Ted Lasso is back. Like a band that makes a big deal out of doing a farewell tour, then reunites before anyone had a chance to miss it, the megahit Apple TV sorta-comedy about a folksy American football coach hired to lead an underdog English soccer club has returned just three years after an implicit finale that sent its hero home to his son in Kansas. Premiering Aug. 5, Season 4 takes co-creator Jason Sudeikis’ Ted, who became a nurturing father figure to the surrogate family that was AFC Richmond, back across the Atlantic to shepherd the club’s new women’s team. It doesn’t quite work.
The season opens with the jarring image of Coach Lasso manning a supermarket register. Still in the Midwest a few years after the events of Season 3, he loves being with his son, Henry (Grant Feely), but is so bored at work, he steals snackfood for kicks. So it’s a relief when his old boss, Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), and colleagues Keeley (Juno Temple) and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) fly in to persuade him to coach the Lady Greyhounds. Never mind that he still doesn’t know much about soccer, or that there are many qualified female candidates back in the UK—he’s the only name on their list. When his ex, Michelle (Andrea Anders), frictionlessly agrees to move with him and Henry to London, everything’s coming up Ted.
With the conspicuous exceptions of Nick Mohammed’s prodigal junior coach, Nate, and team star Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster, who joined Lasso executive producer Bill Lawrence’s new HBO comedy Rooster), the original cast remains intact. Brett Goldstein’s seething has-been, Roy Kent, has replaced Ted as the men’s coach; Beard (co-creator Brendan Hunt) stuck around to assist Roy but has gone feral in the absence of his professional soulmate. Rebecca and Keeley are battling sexism—their own internalized prejudices as well as those of the sports and business communities—to get the Lady Greyhounds the financial support they need. Which leaves Ted to win over the icy assistant coach, Alice (played by the wonderful Tanya Reynolds from Sex Education and The Other Bennet Sister), who was passed over for his job, and establish the same magical rapport with his new team that he had with the old one, despite how careful he needs to be about entering the women’s locker room. Strangely, in the four episodes provided for review (out of 10 total), his interactions with the players are minimal.
The original Ted Lasso was a show about masculinity. Neither particularly funny nor especially exciting in its depiction of Premier League play, it appealed to a broad audience with a vision that was comforting to viewers of all genders—of macho, mostly straight men becoming better people through bonding and introspection. The catalyst for this was kind, empathetic Ted, who played Gallant to a gaggle of Goofuses: angry Roy, preening Jamie, insecure Nate. To its credit, the show put an anxious, avoidant Coach Lasso on the analyst’s couch, too. His ultimate choice to go home to Henry concluded an arc that had him learn to stop running from problems like his divorce and ended the cycle of dad trauma in which several characters’ struggles were rooted.
Ted is a more awkward fit as a father figure to the Lady Greyhounds because, well, the new gender dynamic could read as less paternal than paternalistic. Make him a voice of reason, and he might be perceived as mansplaining; have him defer too much to his players, and he becomes the cringey, try-hard male feminist he sometimes resembled in previous seasons. The show’s solution is to keep him largely on the sidelines, leaving female characters like Alice and, in one clumsily inserted storyline, erstwhile AFC Richmond therapist Sharon (Sarah Niles) to dispense wisdom on such female-coded issues as intra-team cliques. This puts the players at arm’s length as well. There’s a mom, a couple, a goalie who refuses to wear gloves, but no Roy or Jamie emerges.
Female characters were never the mostly male Ted Lasso creative team’s strength. Despite charming performances from Waddingham and Temple, Rebecca and Keeley’s business plot never lives up to its potential because these colleagues continue to interact like giggly teenagers at a slumber party. Although there are plenty of women writing and directing in Season 4, Alice—the highlight of the series’ second act so far—is the only substantial character who doesn’t feel filtered through the male gaze.
No longer a tutorial in how to be a good man, Ted Lasso returns as, in parts, a gentle rejoinder to sexism in sports and a gift to those still shipping Roy and Keeley, but mostly a workplace comfort show about nothing in particular. TV could certainly use more scripted stories about women athletes—a Friday Night Lights for softball, a Winning Time for the WNBA, a sapphic hockey romance in the mold of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus. But a different coach is going to have to inspire those locker rooms, because Ted Lasso just doesn’t belong.
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