Critics’ Conversation: ‘Ted Lasso’ — Farewell, Good Riddance or Come Back Soon?

[This conversation contains spoilers for the third season finale of Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso, which may or may not be the series finale. Who really knows?]

DANIEL FIENBERG: One of my favorite things to do before a series finale is to go back and revisit the show’s pilot. Bringing your story full circle isn’t mandatory, and plenty of shows barely acknowledge their pilots or much of anything from their series runs — and that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad pieces of storytelling. 

Ahead of this week’s third series finale for Ted Lasso, I didn’t go back to rewatch the pilot. There were two reasons for that, both practical: First, episodic runtimes this season have been so expansive — 660 minutes total for 12 episodes, or the equivalent of more than 31 episodes of a standard broadcast comedy — that I barely finished last week’s episode before this week’s episode began. Second, Apple TV+ has perplexingly resisted making any announcements regarding the show’s long-term fate. Is this the end of Ted Lasso’s story or at least Ted Lasso’s story in this world? Sure, why not? But is it the end of Ted Lasso as a series? Well, as Ted wrote on his galley of Trent Crimm’s book — in the world of Ted Lasso, reporters frequently finish drafts of books before the story they’re writing about is over — “It’s not about me. It never was.”

That’s a lie. But whatever! You don’t need to believe it. You just need to BELIEVE.

Another reason it wouldn’t have helped to merely rewatch the Ted Lasso pilot in preparation for the finale: Ted Lasso doesn’t believe in token nods or callbacks. Ted Lasso doesn’t believe in token anything. Part of why the show has worked as well as it has for so many viewers — and critics and awards voters — is that it has aggressively attempted to be everything to everybody, which is part of why it long ago had to abandon the idea of being something as neat and tidy as a half-hour comedy. This season was a mess, but as often as it made me cringe or cover my eyes in embarrassment, it had me wiping tears out of those same eyes. Because I only have two. 

And the finale followed suit. It was an overlong mess and darned if I wasn’t feeling a full rainbow of emotions throughout. And double darned if, instead of one or two little callbacks, it didn’t contain dozens of callbacks that I recognized and no doubt dozens that I didn’t.

So let’s start there. Angie, what was your favorite finale callback and why was it the triumphant — albeit way too brief — return of Shannon, the girl who taught Ted Lasso to dribble and then vanished for nearly two full seasons?

ANGIE HAN: I actually did revisit the pilot before watching the maybe-series-maybe-season finale, less because I was looking for callbacks than because I’ve often found myself this season wondering what this show even was. And while every series evolves over the course of its run, what struck me was how much more modest Ted Lasso felt in the beginning — not just in terms of its modest 30-minute run time, but in its tone.

Ted’s relentless sunniness has always been at the center of the show, but it used to be tempered by undercurrents of sadness or even meanness. (Never forget the whole reason Ted wound up in Richmond in the first place was because Rebecca intended to use him as a tool of sabotage.) This season has retained traces of that darkness, to be sure; Ted’s cathartic “fuck you”-filled confrontation with his mother in the penultimate episode underlined how much better he’s gotten at dealing with his emotions instead of just papering over them with smiles. Thanks, Dr. Sharon Who Spends Most of the Finale Watching TV Alone in Her Room!

But it’s also felt like a season that retained all the wrong lessons from the praise it garnered in the first two for its cheeriness, its compassion, its encouraging portrayal of nontoxic masculinity. It’s leaned so hard into those qualities — even going so far as to have entire scenes of the team standing around the locker room to agree that revenge porn is bad, and so is homophobia — that it’s dropped the ball on storytelling basics like logic, structure and character consistency. (Or whatever the football equivalent of “dropping the ball” might be. I’m sure Beard would know; Ted still wouldn’t.)

The finale, I suppose, works for the show Ted Lasso has become — one that prioritizes big, emotional, feel-good beats over everything else. There were lots! The Sound of Music performance was cute. Roy and Jamie bonding over beer was touching, at least until the callback to one of the grossest moments of the season, when Jamie revealed Keeley’s sexy video was for him. Beard’s pregame video making the entire team weep was perfect for a show about a coach who doesn’t care about winning or losing but cares a whole lot about feelings. But I’ll be honest: At this point, I felt more relieved to see it go than sad to see it end. Where did you land, Dan?

FIENBERG: Ted would absolutely know the football equivalent of dropping the ball! Ted knows soccer now. Or at least he understands the offsides rule. That was the entire takeaway of the finale, if not the entire series, wasn’t it? 

There is no question that Ted Lasso lost all track of logic, structure and character consistency in these last 12 episodes — though I think the writers would argue that character consistency is a myth, because as the Diamond Dogs taught us in a scene that lasted around three hours, but probably could have been dispatched with in one minute, people change. Or maybe people can’t change, but people can try to change? 

As Higgins, definitely the character who changed the least in the series, said, “The best we can do is keep asking for help and accepting it when we can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.”

And moving toward better means learning that homophobia is bad and revenge porn is bad and if you tweet mean things at overtly racist politicians, local racists will destroy your Nigerian restaurant, but your teammates will fix the damage and it will NEVER BE MENTIONED AGAIN. Ted Lasso decided this season that it wanted to be a show about characters and change and the importance of community — things the show does magnificently — and it also wanted to be a show about The Big Issues in Society. That was not so good. 

In every oversized episode, there were a dozen things that made me sniffly or made my heart swell and there were a dozen things that made me cringe with embarrassment. And I just made peace with that.

The finale was the Leonardo DiCaprio Pointing at the Screen meme of constant recognition and I mostly happily played along. Shannon! Dr. Sharon in a Hotel Room! The traumatized mascot dog! The Guy From Amsterdam! Nate’s Penalty Kick Design! I was pleased to see one last glorious bit of truth-telling from Sassy, perplexed that we spent a whole season being forced to care about Jade only to have her in one shot of the finale, and relieved that the Ted/Rebecca romance that strange fans wanted never materialized.

What worked for you? What didn’t?

HAN: In terms of what worked for me, I’m largely at peace with where the characters ended up. It makes sense that Ted would return home to his family. That Rebecca, who made a whole speech a few episodes ago about how football is for the fans, would end up co-owning the team with the fans. (Also that she’d end up with that Dutch hottie, because who wouldn’t if they could?) That Nate would return to Richmond. That Keeley would never choose between Roy and Jamie, because the only real solution to this conundrum is “throuple” and Ted Lasso was never going to do that. That Rupert would go down. That Rebecca and Keeley would launch a women’s team, which may or may not be setup for a Ted Lasso-less Ted Lasso spinoff.

What mostly didn’t work for me was how the show got to these places. The series spent two seasons building Nate up as a genius coach and then turning him to the dark side, only to spend the third deciding he was good again without showing us how he got there, or why we (or the other characters) should forgive him so easily. Likewise, it spent two seasons establishing Keeley as a savvy PR maven, only to waste that setup on a poorly run business and lots more tiresome romantic drama.

I did mostly like Jamie’s arc this season, as it seemed like a meaningful outgrowth of all the ups and downs we’ve seen the character experience thus far. But why oh why are we still relitigating his relationship with Keeley, and why does it have to turn Jamie and Roy into the worst versions of themselves? While we’re asking questions, what was that whole detour with Michelle’s boyfriend who used to be her and Ted’s marriage counselor? Since when was Rebecca so eager to have a child? Why did Rupert’s takedown happen so suddenly, and mostly offscreen, near the end of the season, instead of building over the course of episodes? Why does Richmond only have two bars? How did Ted bring that huge snow globe on board without airport security flagging it for exceeding the liquid limit? (Okay, fine, the last two might just be splitting hairs.)

FIENBERG: I feel like most of the season happened offscreen, which is mighty peculiar for a show that aired, have I mentioned, 660 minutes of content this season. Like with all of the Nate stuff, I truly can’t fathom the distinction between what we saw — endless creepy stuff with Jade, who finally got a personality in her last episode — and what we didn’t see, which then made it really hard to fathom what he was or wasn’t supposed to be apologizing for in the finale. Of course he was a turncoat and the way he handled things was fundamentally terrible, but he took a much better job. I’m not sure why the show was unable to distinguish between “upward mobility” and “being a Judas,” which were put in the identical bucket.

The show’s obliviousness to “creepiness” marred so many things. I loved Roy and Keeley as a couple in season two. This season, almost everything Roy did involving Keeley was creepy, which was sad because I liked his personal journey — we needed more Phoebe, darnit — so much. The relationship between Keeley and Jack, which came out of nowhere and ended out of nowhere, was far creepier than the show realized. Jack was an eccentric billionaire harassing an employee with no pre-established romantic interest into loving her. It was rarely cute! Bosses and employees are always tough to make work as love stories in 2023; see also Rebecca and Sam last season. And yes, the stuff with Michelle and her marriage counselor was icky on a professional level and then had the result of making Ted look … yes … creepy. Don’t get me started on Jamie and his mom on the creepiness scale, though that was one instance in which the show steered into the creepiness.

But, and I’ll say this again, I 100% got teary when the whole team showed up to fix Sam’s restaurant. I completely got teary when the players all just happened to have pieces of “BELIEVE” in their lockers. I cheered at my TV when Richmond won at the end even though I knew Manchester City was going to win as well. I really liked the Amsterdam episode and never found it boring. I loved Jamie’s full arc this season, in fact. 

Do I need a Roy/Nate/Beard spinoff, or whatever the season hinted might be coming but which Apple TV+ refuses to confirm? Probably not. Would I prefer a show in which Roy Kent coaches a new team and they’re all muppets? Absolutely! 

Is there a spinoff you’d actually want?

HAN: No. Individually, the issues we mentioned — the odd storytelling choices, the bloated run times, the miscalibration of its characters’ creepiness — are ones that any show might run into from episode to episode. Cumulatively, over the course of 600+ minutes, they start to look indicative of a show that’s lost its direction and run out of ideas. I don’t have much faith that those problems can be solved by adding more episodes, even if they’re not technically about Ted Lasso coaching AFC Richmond.

I’m not trying to take away from the show’s accomplishments. I loved it once, and found things to like about it through the end. I hope the fans who are sad it’s (maybe) over are still happy to have been along for the ride, and I hope the creatives who steered it are proud of what they’ve achieved. I also think that sometimes, the best way to honor a journey is to acknowledge it’s over. And based on Ted’s decision to move back to the U.S. instead of sticking around Richmond indefinitely, I even suspect he’d be inclined to agree.