(courtesy IMP Awards)
Revivals are, in the land of TV and streaming at least, often bittersweet affairs.
On one hand, it is a joy and delight with an added dose of a fizzy sense of euphoric reunion to be back with characters you know and love and were sorrowfully ripped to shreds to leave behind; on the other, that old adage about never being able to go back (because what you love is no more, can’t be any more, because time moves mercilessly on) is true and no matter how well executed, it’s not the same show you once made all the time in the world for.
Now, depending on who you ask, and the internet being the polarised, dog-eat-dog opinion wars of the modern day, a LOT of people have opinions, Ted Lasso is firmly in the bittersweet camp, all nostalgically anticipatory promise and not much else.
However, and no prizes for guessing where this reviewers heart lies, there are those who equally believe that the producers, including one Ted Lasso himself aka executive producer Jason Sudeikis, have absolutely bottled comedically heartwarming lightning in a bottle once again, and the return of Ted Lasso for an unexpected fourth season is just the short of quietly adrenalised joy many of us have been looking for.
The thing is that the show has changed; that’s all but inevitable since the third season ended so perfectly – it was meant to be the series finale after all so that makes sense – did see ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- everyman football coach and all-round nice guy Lasso return to the US from whence he came from, after successfully coaching the men’s team of AFC Richmond in the UK to sporting glory, and the rest of the found family cast getting their own versions of happy ever after.
With such an emphatically neat bow tied up three near-perfect seasons, which coincided by and large with the pandemic when we needed some real joy in our lives, Ted Lasso couldn’t simply press “PAUSE” and start the same show all over again.
That was, happily, never an option.
“Happily” you say, “happily”? How could that possibly be a good thing?
Because my dear friends and heartwarming sitcom fans, it would have simply felt like a reheated rehash of everything we had had before; we might think that’s what we want but the truth is no one wants the same old thing over and over even if we love the setting and the people; we may think we do but ultimately we don’t and the show’s producers were smart enough to realise that.
So, instead what we get in Ted Lasso season four is Ted Lasso back in the UK, this time with ex-wife and BFF Michelle (Andrea Anders) and now 12-yer-old son Henry (Gus Turner S103; Grant Feely S4), recruited by AFC Richmond team owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), Chief Marketing Officer Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) and Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) right from Kansas City, Kansas or Missouri (depending, it seems, on which side of the street you are literally on).
The first episode, by the way, where they recruit an initially reluctant Lasso back into British football life, is a lovely story, giving us a chance to see Lasso in his country of birth and allowing his UK family, because that is what they became and remain, to see Ted in his natural environment, a neat twist on the show’s fish-out-of-water central premise.
While Ted may umm and ah at first, he eventually can’t resist returning to London where he moves into a beautifully appointed apartment above the Crown & Anchor where AFC Richmond devotee Mae (Annette Badland) and the boys, who share a share in the football team they love, are still doing their thing.
In many ways, not much has changed but everything has changed.
Critically, while Ted’s old college football buddy Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), after some super-hirsute existential angst in the initial episodes which is anarchically fun to watch, is well and truly accounted for, he and Ted are now coaching AFC Richmond’s first women’s team, with the assistance, again very reluctant at first, of Alice Chilton (Alice Reynolds).
The thing is, Alice is not the head coach, and while the show, which neatly explores the clash of values that arise when a traditionally male sport finally joins the modern age and brings in a women’s team in its typically unassuming and non-polemic way, knows this is an issue, it addresses and solves in typically life-affirming and rightness asserting itself, as it rarely does in the real world, fashion.
With the focus firmly on the women’s team, we don’t see the men’s team at all, save for some well-executed cameos of Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster who is in gloriously loveable form), who’d not even with Richmond anymore, and Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh), and that’s a good thing because what would the point be of changing the focus of the show only to split attention to characters who have had their stories told, and told very well. (Roy Kent, played by one of the show’s writers, Brett Goldstein, is present and accounted for and as “f**king happy to be there as ever.)
This changed focus on the Richmond Women’s Football Club aka the Lady Greyhounds means we meet a slew of new characters including brilliant striker Gemma Jay (Abbie Hern), single mum and football talent Lizzie Davis (Faye Marsay), squabbling Irish twin sisters Niamh and Siobhan Harrigan (Aisling Sharkey and Rex Hayes respectively), on-again, off-again girlfriends Margy El Sharif and Mady Song (Mercedes Assad and Annelise Heywood respectively) and aspiring newcomer Shannon Stone (Shannon Stone).
Each of the main players from the team, who come together and triumph in ways only a football fantasy and found family feel-good sitcom like Ted Lasso could manage, get their moments to shine and to be inspired by Ted’s homespun but bang-on-the-emotional-money wisdom which is as folksy and twee as ever and yet which somehow feels like the sage advice with a side order of hugs that you never knew you needed.
Rebecca, Keeley and Leslie are all firmly brought back into the Ted Lasso storyline in ways that honour the past behaviour and narratives of the characters while helping them move on and grow and develop, a tricky thing in a show which has had three beautifully rendered seasons to give them life but one it handles very well, and whie there are cameos from the previous seasons as mentioned, they are kept to a well-judged, plot-enhancing minimum and the fourth season is all the better for it.
Back doing what it does so well but without once feeling like it’s treading water and simply pressing “REPEAT” (again, you might think you want that but you don’t, trust me), Ted Lasso is back baby! (that makes sense if you reference episode 7), full of whimsy, heart, joy and homespun wisdom, a love letter to found family and home that works in its changed fourth season because it judiciously honours what went before, cleverly reinvents itself and brings in the new to winning effect, and goes forth into a brave new yet familiar sitcom world with a fifth season hopefully in the offing.
Ted Lasso streams on AppleTV.
Fun cast stuff …
Behind the scenes with Mae …