Ted Lasso is back – and man, I’ve really needed it
With a new team, old friends and the same unshakeable belief in people’s inherent goodness, Ted Lasso hasn’t reinvented itself for Season 4. Thank God for that.
Warning: This review of Ted Lasso Season 4 details of the first two episodes, as well as things that happened in the previous three seasons of the show. Ted Lasso has been airing weekly on Apple TV+ since 5 August.
The story of how Ted Lasso came into existence sounds like a plotline from one of its own episodes. Jason Sudeikis first played the character in a 2013 NBC Sports ad joking about how clueless American college football coaches are about British football. It was a marketing skit, nothing more.
Seven years later, the sketch spawned a series that premiered on Apple TV+ in August 2020. The pandemic was in full swing, and everyone was arguing about whether or not masks and vaccines were effective, and whether or not people who rejected them were reckless. You’d be hard-pressed to think of another event in recent history that caused such deep division in the world – a division that continues to this day.
Then, this man came on the scene with his moustache and his cookie jar. A man who walked into every room like the happiest person in the world, simply because he was allowed to be there. The timing was coincidental. The impact wasn’t.
«Be curious, not judgmental»
There’s one scene that, even now, encapsulates the entire series for me. In Season 1, Ted plays a game of darts against Rupert, the ex-husband of his boss, Rebecca. Rupert is arrogant, condescending and convinced he’ll easily take down his naive American opponent. And Ted lets him believe exactly that. Then, just before the final round, he recites a Walt Whitman quote he once saw hanging on the wall of a bar when he was a teenager: «Be curious, not judgmental.»
He then throws multiple bullseyes in a row.
The thing that makes this scene so clever isn’t the twist – it’s the observation behind it. Rupert underestimated Ted from the get-go because he judged him without ever taking the time to properly get to know him. This is the very premise the series revolves around. Anyone who judges someone before asking questions almost always misses the most important thing about them.
This is Ted’s true superpower. He doesn’t win because he’s the best coach. In fact, he’s a tactical disaster at first, as the series openly addresses. No, he wins because he’s the only person in the room who really listens, even once everyone else has long since made up their minds on an issue.
Source: Apple TV
The grouchy Roy Kent teaches the same lesson in Season 2, only in a different way. When young Isaac gets lost in his own thoughts, Roy takes him to his old playground, where the neighbourhood kids play football in the evenings. No coaching, no strategy board – just an adult showing a boy once again what joy feels like. Football, Roy reminds him, is essentially a kid’s game. As soon as you forget that, you stop being good. And yet, beneath that joy, there’s always something else at play: the fear of failure, the desire to be seen and the need to belong.
«Football is life,» says Dani Rojas fittingly, bursting with energy.
This is the exact reason why Ted Lasso also appeals to people who can’t tell a corner from a penalty. The actual story never takes place on the pitch. It unfolds in the changing room, at the kitchen table and in the office of Dr Sharon, the team psychologist, where Ted first admits that there’s deep-seated trauma hiding behind his ever-present smile.
In letting its own hero break down, the series took what was perhaps its boldest decision. Ted, the nicest man in the world, who preaches to everyone else about being open and vulnerable, is the least capable of doing so himself. His divorce, his father who took his own life, leaving Ted harbouring rage inside him, his fear of passing on this very same pattern to his son – all of this eventually breaks through the cookie-baking, wisecracking facade.
The healing power of Ted Lasso doesn’t lie in pretending there’s no pain. Rather, it shows that you can respond to pain with kindness, without downplaying it. This is what people mean when they say the series feels like therapy. You suddenly see what it’s like when someone treats another person without prejudice, listens to them with respect (even when they completely disagree) and tries to look at the issue from a different perspective instead of coming at it with judgement. It’s something we rarely experience in real life, let alone practise ourselves.
Back in Kansas, back to London
Season 4 resumes with this very same Ted – only this time in a completely new setting. Three years have passed since Ted left England. Having given up coaching a long time ago, he now works as an assistant manager at a supermarket in Kansas City. Then one day, Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins show up at his door. They want to bring him back to Richmond – though not to coach the men’s team, but to coach the newly formed women’s team.
Ted is reluctant. His son Henry and his reconciliation with his ex-wife Michelle were the reasons he came back to Kansas in the first place. A return to the pitch would put those very things back in jeopardy. In the end, it’s his mother who gently reminds him that fulfilled fathers make for better fathers. So Ted makes a different decision than he did last time. Rather than running away from his problems by leaving his family behind, he brings Michelle and Henry to London with him.
And so a new chapter begins: AFC Richmond, second division, no budget to speak of and not even a private changing room. A team that still has to gel with each other. Roy Kent is now coaching the men’s team, with Coach Beard – yet to even come to terms with Ted’s return – by his side. In other words, familiar faces, but not all in the same place. A clever soft reboot that offers enough reference points for returning viewers without simply copying old successes.
Curiouser and Curiouser
The biggest change has a name: Alice Chilton. Played by Tanya Reynolds, she’s the women’s team’s assistant coach. She deserves the top job – and she knows it. But instead of getting it, she’s confronted with Ted, who wasn’t even in the running for the position. Her first instinct is to quit.
Source: Apple TV
Significantly, the second episode is titled Curiouser and Curiouser, a reference to Alice in Wonderland that also perfectly sums up the premise of the series as a whole. In this very conflict, we see how skilfully Ted Lasso explores the issues it covers. Alice confronts Rebecca with an uncomfortable question: did she even consider a woman for the top job? Rebecca’s forced to admit that no, she didn’t. Even though she’s poured her own wealth into getting this women’s team off the ground in the first place.
Is Rebecca actually a feminist? Or is she deluding herself in thinking she founded the women’s team out of conviction, rather than just doing so to tout her feminist credentials?
That’s what makes this episode so great. It holds up a mirror not only to Rebecca, but also to us viewers, who never for a second doubted that Ted would, of course, get the job. Why should a man be leading the women’s team anyway? What qualifications does he have besides kindness and cookies? Ted Lasso poses this question without preaching to its audience. It doesn’t tell anybody what the correct position is. Rebecca reflects, and I reflect along with her. In the end, it’s not a moral judgement you’re left with – it’s a question to continue pondering yourself.
The series has always approached polarising issues in exactly this way – with curiosity and without judgment.
A slow start
The new season doesn’t kick off completely without issue. The first few minutes are dedicated to Ted’s life in Kansas – his contentment on the one hand, his lack of fulfilment on the other – before the real adventure actually begins. The pace is more subdued, almost restrained, compared to the momentum that the previous seasons started off with.
In those first few minutes, I notice some resistance bubbling up in myself. Isn’t it a little too cheesy now? A little too carried away by its own optimism? My cynicism doesn’t fail to rear its head when the familiar faces reappear on screen.
Source: Apple TV
Then again, in its best moments, Ted Lasso still hits me right in the feels, burying its way through that same cynicism and pushing it aside. The jokes still land. The warmth feels well deserved, not forced. And by the second episode, if not before, it becomes clear that the series hasn’t lost its ability to heal us. It’s just taken a little longer to rebuild that ability.
It’s telling that, even after all this time, the series is still teaching me new things:
«Football is life? No. Life is so much more than football!»
I write about technology as if it were cinema, and about films as if they were real life. Between bits and blockbusters, I’m after stories that move people, not just generate clicks. And yes – sometimes I listen to film scores louder than I probably should.
This is a subjective opinion of the editorial team. It doesn't necessarily reflect the position of the company.
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