Ted Lasso Came Back, and So Did We

Three years ago we said goodbye to Ted Lasso. It was emotional. There was a finale, there were tears, there were think pieces about the end of the nice era of television. Ted flew home to Kansas, the Believe sign was taped back together, and we all agreed it was a lovely thing that knew when to stop. Then last Tuesday it came back, and we watched it the same night. So did everyone we know. Nobody is proud of this. Nobody is stopping either.

The facts, for anyone who spent the past week somewhere without wifi, which in August is statistically possible. Season four of Ted Lasso arrived on Apple TV+ on 5 August. Jason Sudeikis is back in the moustache. This time Ted has been lured back to London to coach the women's team at AFC Richmond, the Lady Greyhounds. Hannah Waddingham returns as Rebecca, still the best dressed woman in fictional football. Juno Temple is back. Brett Goldstein is back, still communicating mostly in one syllable. Coach Beard is back, obviously. There are new faces too. Tanya Reynolds plays Alice Chilton, a coach whose bluntness is aimed directly at Ted's optimism, and Tracey Ullman has joined the ensemble, which on its own justifies the whole exercise.

The discourse, in brief

Here is where it gets fun. The reviews are split, and not politely. One camp says the show is exactly what it always was, warm and funny and engineered to make you cry about biscuits. Decider said the jokes still hit and the tears still stream. The other camp is less charmed. IndieWire found the episodes painfully long. The Independent called the return a bit flat. The Globe and Mail went further and suggested the season sets back women's sport, which is quite an accusation to level at a comedy about believing in yourself. Somewhere in the middle sits the general verdict: comforting, familiar, and possibly unnecessary.

We would like to point out that "comforting, familiar, and possibly unnecessary" describes most of the things we love. Negronis. Linen in winter. A third trip to the same hotel in Puglia. The argument against season four is that nobody needed it. This is true. It is also beside the point. August is not the month for essential television. August is the month for television you can watch with one eye while the other eye is on a ferry timetable.

Why we keep going back

There is a bigger phenomenon here, and it is not really about football. Culture has become a place we revisit rather than discover. The biggest films are sequels. The biggest tours are anniversary tours. Half the new restaurants are revivals of old restaurants. Television has simply caught up with the rest of us, and the rest of us have been rewatching the same four shows since 2020. The industry noticed that we press play on the familiar, and the industry, being an industry, gave us more of it.

It is easy to be snobbish about this. We have tried. It does not hold. The truth is that returning to something is its own pleasure, distinct from discovering it. You know the rhythms. You know the jokes are coming and you laugh anyway. Richmond in season four works the way your favourite table at your favourite restaurant works. Nobody hands you a menu because everybody already knows.

And the women's team angle, whatever the critics make of the execution, is not a random pivot. Women's football has spent the past few summers filling actual stadiums and breaking actual viewing records, and the sport's audience is no longer a niche. A show about coaching that wants to stay relevant in 2026 more or less had to arrive here. Whether Ted Lasso handles it with the grace of a Rebecca Welton blazer or the subtlety of a Roy Kent team talk is precisely what everyone is arguing about, and the arguing is half the entertainment. Watch it, form a view, bring the view to dinner. It is the rare cultural debate where nobody gets uninvited from anything.

A defence of the repeat

Our position, for the record. Season four is not the best season of Ted Lasso. It does not need to be. It needs to be Tuesday night, a sofa, and forty minutes in which the worst thing that happens is a training montage. The show was never prestige television. It was a weekly argument for being kind, wearing your enthusiasm openly, and trusting that the team sorts itself out eventually. If it wants to make that argument again, this time with the Lady Greyhounds, we will be there, sceptical and slightly moved, exactly as before.

There is a lesson in all this that we recognise from our own corner of the world. The things you return to are the things that were built properly the first time. Nobody rewatches a show that meant nothing, and nobody reaches every single morning for a piece of jewellery that was designed for one season. Our favourite pieces work like Richmond. You come back, they are exactly where you left them, and they still do the thing they always did. Believe, as the sign says. Preferably in solid gold.

Photo by Josemar Duarte on Unsplash, used under the Unsplash License. Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ production; no series imagery appears in this article.