Sweet ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4 Still Seems Superfluous
Turns out you can go home again. But does that mean you should?
In the streaming era, real hits are few and far between. No one should be surprised that Apple TV couldn’t quite let go of its Emmy Award-winning critical darling Ted Lasso, no matter what its creators may have originally intended. Now, three years later, the series is back for a fourth outing in an attempt to see if lightning can truly strike twice. The one question that pretty much everyone has heading into the fourth season is: Can it recapture the magic of the show’s heyday?
(Whether we needed a fourth outing after the comedy’s original three-season arc concluded is a different and equally valid question, but that ship, as they say, has sailed.)
Ted Lasso’s third season was divisive amongst both critics and fans, with overstuffed episodes, rushed character arcs, and some truly wild narrative choices that didn’t entirely make sense but at least culminated in something that felt like an ending that made sense for Ted’s journey.
If the four episodes available for critics are anything to go by, the answer is: Maybe? After all, it’s difficult to be but so critical of a series whose raison d’etre is kindness and friendship, particularly in a cultural moment in which the worst people in the world seem to be constantly triumphing. The show’s sunny disposition goes down as easily as ever, its returning characters still feel like old friends, and the squad of recruits has broad appeal. But for all its surface charms, it’s not entirely clear that Ted Lasso 2.0 has anything new to say.
