle of the sexes' humor that feels mired in the 1970s.

Ted Lasso is a winning personality, if sometimes cringy-naive. The writers ameliorated his happy-to-lucky 'dumb' outlook by introducing his darker, more worrisome side in Seasons 2 and 3, which contributed to the show's downward swing in those seasons because it passed it off as just another minor challenge that could be easily overcome if Ted just tried really hard.

Positive vibes from Season 1 still echo in Season 4, though they feel more faint than ever in the first four episodes. With many supporting players elevated to co-lead status, in effect, it makes it harder for new characters, such as his new assistant coach (Tanya Redmonds), whose bark it bound to be only a cover, to be developed beyond caricature status.

Even so, like Ted Lasso, I'd like to think that I'm eternally optimistic. I hope that the balance of the season will counterbalance the past trauma drama with more genuinely cheery goodwill.

It may not be pandemic days anymore, but we still all need a good laugh shared with authentically likeable characters. I know I do.

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