Yesterday afternoon, Apple made an announcement: after releasing episodes of Ted Lasso’s third season at 9pm eastern on Tuesdays since it premiered in March, they were switching course for the finale. “So Long, Farewell,” the series’ longest episode yet, would instead be going live at 9pm pacific.

It’s a baffling decision, on a number of levels—I know I saw plenty of tweets of frustrated fans who didn’t see the announcement earlier in the day and had clearly organized their evenings around watching it before bed. While critics like myself were inclined to stay up to watch in real time, the show’s audience likely chose to go to bed, and will need to find time to watch the episode today. And this is especially an issue when Apple and the show’s producers consciously turned this finale into the ultimate mystery, refusing to confirm whether this was actually the end of the show or simply the end of Ted Lasso’s time at AFC Richmond. That’s more existential suspense than you’d expect from a finale to a feel good football show, and when Tuesday started the show’s most dedicated fans thought they’d be getting an answer three hours sooner.

It’s fitting, then, that they never got an answer at all. “So Long, Farewell” is definitive about Ted Lasso leaving Richmond behind in order to return home to be close to his son, to the point that we get a Cat Stevens montage lest we fail to understand the importance of fatherhood to his and the show’s identity. It also leverages the inherent thrill of the final match of the season determining the Premier League championship as a way to tie up the loose ends from a season full of them. But when it came time to make a definitive statement on whether the story of AFC Richmond would be continuing without Ted, “So Long, Farewell” chooses the path of absolute chaos, leaving viewers entirely unsure if these characters will be returning to their screens at some point in the future.

The interplay between these elements creates a finale that—as expected—resolves none of the mess the show has created amidst ballooning episode lengths and increasingly fractured storytelling. Numerous moments in “So Long, Farewell” capture the immense power of this show’s characters and storytelling, but they’re mostly those that bypass the third season entirely, which frankly only exacerbates my ongoing frustration with the show and its storytelling. Where Ted Lasso lands at the end of its planned three-season arc makes perfect sense, which makes it that much harder to understand how writers who grasp the central idea of this story so well managed to find so little sense in the majority of stories they told throughout this third season.

Ted and Rebecca’s relationship has always been the core of Ted Lasso, and so it wasn’t shocking to see it emerge as the cornerstone of this finale. And while Ted first breaking the news to her becomes one more scene that absurdly happens off-screen (in this case mostly so they can ruthlessly tease the ‘shippers with this cold open), the rest of the episode uses her denial and his avoidance to explore an important question: how much are their respective identities tied to each other and to the team they respectively coach and own? In her attempts to convince him to stay, Rebecca ties their fates together, arguing “if you go, I go.” But the truth the finale explores is that while Ted’s connection to Richmond isn’t strong enough to keep him away from his family, Rebecca’s ties to the team are deeper than she first realized, going beyond her feud with Rupert and tapping into her own need for a sense of family.

And honestly, if we ignore the majority of the storytelling for these two characters this season, I like this story a lot. But I’m—to no one’s surprise—stuck on how the rest of the characters’ stories this season were in service of this conclusion. Imagine if they had bypassed the absolutely atrocious psychic storyline and actually focused on Rebecca being more involved with the day-to-day operations of the club and its ties to the local community. Why couldn’t Ted have spent less time siloed in an obsession over his ex-wife’s new boyfriend and had instead been investing in relationships with his team and its players that were becoming strained by the understandable distractions at home, given that the premiere had already established his homesickness effectively? The attempt to reframe the psychic’s prediction as Rebecca becoming the “club matriarch” is tortured, and the fundamental absence of any resolution around Ted and Michelle’s relationship makes all that back-and-forth an even bigger waste of time. If the writers understood the core of these characters, how did they have so little grasp of how to build meaningful tension and drama around them on a weekly basis?

I don’t want this review to fall into a pattern of rehashing old criticism, because you already read all of that throughout the season, but it’s hard when the finale often has this problem of landing in the right place with seemingly no regard for how absurd the path there had become. I spent the entire season at odds with the show’s depiction of Nate’s “redemption” arc, bristling at a fundamental disconnect between how the writers seemed to understand his past actions and my own interpretation. And while I truly would have preferred shooting him into the sun, I was willing to accept a redemption arc provided it had him reckon with his past actions in a meaningful way, but the show refused this at every turn. And given all of this, I was therefore shocked to see that Nate’s triumphant return to Richmond wasn’t as a new assistant coach, but rather as “assistant to the Kit Man,” where he spends the episode joyfully being the lowest rung of the ladder up until Ted plucks him from the bench to assist in the game-winning setup. 

Again, it’s that disconnect: how do the writers understand that Nate needs to be humbled in this way but seemingly didn’t grasp that having characters like Colin forgive Nate offscreen was insane? Everything about how the writers had told this story so far seemed like they had bought into Nate’s greatness, and in his purpose in life being coaching, to the point that my existential fear has been the show having him take over for Ted after his departure. And as much as I’m glad that didn’t happen, if the writers knew enough to know that Nate’s return to Richmond needed to be navigated more carefully, how did this seemingly have no impact in how they mapped out the story before this point?

While I know I spent much of the season complaining about Nate, my biggest critique of the finale itself ends up rooted in what I previously felt was the season’s most effective storyline. Pairing Roy and Jamie has been the season’s saving grace, offering two characters with room to grow space to better understand themselves. Their stories suffered from some of the same sloppy plotting as everything else at times (I went on a Twitter rant about Roy’s shirt the other day), but there was a clear sense of progression in their respective journeys that was well-served by their mentor/mentee dynamic evolving into a legitimate friendship.

Which is why forcing them back into a love triangle with Keeley in this finale was such a fucking bummer. The show did the exact same thing at the end of the second season, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but this is the one “ending” of the season where I think they dropped the ball. The landing points for every other character basically make sense, but choosing this as the end point for Roy, Jamie, and by extension Keeley is an affront to their respective arcs. The show wants credit for the fact Keeley rejects the premise entirely, booting them both out of her house, but that wasn’t worth the flattening of their journeys for the purpose of creating that moment. It muddles everyone’s stories to no particular end, and the image of them nursing their wounds wasn’t worth that. It also doesn’t work for Keeley to reclaim her independence in an episode that sidelines her character and her agency otherwise, effectively admitting that the effort to build a story around her career failed to generate substance that would still resonate in this finale.

And honestly, robbing us of a more intimate, focused moment of Roy and Keeley confronting their relationship independent of the toxic masculinity of the feud for her affection is just kind of mean. Breaking up Roy and Keeley never really made sense to begin with, but if you’re going to craft a story around Roy self-sabotaging and then growing as a person throughout the season, having things boil down to an external force in Jamie cheapens that story instead of enhancing it. Roy’s embrace of the Diamond Dogs is a big moment for the character, and so I get that they weren’t interested in giving him a happy ending with Keeley. But why couldn’t Keeley have turned down Roy because of lessons she had learned in her firm’s initial failure, and her desire to focus on getting this second chance right? We’re robbed of an actual, vulnerable conversation between the two characters, and while I was never so much of a ‘shipper that I’m mad they’re not together, I think we deserved a greater acknowledgment of their relationship in how their respective stories resolved here.

Jamie’s story works better when it’s tied to his actual play, and this is where “So Long, Farewell” has more success in applying band-aids to the season’s arcs. No, Richmond’s miraculous season doesn’t really make any logical sense, but there’s an inherent climax to a season-ending match like this one, and the “Lasso Way”—scratch that, “Richmond Way”—has shown its capacity to overcome such challenges in the past. The finale’s greatest accomplishment is reframing the show around the power of the club and its culture, and the parade of cameos of past bit players—Ted’s neighbors, that When Harry Met Sally couple, etc.—gives a good glimpse of its extended reach. And while none of the events in Richmond’s 3-2 victory over West Ham fleshed out any particular character arcs from this season, it tapped into the show’s endless well of feel-good football vibes to capture the emotional journey of the series as a whole.

And yes, I’m too deep in the weeds of criticizing the show to get outright emotional, but the various montages and speeches and collective hoarding of ripped up pieces of paper reminded even the cynics among us of the show’s innate compassion. The writers regularly overestimated its capacity to contain certain types of stories within this framework, but they never misunderstood how it could be used to connect with audiences. Ted Lasso knows we want to live in a world where Colin’s story can end with a triumphant on-field kiss with his boyfriend that doesn’t make the front page of the tabloids and turn his life into a living hell. It operates with the belief that most people don’t want to dwell on the rampant rise in homophobia, and that they’d rather have the Lassofied version of coming out in professional sports. And I have to acknowledge that they’re probably right, even if I also believe that addressing issues like racism or homophobia in sports (and life) without fully embracing the consequences is borderline unethical in our current climate.

Overall, though, “So Long, Farewell” is well-calibrated in terms of how it celebrates the core ethos of the show itself. Yes, the show indulges in a Greyhound victory, giving us a final image of Ted doing the running man among his players like in the viral video from his college days. The callbacks to past seasons—the winning play, the dog on the sideline—give everything a full circle feeling, especially given the similarities to season one as cell phones ding signaling that their fate wasn’t fully in their own hands. But although it wins them the game, the Richmond Way can’t overcome Man City’s win in their own final match, and as with their initial relegation the “fairy tale” has a limit placed on it. Ted may have transformed this team and the people within it, but he didn’t also win the Premier League, which gives both him and the team something to play for in the future.

The embrace of the meta-narrative of whether or not this is actually Ted Lasso’s final season is a very conscious choice, and it’s one I’m still trying to parse. After we fade to black on Richmond’s victory, we land on Ted in the airport, where we learn that the premise of the show is still intact: Rebecca’s decision to shift to a co-operative ownership model (in which she retains control) makes the team a part of her future, while losing the premier league means that there would still be a goal for Ted to chase if he wanted to stay. It’s the moment where the finality of Ted’s story fully severs from everyone else’s, which is why it makes sense that Beard bails on their flight home given his love for Jane. While I’d argue the season’s narrative failings demonstrated that Ted’s character was disconnected from the show’s larger storyline anyway, here we do get a diegetic justification for why he’s going back to Kansas (City) and leaving the world of AFC Richmond behind.

It’s what happens next where things take a turn. As “Father and Son” plays, we get an extended montage of the rest of the show’s cast. Rebecca settles into life with her new family. Roy becomes manager. Nate and Jade sit happily in the window table at Taste of Athens with his family. Jamie reconnects with his father. Sam on the Nigerian team. Trent signs a copy of his book for Ted’s neighbor Shannon. Sharon Fieldstone returns as the club’s full-time therapist. Mae and the barflies celebrate with their new shares of the club. Keeley presents Rebecca with plans for an AFC Richmond women’s team. And then we end on Beard and Jane’s Stonehenge wedding, where Colin, Dani, and Isaac have found love of their own. If this is truly a series finale, this montage ensures that we’re given assurances of their respective happy endings.

But in the final note of the season’s Wizard of Oz riff, Ted wakes up on the plane. Everything we’ve just seen has been a dream, more specifically his dream. Whether or not audiences pick up on that, though, is going to be interesting. The thing about the montage that has stuck with me since last night is that Ted’s dream is mostly rooted in reality, or at the very least the show’s reality. Rebecca running into the dude from Amsterdam is admittedly ridiculous, but it’s the kind of ridiculous that we’re meant to see as being possible in this world, given its rules (and, as someone noted in the comments, it happened before the snowglobe shifted us into the dream). And everything up until Beard’s wedding is more or less grounded, and a natural progression from where we left off with those characters. It’s only at the wedding where things take on an air of complete fantasy, and even there it’s only because Ted wakes up right after and it becomes easier to piece together the fiction: Ted Lasso would be at the wedding of Willis and Jane, especially in the show’s fantasy world where there’s a direct flight from Kansas City to London.

It’s a choice that allows Ted Lasso to create an air of finality without finalizing anything. Despite the episode’s decision to present Michelle’s boyfriend Jacob as entirely disinterested in the match and constantly dismissive of it, we get no clear picture of the state of Ted’s relationship with his ex-wife, or the family dynamic they’ve found. We know he’s coaching Henry’s soccer team, but we have no idea what kind of career he might have found, or whether there’s any chance he could return to England at some point in the future given that Henry will go to college before Ted is likely to retire. And although we get Ted’s dream for the friends he left behind in the U.K., we have no idea how much any of that was true—maybe Nate became coach of AFC Richmond as we feared. It’s a pretty clear end to Ted’s story, based on the final shot, but we can choose to believe—get it?—what we want about what the rest of the story looks like from here.

Which is going to make it particularly challenging for the show continue in some form. I don’t know how much dialogue took place between Sudeikis and Apple regarding this ending, but personally I’m struck by the active refusal to chart a path forward. It’s clear that Hannah Waddingham is capable of anchoring a version of this show, based on her performance’s consistent strength even while stranded in terrible storylines, and Ted’s insistence to Trent that it was “never about me” actually rings true even if those stories were a pretty consistent mess. The hint at a possible women’s team is also an incredibly clear and obvious track for a spinoff series to explore, creating a space for existing characters while exploring new dynamics. But if the show were to come back in any form, embracing any details from Ted’s dream will render the show a figment of his imagination, which would actually work better to justify some of its worst instincts but would also destroy any semblance of being grounded in our reality. It’s an ending that seemingly acknowledges that we’re invested in these characters and their future, but in doing so cuts off seemingly easy paths to further stories in ways that would seem to suggest Sudeikis is not willing to reward that investment by keeping the show going.

We’ll likely never know the full details of any tensions between Sudeikis and Bill Lawrence ahead of the latter’s exit from his showrunning gig—perhaps things were as amicable as Bill’s social media presence suggests, but the chaos of the season’s storytelling presents some pretty clear philosophical distinctions. And so I don’t know how much they would have discussed this ending, which reminds me most strongly of the challenge Lawrence had with Scrubs. Scrubs ended in its eighth season with a conclusion that similarly relied on fantasy to end its story, as JD walks outside the hospital to find home movies of an imagined future. It’s a powerful emotional endnote, which made it particularly egregious when the character returned as a recurring presence in Scrubs’ ninth season. Lawrence has since agreed that NuScrubs never should have been presented as Season 9, but at the end of the day he saw it from a pragmatic lens of wanting to keep his cast and crew employed. It undermined the ending he had created, but it maintained his commitment to the people who made that ending happen, and that for him was more important.

What we’re going to learn over the next few months is how important Ted Lasso is to everyone involved. We know that Sudeikis is done, but is he so done that he would deny his fellow cast members and producers the opportunity to keep building on what they created? And even if the compassionate argument for keeping people employed doesn’t resonate, Apple is still thirsting for Emmy nominations, and you have to think they’re doing everything in their power to keep the show intact for the sake of their awards slate. And when you leave the bubble of a critical space like this, it’s clear that the show’s general audience would gladly tune in for another three seasons of AFC Richmond.

Would you? Would I? As a critic, I would find the idea of a post-Lasso season of this show too compelling to pass up, but the clear struggles to balance Keeley and Nate’s corners of the story this season does mean that a significant creative shift would be necessary for a proposed Richmond sequel to work to its full potential. But one thing “So Long, Farewell” reinforced is that these characters are resilient: Nate might be too far gone, but there’s hope for Keeley, and in general these remain characters whose future—fantasy or not—we’re invested in. For all of the show’s failings this season, there was still considerable emotion in this finale, which suggests there is a path to exploring that emotion with a new assemblage of characters and stories in the future.

We’re covering three “series finales” this week at Episodic Medium, and it’s fascinating to see how each show approached this challenge. After Succession chose a natural endpoint to the story it was telling while keeping the world of the show moving along, Barry delivered a finale that definitively closed the book on the show and its premise. But never not the show that does too much, Ted Lasso has tried to thread the needle between the two, making it difficult to wax poetic about the show and its legacy like a series finale review is inclined to. “So Long, Farewell” captures the essence of a show that created an intense emotional connection with its audience and then struggled with how to harness that into an ongoing series. And while the show’s future will shape how we think about this episode, my central takeaway will always remain that despite having written 24 increasingly critical reviews, I still felt those emotions throughout this finale. I still cared about this show and its characters, even as the writers seemed to care less and less about basic logic in their stories. And that’s an achievement, if not one that lives up to the potential of this once-deservedly Emmy-winning series.

Stray observations

• Okay, but truly, the choice to tease the idea of Ted and Rebecca sleeping together has to be one of the cruelest engagements with an online fanbase in recent years. Even as someone firmly against it who was really happy with how the finale respected their platonic connection as the heart of the show, it was hard to enjoy the “win” when you realize how the show just actively kicked them in the teeth like that. They were wrong, but they didn’t deserve that (and then Beard in a thong to wash it down).

• If there’s a “thesis” in the show,  it’s in the first and final meeting of the Roy Kent era of the Diamond Dogs where they talk about personal growth and whether people can change. Ultimately Nate’s presence triggered my ongoing frustration with how they conceived of that story, but it reminded me that I wish I could value the throughline of Ted’s impact on the team and its culture without the Nate of it all.

• It didn’t end up really mattering, since Rebecca spent the entire episode insisting she didn’t care about Rupert anymore so it’s hard to invest much in him, but what was with the clear effort to soften the character in the Akufo episode to then have him play the sniveling, conniving villain who gets his comeuppance here? It was also weird every time he walked by Nate because we missed the entirety of that dissolved relationship, and so there’s nothing to refer back to. Puzzling stuff, even if it had a clear utility in telling this game’s very simple story.

• The Judge McAdoo sequence to start was super fun, and was perhaps the best case before the dream sequence of the idea of just continuing on the show following this team the next season. A pity that it also ends up converging back on Nate, and reminding us that this team allegedly overcame all his past actions offscreen, but alas.

• Speaking of Isaac, giving him the ball during the penalty kick was kind of payoff for his blowup in practice, but I do wish we’d have gotten a stronger team story that could have played with his deserved suspension from the homophobia incident and let this moment have some more substance to it. (Also, him kicking it through the net was nonsense).

• And yes, I also thought the Sound of Music performance was nonsense, but I have made my peace with the show’s belief that a professional soccer team preparing for a potentially life-changing match would spend time learning choreography, so I’m just going to not dwell on it.

• Keeley may not have gotten a story to speak of, and I wish she could have had a more meaningful conversation with Ted, but the snowglobe coming full circle was nice, and I did like the callback to “everyone decent?” from the first season as she came through the locker room.

• Staging Ted and Rebecca’s big conversation in the seats of the stadium, mirroring the opening credits, was a nice touch.

• Harriet Walter gets a lovely if brief scene to fill out her big week—not sure if it’s enough substance to secure a Comedy Emmy nomination to go along with her Drama one for Succession, but we’ll see.

• Speaking of Emmys, I feel like there’s too much goodwill and momentum in the comedy categories for Ted Lasso to follow Game of Thrones into the “Messy Final Season Still Wins Emmy” pattern, but stranger things have definitely happened.

• The care package from Zava was one way to pretend that story made any sense, I guess.

• “It’s like he’s shooting a free throw with his feet”—honestly, that mid-game banter from Dr. Jacob was so egregious that I simply don’t know how we’re supposed to think Michelle would stay with him. I’d have rather the show sabotage him by rightfully pointing to the ethical issues in their relationship, but I suppose this was more efficient.

• I don’t know why Zoreaux didn’t get a more stylish mask to begin with, but the Zorro transition was cute, and pays off a brief story that perhaps could have worked better spread out across the season.

• Enjoyed the callback to tickets being left under the name of country singers (which is how Roy got his seats following his retirement).

• Along similar lines, Ted figuring out what offsides are and calling back the goal before Video Replay did? A nice full circle moment, even if I do sort of feel like Ted just learning this is still weird.

• It’s a pity they couldn’t get the actress who played Nora back, as it would have been fitting for her to be there with Sassy. We also didn’t get a final moment for Sassy and Ted, but they really pivoted to the ex-wife at a certain point, making it harder to resolve that dynamic.

• Beard’s home video was set to “A Beautiful Game,” which I immediately recognized as Ed Sheeran but sort of presumed was just a song I’d tuned out, as opposed to a new single tied to its appearance in the show.

• There’s more that we could get into, but I think this closes the chapter on my coverage of this era of Ted Lasso. I want to thank everyone who’s made these discussions so dynamic this year, especially since I know many of you followed me here from The A.V. Club. This is an example of a show that’s probably better if you’re not writing about it, but I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to write through my feelings, and hope that they’ve helped you work through your own response to the season even if you’ve disagreed. I am immensely grateful you’ve helped me create a space where reviews and conversations like these are valued, and look forward to continuing this dialogue either as the show itself finds new life or we follow the themes into the rest of Episodic Medium’s lineup. Thanks for reading, and I’ll let you know when Ed Sheeran and Max Martin get back to me about writing a song about Nate dying on the way back to his home planet.

Writing about Ted Lasso’s third season from behind the comfort of Episodic Medium’s paywall has created something of a bubble. Generally speaking, the people paying to subscribe to a television criticism newsletter are going to be more critical of the television they watch, or at least more open to the premise of that criticism. And while it’s very possible there are paid subscribers who have loved the third season and simply haven’t chosen to defend it in the comments, those who have joined the discussion have generally operated with a shared understanding that this season has suffered from massive structural issues.

After last week’s episode, which felt like the apex of these concerns as the show, I decided to read the comments at The Other Site, where there has been far more pushback to similar critiques. I spent much of the second season managing the tension of writing critical reviews of a beloved pandemic comfort watch, and discerned quickly that there was a funda…

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Last week, it turns out, was the internet’s collective breaking point with Ted Lasso’s third season. Whether it was Slate’s Sam Adams reflecting on the “civil war” among fans or Vulture convening a whole roundtable of critics to dissect its “major character flaw,” the public discourse around the show formally took a turn toward judgment as the season headed into its final act.

It’s fitting, then, that “International Break” is a crossroads of sorts for two of the season’s most troublesome storylines. When we last left Keeley and Nate, things weren’t going great in their respective offshoots from the main narrative, but there was no indication necessarily that the rug was about to be pulled out from under them. But within the opening exposition, we learn that Nate has left his job at West Ham between episodes, and a few scenes later Keeley is showing up to work to find movers packing up the office after “the board” of Jack’s VC voted to pull funding.

Now, I’d argue that we

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At the beginning of this season, Ted Lasso upped a number of Richmond’s players to series regular status. This doesn’t always necessarily mean an increase in attention: Christo Fernandez, for instance, hasn’t really had much more to do with Dani than he did last season. However, for those paying attention to the opening credits, it definitely raised the expectation that we’d be more invested in their lives both on and off the pitch as the season progressed.

This proved to be a “yes and no” situation. Yes, the show has found space in its ballooning runtimes—anyone else breathe a sigh of relief when they saw this was “only” 44 minutes?—for Sam’s political war over immigration and, more significantly, the ongoing story of Colin’s sexuality. However, until “La Locker Room Aux Folles,” it’s never felt like the show was as committed to fleshing out “the team” as a corner of this story in the same way as they were clearly com…

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Although I was probably the internet’s most prominent Ted Lasso skeptic among critics covering the second season back in 2021, I want to be clear on something: I didn’t go into this season thinking that the show’s collapse was inevitable.

Even as someone who had some serious issues with how that season played out, the core of Ted Lasso was still solid in my eyes; while some of the decisions at the end of the season—mainly throwing a wrench into Roy and Keeley’s relationship—were suspect, I didn’t consider them enough to suggest the show was headed in the wrong direction. And while it’s now clear that the transition from Bill Lawrence running the show to Sudeikis doing it himself was a seismic shift in both philosophy and coherency, it gave the impression of a peaceful transition of power, and I really believe I gave this season a fair shot when it began.

I acknowledge that this may seem like a distant memory now that we’re deep in the weeds of season three, but I can only respond honestly to what we’re seeing on screen. Regardless of whether you consider the forest or the trees, Ted Lasso has become an untethered, unfocused, and underthought shell of its former self, and whereas I could understand how the last few episodes had some flashes of the show’s former glory (even if my structural issues persisted), I would contend there’s no such silver lining to be found in “We’ll Never Have Paris.”

In writing about an episode like this one, there’s really no good place to start, as any attempt to focus on the big picture (forest) just devolves into a rant about a particular storyline (the trees). From a forest perspective, there’s no question the core problem of the season is the choice to extend the narrative beyond AFC Richmond and its employees. I somewhat understand the impulse behind Keeley PR and West Ham as separate story engines in the abstract, but in practice it’s spread the show so thin that it’s hardly recognizable. But the bigger issue is that the trees are rotten: both of these stories have drifted between boring and baffling, with no clear vision on what they’re trying to say. Perhaps there’s versions of these stories that enrich the show instead of poisoning it, but they are nowhere to be found in this outing.

The way Keeley’s storyline plays out in “We’ll Never Have Paris” is a real breaking point for me. From the beginning, Keeley having her own PR firm was an idea in search of a motivation: the story was first introduced as a potential disruption of her relationship with Rebecca, with a real focus on the mentor/mentee dynamic they had built across the first two seasons. But once the show actually made Keeley her own boss, they lost the plot on what they wanted this storyline to say. There’s a vague sense that she’s exploring her full potential, but her struggles to control Shandy and connect with her new co-workers needed more time to make this into an actual story and not an idea floating in the ether, and she needed to be more actively engaging with other bosses in the show’s orbit (Rebecca, Ted, etc.) and exploring her sense of self. When they introduced Jack, it tied her work life to her romantic life, but again without much clarity, and with another hit to her sense of authority that was addressed in last week’s episode but not really unpacked (and isn’t raised again here, so apparently one date at Taste of Athens neutralized the entire messed up power dynamic in Keeley’s eyes).

Everything that happens here only muddles the situation further. Jack had some red flags in previous episodes, especially last week, but here she waves them in Keeley’s face by both passively and actively slutshaming her for recording intimate videos that are subsequently leaked in the show’s nearly decade-late “Ripped from the Headlines” take on 2014’s iCloud celebrity nudes leak. From the time Jack was introduced, I questioned the show’s judgment introducing a new love interest for Keeley when her relationship with Roy is so unresolved, making it hard for anyone to root for a new connection. At the time, I thought the largest obstacle was that Jodi Balfour is just not magnetic enough to overcome the burden placed on her, but it turns out the bigger problem is that Jack’s an absolutely terrible person, who basically rides off into the sunset like Zava having existed solely to…kill time, effectively?

How is a 12-episode dramedy out here introducing and then disposing of characters in four-episode arcs like they’ve got oodles of time to focus on what people actually care about? Jack did nothing to clarify Keeley’s relationship to her work, and somehow the most meaningful growth in this story came for Jamie, who stumbles in as the guilty party whose bad password management led to the leak in the first place. And then there’s that bizarre scene where Roy is so jealous about the idea of her sending a sexy video to someone else that he pries into her business amidst his attempt to be supportive, and…I’m sorry, but I just cannot wrap my head around what this story is meant to accomplish as part of Keeley’s larger story arc and whatever the hell the season as a whole is going for. I won’t take the bait on another Jamie red herring after last season’s late-breaking love triangle feint, not while the Roy situation is so unresolved, and so I’m just…at a loss of why Keeley’s side of this story veered into this toxic relationship that blew up so spectacularly.

I also hated Nate’s story, to be clear, but my issues with it stem from a fundamental difference of opinion: whereas the writers are deeply invested in Nate’s redemption to the point they’re pretending it’s already happened and telling “golly gee” romantic stories with his void of a love interest that pretend season two never happened, I am not, and thus we are at an impasse. If you share the writers’ interest in Nate, his story here is banal and harmless, and it’s probably mildly entertaining to see him try and fail to create his own Diamond Dogs with his hapless new co-workers. Meanwhile, I’m yelling “YOU TREAT YOUR EMPLOYEES LIKE SHIT AND NOW EXPECT THEM TO CODDLE YOU IN YOUR ROMANTIC FOIBLES, AND NONE OF THIS EXPERIENCE IS LEADING YOU TO DELIVERING THE APOLOGIES TO THEM AND YOUR FORMER CO-WORKERS THAT YOU STILL HAVE NEVER DELIVERED?!” I’m truly happy for you if your blood pressure doesn’t rise during Nate scenes, but there’s really no coming back from where the show has brought me, and thus here we are.

The shared issue between these two sides of the show, though, is that the writers have found that impressive spot where Keeley and Nate stories struggle both because they’re taking up too much time in the show as a whole and because they nonetheless manage to feel like they’re missing huge chunks of story that would make them, well, make sense. There’s maybe a more competently structured version of this season that finds a rosetta stone in each episode to tie everything together, but the thematic link of the team and its season has become disconnected from what’s happening around it. Just look at how the team’s integration of Total Football, which was so effective last week, gets swept into a brief montage of victories and then in the rest of the episode this might as well not even be a show about a football club.

“We’ll Never Have Paris” does at least attempt to solve the problem the fragmented narrative focus has created, as they make a half-hearted effort to turn the celebrity photo leak into some type of connective tissue. But even then, it’s hard not to picture how this story would have worked if the show wasn’t so spread out. What if characters like Ted and Higgins had been given opportunities to connect with their friend Keeley as she navigates this situation, so she had a clearer picture of what a proper response would be? What if the coaches had been involved with the locker room conversation the players have about it, as opposed to just Roy eavesdropping for his later interaction with Keeley? What if it had felt like the photo leak was a global issue the team and everyone in its orbit were dealing with, instead of a Keeley story that really only comes into the locker room because they want to stoke the flames of the love triangle and because they saw it as a convenient way to inch forward in Colin’s coming out story (and then literally not follow up on it in this episode for some ungodly reason).

This reality isn’t achievable as long as the show is so unwilling to sever stories from one another, and this is clearest in Ted’s corner of “We’ll Never Have Paris.” Now, I don’t doubt that there are men like Ted who come to terms with their divorce initially and then, faced with the prospect of their ex-wife moving on, lose their chill. But it doesn’t serve any other part of this show for Ted to suddenly lose his shit about his ex-wife dating someone else, and it’s a fundamental drag on the rest of the show to be spending this much time on him being away from the team. I thought it might help when everyone tells Ted he’s being an idiot, up to and including Rebecca (who doesn’t even get a storyline of her own for the second week in a row), but it didn’t help. It just made me even more confused why they couldn’t find a way to seed Ted going back to America that didn’t rip him away from the day-to-day operations of his football club.

This brings us to the central struggle of writing about Ted Lasso in this current moment. Given how much of a mess everything is, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of pointing out every problem, like the now recurring issue where it feels like the events of the second season (Nate’s behavior, Ted’s therapy) have basically been completely forgotten as we return to Season 1 conflicts (Nate’s lack of confidence, Ted’s marriage) it seemed we had resolved. But the nagging puzzle I find myself getting distracted by is trying to figure out why a once-good TV show would be making so many terrible decisions. What endgame could justify rushing through Nate’s redemption arc to the point where it seems like the writers think we should be rooting for him romantically and thinking that someone who treats his employees like absolute shit should be entitled to a supportive circle of bros? Is any conclusion worth reducing Rebecca’s life to a psychic’s prophecy and dealing with her coach’s insecurities with no regard for the actual business of running her team? And are they seriously implying that what would fix Ted’s life is his ex-wife miraculously deciding she’s still in love with him, and he can return to America having healed the broken marriage he came to Richmond to escape?

I know that not every viewer of a show like Ted Lasso is going to foreground these types of story questions in their response to the show, especially since it has its origins as a pandemic comfort watch back in 2020. But whereas I can understand how episodes like last week’s could be perceived as a “return to form” when you’re not pre-concerned about Sam’s storyline having no followup (it had none), there’s no such evidence to be found here, unless we count the Beard/Henry conversation about “Hey Jude” that suffers from, well, everything else about the Ted story around it. The show is in an unpleasant place that portends a disheartening future, and my trust in the show’s ability to find its way out of this forest of rotten trees is…well, it’s gone, is the thing.

Stray observations

• Friend of the Newsletter Alan Sepinwall brought this up on Twitter just now, but it is bizarre that Trent has been embedded with the team for so long without encountering the Diamond Dogs. But in the show’s current narrative strategy, it seems like literally nothing meaningful happens for huge stretches of time between episodes, so I suppose the show is saying that the Diamond Dogs meet less often than we think, and also that Trent is purely observing the team and not conducting any interviews/discussions about team culture that he doesn’t personally witness? 

• How do we think we’re supposed to feel about Jake? Again, the show has really kind of brushed past the ethics of dating a former client, but in general he seems like a big dork, and I’m just waiting for them to reveal he’s a terrible person so that Ted and Michelle can reunite (in my world, we call this Lynn Johnstoning a Relationship—FBOFW-heads know what I’m talking about).

• I had a conversation with some other critics about this on Twitter this week, but…what is Jade’s deal, exactly? Her mind games with Nate when he attempts to DTR are absolutely unhinged, and then the casual way she drops “boyfriend” honestly makes me wonder if she’s secretly filming him for her TikTok channel where she gets off on manipulating incels?

• I’d love if the show could give Higgins a story about actually running the football club, but I did enjoy him running to the Diamond Dogs meeting. Fun bit.

• I know that the showrunner of this television show likely hired a private investigator in the midst of his very public separation, but Ted’s suggestion that he do the same was…idiotic, and I hate that Rebecca even briefly entertained the idea before shutting it down.

• Colin Watch: Overall, I thought the scene with the team debating looking at nude photos did a decent job of matching the players’ personalities to their opinions on the matter (Sam as the moral compass, Isaac as the Forceful Pragmatist), but I do think the leap to everyone deleting things was rushed to get to the Colin moment. I didn’t really grasp why Colin was so resistant to deleting them—does he not know about porn? There’s just not enough substance to his story to sell me on that particular moment, and it highlighted how inorganic the story was to generate that moment.

• “The Great Awankening” isn’t particularly clever, but was it weird to anyone else that they seemed to ignore that “The Fappening” was a pivotal enough moment in internet discourse to have its own Wikipedia page?

• “Give her a chance to surprise you”—I’m sorry, but the Rebecca I know would add the red flags from last week to the fact that Jack would even present that bullshit statement to Keeley and tell her to get the hell out of there.

• On a related note, I love how they’re like “Hmm, we’re going to have Jack slut shame Keeley, but what if she also identifies her as a “friend” to her mate from uni, just to really clear the deck on her decency?” Honestly, what was the point of this? Help me understand. Please.

Sam Obisanya is the origin of the moment I disconnected from the general fanbase for Ted Lasso. Through the show’s first season, I feel like everyone was on the same page—albeit without any kind of weekly coverage dissecting the show—on the charm of the show’s characters and story, but Sam’s battle against Cerithium Oil was a critical turning point. Or, rather, how the show resolved that story was a bellwether moment for the series and the stories it wanted to tell.

For me, the way the writers introduced the idea of significant financial consequences for Sam’s protest and then swept the entire situation under the rug between episodes broke my trust in Ted Lasso. It reinforced the show’s desire to tell compelling stories but communicated a disinterest in addressing the implications of them, even when those implications would have clearly benefitted the character and story arcs involved. And this distrust spread to other stories, including Sam’s relationship with Rebecca,…

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We’re halfway through Ted Lasso’s third season, and “Sunflowers” is what Kathryn VanArendonk has proposed we think of as a “departure episode”: after a disastrous friendly in Amsterdam, Ted decides to remove the team’s usual curfew, hoping to break the team out of their funk. A sort of inversion of last season’s “Beard After Hours,” this hour—yes, a full hour—follows everyone but Beard as they explore one of Europe’s finest cities, where to quote the synopsis “one night out unlocks truths for many.”

I don’t know who is responsible for writing these synopses, but I’m going to call bullshit on this one. There’s exactly one storyline in “Sunflowers” that this describes, and even then I don’t really know if truths are “unlocked” in a meaningful way. Ted Lasso is a show with an amiable cast that I have a lot of affection for, and seeing them let loose like this has a certain je ne sais quoi that carries parts of the hour. But separating the characters from both each other an…

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As season orders have shortened, the burden placed on ephemeral story arcs has increased. In a 22-episode season of a sitcom, a four-episode story arc would be a blip on the radar—in a 12-episode season of a streaming dramedy, it’s a full third of the story being told. If you are going to invest a third of a character or a team’s story around a temporary presence, then it needs to generate meaningful momentum and leave a mark on the characters involved.

“Signs” is the exit point for two characters introduced in the second episode of Ted Lasso’s third season. After arriving as Keeley’s friend and worming her way into a job at her firm, Shandy’s behavior reaches a breaking point after being reprimanded for her renegade bantr campaign, and Jack guides Keeley through firing her. Meanwhile, Zava came into the story wanting to play in England on something of a whim, and he leaves similarly, abruptly retiring after one last vacuous yet inspiring speech to AFC Richmond before a…

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The circumstances surrounding Nate’s departure from AFC Richmond meant that no one involved really got a chance to unpack what happened. And with the much-anticipated showdown between Richmond and West Ham approaching, it becomes clear that both Nate and Ted are harboring some anxieties about how to approach their reunion on opposite sides of the pitch.

In Ted’s case, he knows how he wants to handle it, but is facing pressure from his coaching staff and his owner to dig deeper and find the space to hate Nate for what he did. In most contexts, the show has largely held up Ted as an exemplar of forgiveness and understanding, like when they needed to transition Rebecca from a villain to a hero back in season one. But in this case, everyone around him is adamant that he should be furious, and to use that anger to prove a point on the pitch. Ted doesn’t really have it in him, but he’s also juggling an existential crisis caused by Sassy’s diagnosis that he is too much of a me…

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In the third episode of Ted Lasso’s second season, Keeley is explaining bantr to the players as she ropes them into her side hustle doing PR for the new app. As she points out how the app spells its name, Colin pipes in “Oh, like grindr,” and Keeley briefly raises her eyebrow before going on with her explanation. Two episodes later, bantr was the team’s main sponsor, and Colin…well, Colin was back into the ranks of AFC Richmond’s midfield, offering an occasional one-liner as necessary.

When I covered the second season at The A.V. Club, it’s fair to say that I hyper-fixated on this brief moment. As I acknowledged at the time, it’s absurd to think that simply knowing grindr exists means a person is queer, but the joke is so superfluous that I couldn’t imagine its meaning being tied to anything but who was telling it. And so I started “Colin Corner,” which was basically just a weekly update on how literally nothing else in the show’s presentation of Colin supported it: the…

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If you’re going to prepare a show and its audience for the departure of its star, an episode like “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” is pretty much your textbook strategy.

Put simply, Ted Lasso is entirely incidental to everything that happens in this episode of Ted Lasso. It’s Rebecca who takes point on the effort to land an unexpected transfer when conceited striker Zava makes it clear he plans to come to England, while Trent Crimm Formerly of The Independent embedding with the Greyhounds becomes almost entirely Roy’s story as soon as he curses the former reporter out on sight. And obviously, the latest developments at Keeley Jones P.R. are all about fleshing out this new corner of the show, as Keeley hires a friend and tries to make a new one while figuring out how to juggle her new management role.

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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of the third season of Ted Lasso, which debuted today on Apple TV+. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews will only be available to paid subscribers. You can find out more on our About Page.

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The decision by Jason Sudeikis to spend the better part of two years insisting that Ted Lasso was a “three-year plan” and then delivering—as the new showrunner, with Bill Lawrence stepping aside to focus on Shrinking (which I’ve been reviewing here at Episodic Medium, if you missed it)—a third season premiere with zero clarity on whether this remains to be the case is a choice.

The facts, though, are clear. Obviously, Sudeikis and his co-creators made this plan before the show became an Emmys juggernaut, and a huge calling card for Apple in an era of streaming expansion. It also happened before the show had proven the capacity of both its central character and its supporting cast to extend beyond the flimsy starting point of “U.S. football coach travels to England to coach the other football” into complex, dynamic characters that resonate with audiences. And needles to say the decision pre-dates the explosion of licensed merchandise onto store shelves, giving producer Warner Bros. plenty of incentive to keep the train rolling as long as possible. Put simply, I do not think there is any possibility that Ted Lasso as a cultural entity will cease to exist following this 12-episode third season.

But Sudeikis is very clearly still convinced that the idea of Ted Lasso as this kind of football coach has a fundamental limitation, based on “Smells Like Mean Spirit.” We reconnect with Ted at Hearthrow, sending his son Henry back home to Kansas City after six weeks in London. When he gets on the phone to his therapist Sharon afterwards, we watch as he deconstructs the evidence Henry was in his apartment—the LEGO is cleaned up, the pillow fort is decommissioned, etc. We watch as he shaves his face, packs the biscuits in his bag, and gets ready to return to AFC Richmond, but in the process he asks a crucial question: what is he still doing coaching AFC Richmond?

He went to AFC Richmond as an escape from his failing marriage, and he stayed when it became clear that he could make a difference in the lives of his players and coworkers…and that the marriage was truly over. The second season, though, saw Ted channeling all his energy into “rescuing” his team from relegation, failing to register that he himself needed to be rescued from an ongoing mental health struggle. But while his road to recovery is still ongoing, Richmond is officially back in the Premier League, and now Ted finds himself in a climate where everyone thinks the team will be relegated again, Rebecca is champing at the bit to wage war against Rupert and Nate at West Ham, and Ted is too busy tracking Henry’s flight back to Kansas City to be invested in much of any of it.

By the end of “Smells Like Mean Spirit,” it is clear that Ted Lasso will not remain in London past this Premier League season. I was a bit insulted when the show felt they needed a cliffhanger ending where Henry’s getting toys from a new Dad, to be honest, because the existentialism is itself enough to make their point clear. Sharon is right that Ted never quits anything, but this implies that his “task” is to win, something that he’s inherently struggled to internalize over the course of the show’s run. Rebecca is right that at the end of the first season he was fiery in his determination that they’d return to the Premier League and “win the whole fucking thing,” but a lot has changed since that moment in terms of his life’s priorities, and we see more than enough here to conclude that he is not going to be the coach Rebecca pictures as her champion in the war ahead.

The question, though, is how much the show is willing to commit to the idea that he’s actually the coach she needs. Their tension in “Smells Like Mean Spirit” comes from the optics of Ted abandoning practice to take the team into the literal sewer while “Wonder Kid” Nathan Shelley spits insults about the entire media predicting Richmond to finish dead last in the Premier League. Unlike Rebecca, we saw the players before Ted abandoned practice, losing their focus in the locker room as pundit after pundit questions their capacity to win. We also see how his roundabout lesson about how each player needs to create a sewer system and then connect those systems together like an emotionally supportive human centipede to feed off of their best coping strategies seems to get through to them, to the point that they use it as soon as the news of Nate’s comments breaks. We know that despite outward appearances, Ted’s approach continues to work, and Rebecca herself seems to understand this at their press conference as he pivots away from her desired counter-attack against Nate to instead self-deprecate.

But here’s the thing: although last season the show ignored this in order to focus on personal stakes, Rebecca is the owner of a business, and it actually is deeply important that Richmond succeed on the pitch in order to remain solvent as a business. And the truth is that last season Richmond returned to the Premier League in spite of Ted’s coaching style and not because of it, at least given how little the show seemed concerned about connecting the on-field developments to what was happening behind-the-scenes. In the comments of my review of the season two finale, someone wrote at great lengths about how the show is really about how Ted’s “players are people first” approach adopted from famous college coach John Wooden and his Pyramid of Success is superior, but I always return back to the moment in the first season where Beard has to remind Ted that these are not college students. Their professional futures depend on this, and he can’t treat his job like his goal is to make them better people instead of winning matches.

But the show definitely wants him to do this, and my greatest fear for this season is that the show is going to suggest Ted’s coaching philosophy is so powerful it can propel a barely-promoted team to the Premier League championship—an unprecedented feat—as the ultimate underdog sports story. He may be right that focusing his attention on helping his players continue to connect as a team and work through the pressures of playing professional sports will generate positive results on the field, and it’s clear from our brief glimpses of Nathan Shelley: Head Coach that it’s far superior to the insults and punishment being doled out at West Ham. But the show cannot simultaneously shell out for Premier League licensing to amp up realism and insist that there are not fundamental realities of the Premier League—money, contracts, etc.—that would create a ceiling on how a team like AFC Richmond would perform.

And thus we have the tension that sits at the future of both Ted Lasso and Ted Lasso. If this is a TV show about AFC Richmond, it needs to be about striving to win the Premier League, because that’s the goal you need to have at an elite level. But if this is a TV show about Ted Lasso, that’s not the goal he has, nor a goal he wants to have. It’s Henry who adds the Premier League trophy to Ted’s LEGO recreation of a football stadium, not Ted, who cares far more about Henry’s optimism that he and Nate could one day be friends again. That, in truth, is all Ted wants: to reconcile his emotional connection to the people who have been part of this journey. And at least in this premiere, I was heartened that the show observed this tension but also a bit alarmed when Rebecca smiles to herself as Keeley lauds her for letting Ted be Ted, knowing that a conscious uncoupling needs to be in their future for both sides to get what they really want.

This brings us to the other unconscious uncoupling, as Roy and Keeley spend the episode apart before coming together to break the news to Phoebe that they’ve…well, they don’t really know. I sort of admire the writers’ choice to just have Phoebe herself point out how stupid this storyline is so I don’t have to spend too much time on it. There’s zero effort to actually connect to the forced effort to poke holes in their relationship in last season’s epilogue, and when Phoebe pushes them for any kind of explanation it’s all dumb cliches about being busy, as though they weren’t busy before. Sure, we see Keeley so busy that she double booked her lunch with Rebecca with her emotional breakdown, and Roy expresses some anxiety about taking over the tactical side of the team in Nate’s absence, but the notion that they need to break up—or, in Keeley’s words, take a break—is unmotivated and feels like a contrived source of tension about which I share Phoebe’s position: it’s stupid.

Although it’s a super-sized premiere, there’s not much room for the rest of the supporting cast to get involved: the team has their anxieties, but no one player’s story rises to the surface, and Beard and Higgins are purely supporting their bosses here. The rest of the episode’s oxygen belongs to Nathan Shelley, as the show begins splitting its time between three different workplaces. And look, I know the episode ends with Ted convincing himself that it’s possible for he and Nate to still be friends, but who the hell wants to be friends with Nate given the way he treats people? Between his abuse of his players and his appalling disrespect to his coworkers, Nate is just a wholly unlikeable presence, and I can already tell I am going to struggle mightily with the redemption narrative the show is laying out.

Because ultimately, Ted Lasso as a show and Ted Lasso as a person need to believe that there is good in everyone, and that it’s just about getting through to them. And with Nate, the show is not being subtle about where all of this behavior comes from. It’s a classic Catch-22, because the very qualities that Ted and others hold onto in order to believe that he is capable of being redeemed—his humble beginnings, his innocence—are also the ones that drive him to be a relentless asshole. He’s so obsessed with being valued and appreciated, but any praise he receives only convinces him he isn’t worthy of it, forcing him to pull himself further away from his former identity and just mistreat everyone around him. Throw in a healthy dose of daddy issues with his father, Ted, and now Rupert, and you’re left with a truly broken man who is so consumed by his traumas that he has no perception of anything but himself.

This premiere gives us a solid glimpse of his relationship with Rupert, which feels like it will be important moving forward. On the one hand, you could argue that he is enabling Nate and his behavior, pushing him to dig at a wounded Ted and Richmond and continue salting the earth in that relationship. And certainly there’s a real turning point in Nate driving into the stadium in the beat-up old car he chauffeured Ted with back in the pilot, but driving off with a fancy new sports car that better reflects the person he wants to be, Rupert watching from his creepy window. But to suggest that Rupert is the one corrupting Nate is misleading: all Rupert is doing is feeding Nate’s toxic behavior, either because he sincerely believes it will help him win or because he knows it will fuel his feud with Rebecca. All Rupert is doing is delivering positive affirmation to a broken man desperate for validation, who—ironically, given how he leaked Ted’s mental health issues—has a breakdown as soon as he leaves the bubble and faces the media.

To put it in another way: as Ted reckons with why he’s still in London, Nate has yet to fully reckon with why he’s doing anything he’s doing. There’s no capacity for self-reflection, only a soulless quest for respect that he feels he has earned, with no regard for who gets hurt along the way. It’s clear that we’re going to be charting Ted’s navigation with the end of his football coaching career with the beginning of Nate’s, and I just hope that in doing so there’s a concerted effort for everyone to unpack how Nate’s situation happened and what could have been done to stop it. I need Ted and Beard to confront how they could have done more to minimize his mistreatment of their team, and I eventually will need Nate to accept responsibility for his actions. This isn’t to say I need them all to be friends, and frankly if they’re setting up Nate returning to Richmond as coach in Ted’s absence I’m going to be furious because that store is closed as far as I’m concerned. But the end of one career and the beginning of another offers a meaningful space to ruminate, and the show owes that to the characters and their storylines.

That is going to be a tall order. I’m not convinced I’m capable of having empathy for Nate after how he’s treated everyone around him, and while I admire the show’s choice to tackle his unlikeability head on, I’m not sure how you build a comic season of television around it. “Smells Like Mean Spirit” isn’t without comedy, but that comedy dies when we visit West Ham, where Nate’s continued insistence he said “Wunderkind” is too pathetic to elicit a chuckle. And while Ted being Ted at the press conference asserts that the status quo of the show’s relentless positivity will still have a place, ending on his existential questions about his future points to a tension that will make it harder for the show to avoid the stakes and consequences they’ve established.

Which is why this is the final season of Ted Lasso as we know it. By season’s end, we’ll see whether the post-Ted AFC Richmond has enough of a purpose to become a show in its own right, or whether Roy and Keeley’s on-and-off romance will bridge their respective workplaces enough to sustain a larger narrative. And while the circumstances necessitate a focus on Premier League championships, it’s clear that these human dynamics are more central to Sudeikis’ vision for this final season, and how he chooses to resolve that will ultimately determine the Lassoverse’s future.

Stray observations

• If you noticed the credits moving much faster than usual, you’re right—Toheeb Jimoh (Sam), Cristo Fernández (Dani), Kola Bokinni (Isaac), Billy Harris (Colin), Anthony Head (Rupert), and James Lance (Trent Crimm, formerly of The Independent) have all become series regulars. And speaking of which…

• Colin Corner: Of the actors elevated to regulars, Colin is by far the least developed, and so I’m really curious what facilitated this move. If you’re following these reviews from their former home, you’ll recall that I spent much of season two scrounging for some sort of evidence to follow up on the time Colin casually brought up Grindr, so consider my antenna fully erect actually no scratch that, don’t do that, abort metaphor.

• They could have just had Sharon on the phone, given that she’s now with another sports team and simply seeing Ted as an ongoing client, but I do appreciate that they took the time to be like “Sharon Fieldstone fucks” as Sarah Niles departs the regular cast to guest status.

• Look, if you’re going to license Premier League teams, you really do need to commit to realism, so can we have a conversation about the idea of a direct flight from London to Kansas City? Did they invent this route exclusively for Ted?

• Related: with due respect to the young actor playing Henry, I do not believe that child would have any opinion on his country’s political climate, and worry the show doesn’t realize that not every child actor can pull off Phoebe’s wisdom beyond her years.

• “Fuck you, Joe Rogan”—I’m absolutely for this sentiment, although I don’t know that I was clear on what Keeley was doing, exactly? Was she acting as Rebecca’s PR rep? Is Rebecca formally a client? That was certainly my sense, but hard to gauge with the exposition necessary in their time together.

• Jamie’s hair has…only gotten worse between seasons. I truly can’t stand to look at it. It hurts my eyes.

• While James Lance’s presence in the credits confirms that his weird prominence at the end of last season means we’ll be getting a followup on Trent Crimm, formerly of the Independent, we do learn that fellow press room mainstay Marcus has picked up his gig, which gets a nice reaction during Ted’s press conference.

• With Rebecca’s presence in the office, it’s hard to gauge how much we’re meant to see figures like Keeley’s CFO as characters we expect to see again, but I presume that wasn’t just a one-off conflict over finances.

• Fun little moment where sweet, simple Will is busy trying to balance water bottles on his knee before Ted calls him over to get the hippie bus driver who started a cult and lives at the stadium (that runner was…weird).

• I was a bit annoyed that Ted didn’t actively mention Match Game while trying to convince the press to go along with his joke structure, given that’s where I remember being introduced to it.

• Obviously, we know Apple shows have absurd music budgets that allow them to afford Beyoncé, but I’m not super convinced “Ring the Alarm” matched the vibes of the final scene? And while Jake isn’t a bad name for a stepdad, I do think Harry’s even better, so a pity that was off the table.

• Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Ted Lasso! I started this Substack five months after concluding my reviews of season two at The A.V. Club, and being able to continue the dialogue I started with the readers and commenters there was a huge reason I wanted to create a space to continue writing in this format. I know not everyone reads the comments, but I spent some time going through the comments on my finale review, and I was reminded how enriching I found the back and forth my critical take on the show inspired. And while I’m sure that there will be some mild celebration when a review appears on the site without my byline, I’m hopeful some of you will migrate here to continue what I feel are really productive conversations about comedy, narrative, and the function of criticism. As ever, your direct support makes it possible for these conversations to have a home online, and so spread the word and help support these reviews and the rest of our Spring lineup here at the site (check out our About Page for the full schedule).

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