Josh Reviews Ted Lasso Season Four!

Like so many others, I fell in love immediately with Ted Lasso as soon as I started watching the first season.  The show was a nearly miraculous balance between being extremely funny while also being beautifully life-affirming, warm and upbeat.  The show was also incredible in the way it developed its entire ensemble into fully-realized, three-dimensional characters that I loved and cared about the way I would in the most impactful TV drama.  Ted Lasso always had real emotions and dramatic stakes, and the show could be sad and heartbreaking at times, while never losing its ability to be hilarious.  Very few TV shows can manage to achieve all of this!

Overall, I deeply loved that original three-season run of Ted Lasso, and if that had been all we ever got, I’d have been OK with that.  However, I thought the third season of the show, while still great, was shaggier than I’d expected, and quite a number of character arcs weren’t resolved to my satisfaction.  It felt to me like the writers were hedging their bets, trying to bring enough resolution to be satisfying if the show was over, but leaving room for new stories if the show continued.  I didn’t love that approach, and so I’d been hoping since season three ended that perhaps we’d someday get more.

And so I was thrilled to get season four of Ted Lasso, three years later!  As season four opens, Ted is living his life in Kansas City, but he’s lured back to the UK and Richmond with the prospect of a new challenge: leading the new Richmond women’s football team that Rebecca & Keeley have launched.  And so, season four of Ted Lasso is both a continuation and a gentle reboot.  Many of the familiar characters are still around: Ted, Rebecca, Keeley, Roy Kent, Beard, Higgins, and others.  But we also have an array of new characters: coach Alice Chilton and all the new Lady Greyhound players, and more.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching every episode of season four of Ted Lasso.  Much of what I used to love about the show has been recaptured.  The tone feels correct — they’ve managed to once again find that balance of comedy and emotion, with a positive, life-affirming ethos, that I was describing above.  It’s a pleasure to see so many of the show’s beloved characters again, and I was very impressed by what a good job Jason Sudeikis & his team did introducing a whole host of new characters who I also grew to like and care about by the end of the season.  At the same time, there was a wobbliness to the storytelling that surprised me.  There were a number of times in which I rolled my eyes as the show had the characters acting dumb and engaging in ridiculous sitcom-like behaviors.  And some of the shagginess of season three’s storytelling was still present, with some key moments seeming to happen off-screen, and storylines needing more attention to have landed in the finale with the impact that I think the show’s creators expected them to have.  (More on all of this below.)

But overall, I really did enjoy this season!  Every episode gave me great pleasure and was filled with lots of wonderful moments.  I’m glad season four exists, and I hope we’ll get more!

Shall we dive in further?  Beware minor SPOILERS below.

I love the concept of this season, that Ted is now the coach of the women’s team.  That’s a great idea, and I was very happy with how that all played out over the course of the season.  I think this season’s biggest accomplishment was in successfully introducing this array of new characters connected with the women’s team.  If this hadn’t worked, I’d have been frustrated watching scenes with these new characters, wanting more time with the show’s original characters.  But, in fact, the opposite happened, and if anything I’d have liked to have seen even more focus and time given to these new characters!

Tanya Reynolds was a delight as Coach Alice Chilton.  I loved this character.  I really enjoyed the way the show took the time to explore her backstory and what had shaped her into the tightly-wound person we were meeting on the show.  It was a delight seeing a character not immediately fall in love with Ted’s folksy persona and approach.  The show found just the right amount of butting heads between the characters to bring an interesting new dynamic into the series, while also allowing both Ted and Alice to learn and grow from one another, in keeping with the show’s central ethos.  This was very well done.  I loved the way Alice’s arc played out over the course of the season; I think this was the most fully successful character arc of the season.

All of the new Lady Greyhound players were great: Abbie Hern as Gemma Jay, a young woman with extraordinary talent who is torn between her love of football and a more normal, expected career path; Faye Marsay (Vel Sartha on Andor!!) as Lizzie Davis, trying to balance single motherhood with her pursuit of football excellence; Rex Hayes and Aisling Sharkey as the bickering twins Siobhan and Niamh; Jude Mack as Boots, the goalkeeper who stubbornly refuses to use gloves; Shannon Hayes as Shannon, reprising her role as the “soccer girl” who Ted used to bump into while walking around town, now trying to earn a spot on the team; and many more great supporting characters.  I loved this group!

Tracy Ullman played a major new character; the wealthy Zelda Southport.  I have mixed feelings about this character.  On the one hand, I adore Tracy Ullman, and I loved watching her portray this zany rich lady.  On the other hand, by the end of the season, I got a little tired of the “mystery” of whether Zelda was genuine, or a snake in the grass.  It seemed obvious to me that the show needed some sort of replacement for Rupert (the late, great Anthony Head), and so I suspected all along that it was Zelda.  I assume most viewers did.  There was really no one else it could have been.  I wonder how the season would have played had they given us this reveal mid-season; would we have been able to have gotten more enjoyment out of seeing her in villain mode, albeit much sillier than Rupert, rather than trying to keep this as a surprise?  (I’d also have loved to have seen Leslie being smart; I wish we’d gotten to see him figure out what Zelda was up to.  Instead, Leslie looks pretty foolish for much of the back half of the season, until the switcheroo at the very end.)

I really missed Phil Dunster’s Jamie Tartt; I assume Mr. Dunster was busy with Rooster (where he is fantastic).  I was glad we got to see Jamie return for one episode; his continuing bromance with Roy Kent made me so happy.

I was surprised Nick Mohammed wasn’t back in a larger role as Nate Shelly.  But Mr. Mohammed is also a busy actor these days; I wonder if he wasn’t available, or if the show’s creators wanted to move on from Nate’s storyline.  (Personally, I felt they’d bungled Nate’s redemption in season three.)  It did make me happy to see Nate the Great again briefly at the end of the season; I’d love for him to be more of a part of a season five, if that happens.  (Maybe Nate can coach Richmond’s mens team, now that Roy has left?)

I was also expecting Trent Crimm (James Lance) to be more involved this season; I thought it’d be easy for his writer-character to be involved in this season’s storylines.  I missed Trent Crimm!

I of course also missed all the lads on the Richmond men’s team, most of whom had evolved into such wonderful characters by the end of season three.  But I understand why they weren’t a part of this new version of the show.  I was happy just to get a glimpse of many of them in the season finale.

I’d expected Ted’s wife and son to have more of a role this season, particularly after they were both such a big part of the season premiere.  I’m OK that they weren’t — the show has a huge cast of characters and it’s hard to give everyone enough time — it’s just a choice that surprised me.  I didn’t need Ted’s family drama to be a bigger part of the show that it was; I like the focus staying on the football.  However, the downside of this was that I didn’t think Ted’s choice in the final minutes of the season finale (which I won’t spoil here) landed the way it should have.  We needed to have spent more time over the course of the season with the idea that Ted was struggling with his work-life balance for that choice to have felt like one that made sense to me.  As it was, it came out of nowhere, and stretched my credulity that any former coach of a Premier League team would do that.  If the show continues, I hope we get to see a little more of Michelle (Andrea Anders) and Henry (whose role was recast here in season four; he’s now played by Grant Feely, who was terrific).  (I did love getting to see the great Becky Ann Baker back in the premiere as Ted’s mom, Dottie.  I love Becky Ann Baker, ever since her Freaks and Geeks days!)

I was happy that we got a lot of Mae (Annette Badland) this season.  I was sad to see her go, but it was nice that the show gave her character a lovely moment in the spotlight before she did.  If we get a season five, I hope we get to explore what life is like for the three guys now, having to actually run Mae’s pub instead of just spending all their days hanging out there and drinking!!)

To my surprise, I felt this season’s main weakness was in how it handled many of the returning characters, especially Rebecca and Keeley.  Let’s start with Keeley, who I felt repeatedly behaved in an extremely out-of-character way and was given dumb, bad sitcom storylines.  There’s a story early in the season in which Keeley is surprised and disappointed that, despite a happening social media campaign, that didn’t translate into actual ticket sales for the Lady Greyhounds’ opening game.  I cannot believe that Keeley, who’s always been presented as an extremely smart, savvy marketer, someone who is comfortable in the online world and knows how to use it to her benefit, didn’t immediately understand that it would take more than a cool social media campaign to actually sell tickets for this new venture!  Things got worse quickly, when we see Keeley hatch an excruciatingly dumb plan to have Roy date ten women before she’ll allow him to date her again.  This was a painfully stupid storyline on Sports Night three decades ago!!!  I could not believe it was happening here on Ted Lasso.  And then, ugh, we got the ridiculous scene in which Keeley hears Roy, in a hospital bed, profess his love for his hot new physician girlfriend, Erin, but oops, Keeley steps away right before hearing that Roy is actually talking about her.  And this whole exchange was the result of a drug-induced stupor, in which Roy is only opening up because he’s loopy on drugs, and his girlfriend Erin thinks Roy is talking about her but is heartbroken to learn he’s talking about Keeley.  Aaargh!!!  What a pile-up of dumb sitcom coincidental plotting!!!  This made me crazy.

I wasn’t much happier about Rebecca’s storylines, in which she also often came off as surprisingly clueless.  Rebecca doesn’t think that hiding important data about the new women’s team from Keeley will come back and burn her?  Rebecca just invited Zelda right into her inner circle, and allows her to be privy to all their internal conversations?  And Rebecca really bungles her relationship with Matthijs mid-season.  I love that the season ended with Rebecca proposing to Matthijs and finally moving on with her romantic life, post-Rupert.  But for me to have felt that this was the right choice for a happy ending for Rebecca, I wish we’d spent more time exploring that relationship, especially after their fight and make-up.  I wanted to see how that brought them closer and helped them take their relationship to the next level, with better communication.  (Matthijs also acted poorly in that fight; I wish we’d had a few more scenes with him afterwards, exploring why he behaved that way and walking that back.)

I was surprised that the original Ted Lasso run didn’t end with Roy and Keeley back together, and I was annoyed that this season seemed to be continuing the “will they/won’t they” games, so I was glad the season ended with them together.  We got a lot of great Roy-Keeley scenes this season, which made me happy.  (I particularly enjoyed Roy’s narration of the Lady Greyhounds match to Keeley, who wasn’t supposed to be watching because of her stress-levels.)  If the show continues, will we see them as parents??  That’d be an interesting development!

I was happy the show gave Beard lots of fun stuff to do.  I’m glad they undid his being married to Jane; and I loved how much great comedy they were able to mine from Jane’s crazy one-woman play about Beard.  I felt sorry for him after getting his wires crossed with the young lady at Zelda’s party.  (My wife and I both agreed she WAS giving Beard signals that she was into him!!)  But I loved all the comedy that came after that, with Beard’s increasingly dramatic physical changes, trying to look younger.  Brendan Hunt is a comedic genius!

It was a pleasure and a gift to be able to enjoy ten new episodes of Ted Lasso.  I hope we get two more seasons and another complete three-season arc for Ted and the Lady Greyhounds!

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