Related Articles
This post contains spoilers for the Ted Lasso season finale, “So Long, Farewell.”
During what certainly seems to be the final episode of Ted Lasso, reporter Trent Crimm reads a note Ted has written him regarding Trent’s book about his season with AFC Richmond, which Trent has titled The Lasso Way. “One small suggestion,” Ted writes. “I’d change the title. It’s not about me. It never was.”
The sentiment works as something wholly true to Ted and the philosophy he has espoused over the comedy’s three seasons. And it functions as something of a meta-comment about the viability of the series potentially continuing without its title character. No one involved in the series — not Jason Sudeikis, not Apple, not the studio — has said word one about whether this was meant to be the end of the third season, the end of the series, or the end of the whole Ted Lasso Expanded Cinematic Universe. But the season ends with Ted back in Kansas, happy to be around his son Henry, and to be part of ex-wife Michelle’s life in some way. (We’ll get back to that.) Whether or not Apple tries to pull a Hogan Family/The Conners/Mayberry RFD reinvention featuring all the characters other than Ted, his story feels concluded.
But there’s a third way to look at that note, even if it’s not what the episode’s writers, Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly (who, along with Bill Lawrence, adapted the character from a series of NBC Sports promos in the 2010) may have intended. In arguing for his lack of centrality to the story in the book — which Trent retitles The Richmond Way — Ted is unwittingly acknowledging how irrelevant he had become to Ted Lasso itself.
The third season opened with Ted feeling sad that his son Henry was going back to America, and asking Hunt’s Coach Beard if there was still a reason for them to be in England. And that was nearly all of what this year had to say about Ted. There was an episode where the placebo effect from an ineffective psychedelic drug inspired Ted to dream up what he thought would be a new style for the team to play. Even there, Beard pointed out that he had dreamed up something that already existed, but at least it was the first time in the life of the series where Ted seemed interested in learning how to actually coach non-American football. (The finale demonstrated another way in which he’d evolved on this front, since he finally recognized how the offside rule worked.) Mostly, though, Ted was just lurking on the periphery of other characters’ stories, looking sad, and only occasionally even offering the sort of corny but endearing dad jokes that were his previous stock-in-trade.
Was this Sudeikis growing tired of a character he’d been playing for years? Was it him taking one for the team in an attempt to seed one or more spinoffs that would debut after he left? Or was he trying to channel his mustachioed alter ego, showing that this was never about Ted by foregrounding everyone else’s stories at the expense of his?
Whatever the motivation, it didn’t work. Without Ted — and, by extension, the team he coached — as an organizing principle, Season Three felt more and more unfocused with each passing week. Big ideas were introduced and then dropped, huge interpersonal moments took place entirely off-camera, and characterization was all over the map. The home stretch of the season felt incredibly rushed, as if Sudeikis and the other producers(*) had run out of time even though most episodes had ballooned to 60-odd minutes. (The finale was 75.)
(*) It’s worth noting here that the series’ fourth co-creator, Bill Lawrence, was otherwise occupied this season as he focused on his new Apple TV+ comedy, Shrinking. The loss of someone who has created or co-created a bunch of beloved, long-running sitcoms like Scrubs and Spin City, and who has a strong command of basic TV structure, was palpable.
It was remarkable and strange how much of the season seemed to be occurring in between episodes or scenes. The worst offender of this was the storyline about Nate, whose rise from kit man to assistant coach was one of the first season’s most successful arcs, and whose descent into aggrieved villainy in Season Two was well-plotted, even if it upset many viewers. Given the empathetic messages of the series, it was obvious that Nate would return to the fold by the end of this season. But pretty much every choice on that journey was mystifying. Rather than show him gradually recognizing what an abusive person he had become, how terribly he had betrayed Ted by leaking his private medical information to the press, etc., the show seemed to view his redemption as a matter of Nate learning to love himself. And the writers’ method of doing that was a bizarre romance arc involving Jade, the hostess at Nate’s favorite restaurant, who had no personality and no apparent reason for wanting to go out with Nate other than taking pity on him after another woman was mean to him in front of Jade. (Nor were we ever given any reason why Nate was so hung up on Jade, given how repeatedly cold she was to him prior to that moment.) Eventually, it turned out that all Nate really needed was for his emotionally-closed-off father to acknowledge Nate’s genius, and for Nate to play the violin, and suddenly everything was OK. Nate quit his dream job as head coach of an EPL team in between episodes, with no explanation other than his discomfort at club owner Rupert trying to get Nate to cheat on Jade. Early in the season, we saw the entire Richmond squad so incensed by video footage of Nate destroying Ted’s homemade “BELIEVE” sign that they spent an entire half of football being penalized for assaulting various members of Nate’s team. Yet last week, we saw three representatives from the team — two of them, winger Colin and replacement kit man Will, among the most frequent targets of Nate’s abuse in Season Two — arrive at the restaurant with smiles on their faces to tell him the team had voted unanimously to invite him back. Even if you believe Ted’s ethos that forgiveness should not require redemption or atonement, how do you not show a scene where the team — who are in the midst of the winning streak of their lives, have been shown to be a deeply superstitious lot wary of shaking up anything that’s working, and, again, are all furious with Nate for one reason or another — gets together to debate this and vote on it? How do we skip over Nate’s actual return to the building, or the moment when he’s told that he will be — or chooses to be — Will’s assistant, rather than rejoining the coaching staff?
Compare this to how the show dealt with Rebecca and Jamie in previous seasons. Rebecca did just awful things to Ted at the beginning of the series as part of her vendetta against ex-husband Rupert, but we also saw her ongoing struggle with the fact that Ted was the most decent person she had ever met, so when she finally fessed up, it felt authentic that Ted would instantly forgive her. And Jamie spent Season Two putting in a whole lot of work to be a better person and teammate, rather than the arrogant bully we first met; his friendship with Roy and evolution into the team’s emotional center was by far the best and most consistent part of Season Three. Nothing like either of these approaches happened with Nate, where the show acted like it wanted the audience to forget all the bad things he had done. Nate somehow even rejoins the team and only apologizes to Ted afterward!
The whole thing was a destination without a journey, which unfortunately held true for much of this season. Roy and Keeley’s relationship also fell apart off-screen, and when they finally discussed it a few weeks ago, Roy’s explanation was too vague to justify why it was kept a mystery for so long. Ted told Rebecca(*) and then the team about his plans to return to America off-camera; while we got a strong sense of her feelings on the subject throughout the finale, the initial response of the team — who revere Ted and credit him for allowing them to be their best selves and enjoy football more than they ever have before — was too important to skip. The players performing “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music at the end of Ted’s final practice as their manager was nice, but their presumably complicated first reaction felt like the more necessary scene.
(*) The finale opened with a scene that for a few moments implied that Ted and Rebecca had slept together, which would be yet another huge event happening outside the audience’s notice. Instead, we find out that Ted, Beard, and Beard’s terrifying girlfriend (and future wife) Jane had slept in Rebecca’s mansion due to a gas leak at Ted and Beard’s apartment building. The whole scene felt like the writers trolling the very vocal corner of the fanbase who were convinced that Ted and Rebecca were destined to end up not as close friends and respected colleagues, but as romantic partners.
Other characters drifted in and out of the narrative with no rhyme or reason. Toheeb Jimoh’s Sam got much more to do in the first two seasons when Jimoh was a guest star than when he finally got promoted to the main cast. Keeley got exiled to what was essentially a bad spinoff embedded within the main show, spending a lot of time employing her obnoxious and incompetent friend Shandy, then onto her dating her boss Jack(*), then being slut-shamed by Jack yet feeling desperate when Jack stopped responding to her texts, etc. It was a relief when she started hanging around the Richmond offices again, just to see Juno Temple get to interact with the main ensemble regularly. Rebecca spent a lot of the season obsessing over a psychic’s predictions — including one about her becoming a mother — then forgot about it entirely, only for the idea to resurface in the finale, including her reconnecting with the hot Dutch airline pilot she spent a night with in Amsterdam, and perhaps becoming stepmother to his daughters. And don’t blame yourself if the mention of Zava in the finale was the first time in weeks you’d thought of a character who dominated the early part of the season before abruptly ghosting the team.
(*) With both Keeley/Jack and last season’s Rebecca/Sam relationship, the show was fond of mixing work and romance in ways that ignored the huge power imbalance that comes when a wealthy boss dates an employee. (And related to that, we had Michelle dating her former therapist Dr. Jacob — who also doubled as the Lassos’ couples therapist, and helped them accept that their marriage was ending — while glossing over the sketchy ethics of that.) At least the final episodes dealt with that a bit through Rupert getting in trouble for sleeping with his assistant, but he was always a cartoon villain who wasn’t going to get the same benefit of the doubt as the beloved Rebecca.
The maddening part was that the show was better than all of this. We had two seasons worth of evidence to that effect, and Season Three intermittently offered moments or subplots — like Roy delivering a passionate and self-lacerating public response to Isaac going into the stands to beat up a homophobic heckler on behalf of closeted teammate Colin — that evoked the good version of the show.
Despite the many odd choices of what to show and what to elide, “So Long, Farewell” trended more toward that version than the one on display for most of Season Three. All the Ted and Rebecca scenes were lovely. The final match against West Ham — including a halftime sequence where the players reassemble the destroyed “BELIEVE” sign, plus Jamie again playing selfless football as the team brought back one of Nate’s earliest play designs — was for the most part terrific. If Rupert’s sideline meltdown — which included shoving West Ham’s new manager to the ground for refusing to have his players deliberately injure Jamie — was on the cartoonish side (he was even dressed all in black!), it at least felt like a moment the show had built up to over the years. And there were various sweet grace notes throughout: Dr. Sharon watching the final match with the same amount of passion as Henry and Michelle, Coach Beard finally being given the first name Willis, Mae having the same Geronimo photo on the wall of her pub that Sam Malone did on Ted’s beloved Cheers, Sam finally getting to play for the Nigerian national team, etc. For the most part, it was the most emotionally satisfying chapter of a very weird, often hugely frustrating season.
But the ambiguity about the future of the show also sapped some power from the episode. Does Keeley reject both Roy and Jamie so this story can continue in a potential continuation series, or because the point is that both guys are being entitled children and she deserves better? Is Roy being promoted to succeed Ted (much to the relief of many viewers who feared it would be Nate) also setting up a spinoff, or just a reward for one of the series’ most beloved characters? Even the concluding sequence was vaguer than it could, or probably should, have been. Earlier, we see Michelle growing irritated with Dr. Jacob’s sarcastic commentary during the Richmond-West Ham match, implying that she was losing interest in her new boyfriend. But when Ted returns to their house with a suitcase in hand, it’s unclear if Michelle is single again, if Ted is just crashing there until he finds a new place to live, if he and Michelle are reconciling, etc. On another show, that ambiguity might work, but a lot of this one was about Ted’s journey toward accepting that his marriage was over and he needed to get on with his life, while still finding ways to be close to his son and his ex. Even leaving open the possibility feels like a step backward from all the work Ted did with Dr. Sharon and others over the run of the show.
Sudeikis, Hunt, and many other key members of the cast and crew are out on WGA picket lines, not doing interviews. So there’s been no official commentary on the future of the show and/or franchise. Maybe this becomes a Curb Your Enthusiasm situation, where Sudeikis gets to come back and make another season — with or without Ted as the main character — only when he feels like it. Maybe Apple will soon announce that The Richmond Way, Keeley Jones: Independent Woman, and Coach Beard: Origins will all be coming our way in 2024. Or maybe this is just it.
It’s disappointing to not be able to be kinder to a season of a show that, like its namesake, preached the value of kindness above all. But Ted Lasso was once upon a time capable of kindness and greatness simultaneously. With or without Ted himself, any version of the series going forward needs to be good in its storytelling, not just in its characters’ motivations.
