Watching Ted Lasso
September 13, 2026
Whenever a show is hyped, I wait years, never quite convinced yet reluctant to be disappointed. The summary of the Ted Lasso plot made me sure I would be disappointed. Folksy American brings the Brits down to earth. Unlikely hero transforms team. Revenge plot softens into a happy-family ensemble. Really?
Also we do not subscribe to Apple TV. Recently, though, I ran out of shows to watch and found Ted Lasso in our public library. And I cannot stop watching.
Yes, Ted is a folksy, chatty, naïve, Pollyanna version of Dr. Pangloss. Yes, the plots are too good to be true. How did they recover when they all took the high road and called out their evil corporate sponsor? How can they afford not one but four coaches when they barely ever win? The characters are drawn with fat magic marker, caricatures lacking nuance and complexity. Even the catharsis that comes when we finally learn their backstory is not enough to catapult them out of conventional stereotype. We love them because we already know them and can predict how they will behave, not because they intrigue us.
So why am I lapping this up? Because the show is honest and hopeful—two qualities that seldom coincide. It understands pain—and drinking or hurting others to relieve it. The healthier coping strategies it supplies can be silly, but in wonderful ways, like inventing a ritual to end a legendary haunting so a superstitious player can recover his mojo. Or taking a surly, snappish player who’s putting too much pressure on himself to a neighborhood pickup game, so he can remember what pure fun football was when he was a kid.
Ted Lasso is also honest about the ways people react to one another, and that chemistry blows the stereotypes open. The point is not any one character, but the relationships between them. And that, when you think about it, is true for all of us.
Halfway through Season Two, one of the episodes lost me completely. The focus narrowed to a single character (Coach Beard), and the interaction fell away. Still, I requested Season Three, and while finishing Two, I thought about ways this show found to move us. Many sound trite in a list: easing someone’s fear; humbling their arrogance; forgiving them so generously, we can forgive them too. Giving someone a hidden talent that makes them more appealing. Promoting the shy guy who is smarter than anyone realizes. Showing a nerd to be so enthusiastic, so fully himself, that he is almost cool.
The list goes on. Finding a clever way to convince a man that being vulnerable is sexy. Enduring an entire city’s rage and scorn with grace until the boos turn into applause. Speaking unvarnished truth in public. Loving someone who is angry and hurt so wisely that you give them freedom to be themselves—but do not honor the demand for space when they really need company. Bringing someone who loves their partner around to granting a divorce because he loves her. That character was Ted, and in a bitter coincidence, co-creator, writer, and star Jason Sudeikis endured the end of a decade-long relationship with the mother of his children in the middle of filming. His son was twelve, the same age as Lasso’s son. The script had been written long before its real-life imitation.
The acting must have become painful, but he pulled it off. Just as, in the show, his character manages to hold a sports team together without pushing cutthroat competition. And just as the show, with its deliberately British slower pacing, lots of pauses and silent exchanged glances, manages to overcome the American rush for action.
I love the way the guys finally open up, becoming a regular source of problem-solving and wisdom for one another—a cliché that cannot occur often enough. I love the angry, insecure Roy Kent’s tenderness with his niece, and how, with Keeley’s help, he lets her know that the stench a little boy teased her about is not her fault and they will fix it. They knock on doors in a fancy neighborhood on Christmas Eve until he finds a dentist, and then they find a creative way for her to both forgive the boy and demand an apology. (Sorry if this is a spoiler, I know that episode would have you in unbearable suspense, but everyone on the planet save me has already seen the show.)
Season One won a 92 percent critic score on the venerable Rotten Tomatoes site, and its twenty nominations made Emmy history for a first-season comedy. The show took home seven trophies. When the cast visited the White House, Joe Biden hung a Believe sign. When success seemed too rosy, Sudeikis announced, “What we’re going to have to do now is kill a dog,” recalls cocreator Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard. “Partially to make sure that we weren’t getting high on our own supply and partially to remind people, ‘I’m glad you think that we’re a force of cultural good, but that’s not what it says on the tin and it’s never been our remit.”
In Season Two, the Rotten Tomatoes score shot even higher, to 98 percent, and the show won another twenty nominations and four awards. But Season Three—despite being the year’s most watched streaming original, racking up 283 million viewing hours—dropped to an 81 percent score, and the only Emmy was for a guest appearance. The early tension was over, critics pointed out, and the episodes were longer and felt clumsy.
Those are obvious ways to fail. What I love are the ways the show has succeeded. Not because it is storybook happy, but because the audience response proves we are better than I thought we were. We hunger to hear a coach or boss tell us winning isn’t everything. We thirst for integrity and principle, forgiveness and kindness.
Sudeikis had always planned on a three-season arc, ending when Ted goes home to Kansas City to bring up his son. Suggestions of a fourth episode were brushed away; he was not about to let the million or so he makes each episode color his decision.
“This wasn’t a negotiation tactic,” he told Hollywood Reporter. “The story was told. Ted went home to be with his son. I wasn’t going to have Ted uproot their life to justify the money truck.”
A year later, he changed his mind and agreed to write a fourth season. He missed the fun, the family of actors, and most of all, the chance to be Ted Lasso. “It is infectious to play a character who sees the best in people and isn’t mad at the world for all its foibles and bullies and shadows…. It was good to live in that—to have that coursing through your brain and your body all day.” He paused. “It still is.”
