Folksy football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) turns his attention to coaching a women’s team: the second-division Lady Greyhounds.
Streaming on: Apple TV
Episodes viewed: 4 of 10
As one of the later entrants in the streaming wars, Apple TV needed a hit in its infancy to earn its seat at the table. Its initial big-budget vehicles — Servant, Carpool Karaoke: The Series — never fully became mainstream juggernauts. The show that actually put Apple on the map was the plucky underdog about plucky underdogs: Ted Lasso.
The critical and commercial hit, following the fictional Richmond FC and its inspirational American coach, won hearts worldwide, made stars of Hannah Waddingham and Brett Goldstein, and elevated the dad joke to an artform. It lost some shine in Season 3, squandering the arc of Nate (Nick Mohammed) and delivering a cloyingly saccharine Christmas special, but the most confounding choice was bowing out after 34 episodes despite a loyal audience and a premise with legs; an abrupt finale saw Ted moving back stateside, to spend more time with his son.
The tangible desperation to recapture old magic deadens the humour.
And now we return, three years later, to find Ted (Jason Sudeikis) stocking shelves in Missouri, co-parenting his blandly pleasant son with his blandly pleasant ex-wife. Sure enough, the obstacles keeping him from Richmond dissolve instantly, underlining how flimsy his exit was, and Ted returns to coach the new women’s team.
Where this could examine how women’s sport still contends with misogyny, Ted Lasso makes that case by committing the same sin. In a Britain where the Lionesses are European champions and national heroes, punchlines about nobody caring about women’s football land as the show’s own dismissal rather than that of the culture. The women’s squad of hapless, puerile near-amateurs starkly contrasts with the dysfunctional but talented men Ted first met. Roy Kent (Goldstein) now coaches those men, a footballing ensemble kept conspicuously off-screen in a way that suggests lapsed actor contracts. Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds) joins to help coach the women, but her defining trait is people thinking she’s a nightmare.
Waddingham is reduced to an uneventful romance with a pilot and proving her feminist credentials to nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Juno Temple’s Keeley solves marketing crises with all the skill and aplomb of a caffeinated toddler, while embarking on an interminable will-they-won’t-they with Roy that only underscores how thinly sketched their earlier break-up was.
Comfort comedies can get away with iffy politics and wobbly plotting so long as the cosy giggles keep coming, but the tangible desperation to recapture old magic deadens the humour, every scene playing like a sweaty plea for one more chance. Trading on nostalgia is understandable, but doing it this nakedly costs the series the authenticity that made it beloved. For a show that had puzzlingly little reason to end, Ted Lasso managed to find an even less compelling reason to come back.
Ted Lasso is back, but the magic clocked out years ago. It sputters along on goodwill and nostalgia, hoping you won’t notice there’s nothing else left in the tank.
