Ted Lasso's Fourth Season, Resurrected for Commercial Reasons, Surprisingly Works

The premise, necessary and undeniable, is that Ted Lasso's fourth season is first and foremost a commercial operation with a vaguely mercenary flavor, one of the rarest instances where AppleTV bends to the desires of the audience and executives rather than narrative logic. The series that explained soccer to Americans and gave the rest of the world a great comedy about the sport had definitively concluded in May 2023, after becoming the battering ram with which the streaming service had finally managed to overcome the shadow cone to which it seemed condemned. Ted Lasso was Apple's first true serial hit, the platform's first real success to enter Nielsen's general ranking of most-watched content and to introduce many viewers to the very existence of AppleTV.

It is commendable how the series refused to drag things out, after its protagonist and the rich supporting cast had undergone a complete narrative journey, finding a bittersweet conclusion in perfect balance with the very essence of the series, among the most important to introduce the theme of mental well-being in a product primarily intended for a male audience. Three years later, Apple has retraced its steps, with a fourth season that exists not so much due to fan insistence, but due to a precise platform strategy that is easy to deduce considering recent acquisitions. It's no secret that Apple is increasingly interested in sports and the broadcasting rights for live competitions. After the Women's World Cup victory and the Men's World Cup just played in the United States, interest in this sport is also growing in America. Not only that: Apple has acquired the rights to the UEFA Women's Champions League, an important first experiment to see if the conversion of the American sports audience into soccer fans and the "Americanization" of such a non-American sport, as happened in recent years with Formula 1, for which the docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive played a key role, will be replicable. Apple is therefore focusing on women's soccer to try to replicate Netflix and FIA's move: what better bridge content than the return of such a beloved series, this time centered on women's soccer?

So here comes Ted Lasso back with a very long introductory episode set in Kansas City (both the part in Kansas and the one in Missouri) where the AFC Richmond management tries to propose to Ted that he coach the newly formed women's division, encountering surprising resistance from Jason Sudeikis's character, who has returned to the United States at his mother's urging to be with his son. Once that issue is resolved, the adventure of the Lady Greyhounds begins, which sets itself the ambitious and noble goal of bringing together American and European audiences, addressing the realities and stereotypes surrounding women's soccer: underpaid, ignored by male fans, accused of being qualitatively inferior. Of the four episodes available to the press for the series launch, what is striking is not so much this story, given that it has a very direct, simple, sometimes trivial starting point. The series' strong point has always been the deconstruction of drama, the whispered and ironic approach with which it tackles important themes to find a calm and reflective way to address them. In short, what sustains this fourth season is not so much the lack of a decent locker room for the protagonists, Ted's inability to burst into the locker room at will for fear of inappropriate situations, the superficiality of sponsors and fans in accusing the women's team of taking resources away from the men's division's Champions League dream. These are "easy" themes from which each episode begins, but which Ted Lasso manages to tackle with the verve and unexpected wisdom of the first season.

In short, it's not exactly a return to origins, because, after all, references to the past are continuous and much of the original cast is confirmed and has returned permanently. Yet with Ted grappling with learning to relate to an entirely new team, the feeling is precisely that verve, sometimes tinged with melancholy, that made the first season so successful. The series then does a splendid job with Hannah Waddingham's character: Becca perfectly embodies both her upper-middle-class socioeconomic status and that generation halfway between the "fighting" feminists of the 70s and the new generation of athletes and sports trainers on her team, who constantly (and rightly) question her vision, which is only theoretically supportive of women. In its best moments, the start of Ted Lasso's fourth season truly does an excellent job of demonstrating how, in practice, it is complicated economically, generationally, and socially to defend and support women's sports realities.

The real, wonderful surprise of the season, however, is Tanya Reynolds as Alice Chilton, Ted's assistant who makes no secret of having aspired to the role of coach, so much so that she initially decides to resign when an announcement is made about a man taking the role. Her former footballer, who transitioned to the technical side with a motivational Billie Jean King quote on a sticky note, is a wonderful alternation of rigor, irony, and great emotionality, amplified by the portrayal of the players who make up the team. The two very quarrelsome sisters, the tough working mom, the even tougher goalkeeper who plays without gloves, recreate the magic of the first season and its footballers who gradually composed the human fresco of the Richmond locker room.

Indeed, the main criticism that can be made of this return, which as far as we have been able to see has been successful, is precisely a certain lack of courage in creating a more focused and effective product. Ted Lasso has supporting characters linked by such relationships that it could easily have survived Ted's return to the United States. The young star of Sex Education, Tanya Reynolds, truly gives the impression of being able to carry the show on her shoulders (and who knows if that isn't the direction that will eventually be taken?) and with characters like Becca and Keeley becoming increasingly central, perhaps it would have been more appropriate to create a spin-off. We must not pretend to ignore the real problem: that an all-female series loses a good part of the male audience who, like the most foolish Richmond fans, arbitrarily snub a form of entertainment if it doesn't revolve around a man.