Last night I watched the final episode of Ted Lasso Season 3. It sure as hell felt like an ending. But it wasn't. Season 4 is currently in production. It's due to air sometime in 2026 with the smart money on a spot in the summer schedule.
I already knew that, even as I was watching, although I only found out earlier the same day. Often, the first thing I do when I get to the end of what appears to be the final season of a show is to google to see if that's really what it is or if there's more to come. This time, though, I just happened, by co-incidence, to have seen a news story about the fourth season before I watched the finale.
It's spoilers all the way down from here, by the way, just in case anyone's not seen it yet and plans to.
The knowledge another season was coming certainly put an odd spin on the whole thing. I've rarely seen a concluding episode that looked more like the writers putting the final dots over the "i"s and making sure every last "t" was properly crossed. It did everything short of putting up a post-credits "Where are they now" roll-call, although the last few minutes were pretty much a montage version of exactly that.
Except for one thing.
Coach Beard (Or, as we now know him, "Willis".) has faked appendicitis to get off the plane even after the doors have been locked. Ted's still on the plane, alone now, heading back to Kansas to be near his son, having resigned from his managerial job with Richmond AFC and said his goodbyes to everyone
There follows a cavalcade of scenes, apparently set at some unspecified time in the future, probably months rather than years, in which we see all kinds of things happening. Roy Kent is appointed Ted's replacement as manager. Rebecca sells 49% of the club to "the fans" and stays on as owner. Keeley proposes Richmond start a women's team and Rebecca agrees. Coach Beard marries Jane in what looks very much like a pagan ceremony at Stonehenge...
Most surprisingly of all, Sam appears somehow to have made it into the Nigerian national side. I found this by far the hardest to swallow. The billionaire psychopath who swore it would never happen must have been killed in a plane crash or something.
I was watching all of this in the full knowledge that whatever it looked like, it wasn't actually the and of the story, when the montage ended and we cut to a shot showing Ted in the plane, waking up from a nap. That moved into a sequence where he arrives back home in Kansas, which was clearly out of sync with the future timeline we've just been watching, back instead in linear continuity with the rest of the episode.
My immediate thought was "Oh, it was all Ted's dream!". It certainly seemed like something he would have dreamed because it was all so nice. Everyone got what they wanted, pretty much. No-one seemed to have any regrets. No-one was sad. Certainly no-one seemed to miss Ted.
Except, when I went to take a look at what's known so far about Season 4, it does kind of fit in with the montage. No-one's saying anything about Coach Beard marrying Jane but apparently the whole thrust of the show is going to be a new women's team at the club, which Ted will return to manage. And Roy Kent is back in a major role (Not all the cast are coming back, apparently, and of those who do, some will only be making cameos or guest appearances.) which certainly sounds like he could be managing the men's team.
So, was it a dream sequence or not? Let me ask google.
Well, that was certainly a very popular interpretation. And frankly, I find it hard to believe the creators didn't expect the montage to be received that way. I mean, why the hell else would you cut straight to a shot of Ted waking up the moment the sequence finished if you didn't want to suggest it was all a dream?
But apparently it wasn't a dream at all. Or so the director claims. Assuming you can make sense of his peculiar syntax. Here's what Screen Rant reports him as saying, in reply to a direct question about it:
"... I think the details are too specific for it to be a dream of tense. I know there's something very dreamlike about the first scene which is Rebecca seeing her Airline captain and he's not behind him and he's like is this really not and then after the Montage Ted wakes up, but I think we're flashing forward to seeing what happens to everybody in the future."
"A dream of tense."? "...he's not behind him and he's like is this really not..."? I have no idea what that means. Also, wouldn't the director know? Why is he speculating?
Anyway, all of that oddness did somewhat take away from the overall impression left by Season 3, which otherwise was that it was a satisfying, very enjoyable, frequently funny watch, well up to the exemplary standards of Season 1.
Season 2 was a lot more up and down, I thought, with the Christmas episode being especially weak. Granted, seasonal one-offs are rarely the highlight of any show but the Ted Lasso Christmas Special, which it might as well have been called, was very unconvincing in early Autumn and I suspect wouldn't have gone down much better in December.
Things did improve a lot after that. Season 2 sagged in the middle but rose again and ended on a level noticeably well above where it had begun. Season 3 picked up from there and continued to ascend. There were plenty of moments to remember, not least tour de force soliloquies from both Roy Kent and Rebecca and the whole of the excellent Fear And Loathing In Amsterdam episode. (Not the real name, sadly.)
Ted Lasso, despite being named for a single character, is very much an ensemble piece, with a huge cast of regular characters, something that becomes more and more obvious the longer the show goes on. Indeed, in Season 3, Ted doesn't really do all that much or have all that many significant storylines. In keeping with his managerial style, he mostly encourages others to shine.
My favorites remain Roy and Keeley, both of whom undergo significant character development throughout the run, although I worry that humanizing Roy any further may somewhat reduce the hilarious impact of his anger, glares and voluminous swearing. Keeley also seemed perhaps to have received a little too much attention from the writers by the end. I'm not sure we needed every twist in her story delivered in such quick succession.
Of the minor characters, Rebecca's mother was always a delight and Nate's girlfriend, Jade, has some of the best deadpan expressions I've seen in a while. Barbara was fun, too. but it's unfair, really, to single out anyone from the supporting cast. They're uniformly excellent.
I wish I could say the same for the numerous cameos from real people playing themselves. The ones I recognized were frequently wooden and awkward, with Gary Lineker and Thierry Henri among the exceptions, but my real problem with the endless walk-ons was that frequently I was aware I was supposed to recognize someone but I had no clue who I was looking at.
The vote for Character Most Likely To Get Their Own Spin-Off has to go to Coach Beard, who frequently seemed to be in a different show to everyone else already. The drip-feed of detail about his past became more and more surreal as the episodes went by and yet somehow none of it ever seemed entirely unbelievable.
Nate, on the other hand, certainly wins the prize for strongest character arc with his largely convincing redemption storyline. By the end of the first season I really couldn't stand him and I still think we should have been given a little more insight, back then, into the reasons for his self-doubt, as opposed to some of the scenes of open aggression and self-justification we got instead.
Over the course of the next two seasons, though, enough of his backstory and internal monologue was revealed to allow me to accept his contrition as genuine. And thank god he finally stopped spitting. That was stomach-turning to watch. Hmm. Now I come to think of it, it was from the moment Keeley and Rebecca taught him that assertiveness technique that his personality changed for the worse and it changed for the better as soon as he abandoned it...
As for the actual sporting scenes, I thought the training sessions got more farcical just as the games became more credible. Certainly the matches were better-shot in the latter episodes, with the editing occasionally even making it look as though some of the actors were playing football.
The way the results fell out was very satisfying, I thought, with a great balance being struck between the standard sports-fiction no-hopers to champions arc and a more believable tale of good performances and bad luck. Mediocre sports teams do sometimes have exceptional seasons after all.
With Manchester City pipping Richmond to the Premier League title and Ted thereby not quite having achieved his goal and with the team qualifying for the Champions League through coming second, it did seem like there were a couple of strong pegs on which to hang that fourth season. Then the montage arrived and it absolutely felt like every last loose end was being tied in a neat bow. Had I not already known, another season was coming, I would have been sure that was all.
And now it seems the whole thing is going to shift direction again, which is probably a sound creative decision but may not feel as satisfying as more of the same might have done. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. And believe.
My replacement for Ted Lasso is going to be the Rashida Jones vehicle, Sunny. Cancelled after just one season I believe but I said I wasn't going to let that put me off any more. I know nothing about it other than the trailer. It looks nuts and I'm not surprised it didn't find an audience but it has some great reviews and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%. It's ten episodes so I'll let you know what I think in a couple of weeks.
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