Ted Lasso season 4 review: Jason Sudeikis and women’s team coach each other

Ted Lasso season 4 was an afterthought. Ted Lasso, having hung his UK boots and relocated back to his home turf of the US, is summoned back to Richmond, this time to coach a women’s team. The premise was enough for the Indian audience to churn out memes of Ted Lasso delivering the climactic “sattar minute” speech in the women’s locker room, a la Shah Rukh Khan’s hockey coach Kabir Khan in Shimit Amin’s 2009 seminal Bollywood sports drama Chak De! India. But Ted Lasso is no vindictive, defamed coach trying to get back his lost glory. He’s just an average American Joe pulled back to a land thousands of miles apart to do what he does best — live.

Fish out of water — two times over

Co-creator and lead actor Jason Sudeikis had signed off as the titular buoyant football coach after season 3 of Apple TV’s Emmy Award-winning show before he had an epiphany. As he returns to Richmond to coach its second-division women’s football team — he faces resistance, particularly from their coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds). And just like that, it’s like season 1 all over again. A soccer player roped in to train a British football team? Heck, he doesn’t even like tea. But that’s not important. What’s key here is how Lasso makes his way in, not by blending into the British way of life, but by dialling up his infectious, charming self. He’s inherently a team player, so divisions — whether they’re nationality or gender — have little bearing on his being. Not that he vowed to, but instead of relishing tea, he ends up getting Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), the uptight AFC Richmond owner, addicted to shortbread biscuits.

Coach Alice is too messed up and amour-propre to exchange her head position with a man — however ebullient and chivalrous he may be — for the women’s football team. The way episode 1 ends, one does feel that the male wagon of creators and showrunners — Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Brett Goldstein — are using the audience’s unabating love for Ted to shortchange Alice. “Take it or leave it” with a shrug of shoulders — that seems to be Ted’s tone, even though he’s trying to be as unobtrusive and friendly as possible. So, when Alice caves in — and doesn’t accept Ted’s farewell gift — it feels like feminism just walked backwards by a few steps.

It’s natural then that Alice feels a strong surge of jealousy when she sees Ted warm his way into the women’s locker room — even though it was she who handheld him and Coach Beard the first time, making them close their eyes and wait until the women are dressed. Ted isn’t even the most abhorrent of men who mansplain women into learning football. He’s considerate, patient, and most crucially, in touch with his feminine side. He urges his players to cry out their emotions — “there’s crying in football” — and not bottle them up like Alice. He’s also as conscientious — cleaning up a bar with the women after they make a mess out of it during an impromptu brawl with a bunch of men (did Kabir Khan and the Chak De! India girls clean up the McDonalds? No).

Learning from life — and everything that it throws at you

But there’s something that Ted is bound not to get as a man. In an affecting and strikingly relevant episode, we see members of the team deal with personal crises — from taking up odd jobs to make ends meet since second-division women’s football doesn’t exactly pay handsomely, or doubling up as a mother of two because your husband treats her ambition as inconvenience. Ted’s go-to magic word — “Believe” — doesn’t exactly cut it here, as that’s easier said than done. It then takes an Alice to step in and make a tiny addition to get the women all pumped up — “Believe… and win”.

It’s this added adrenaline and call to action that season 4 of Ted Lasso needed to make it as effective as its predecessors. The individual arcs of all the women players could’ve made for a far more impactful and well-rounded season than wasting it on side plots like a secret investor buying their way into AFC Richmond. Not all side plots are as tepid though. Rebecca giving new love a chance, before sabotaging it, and then giving it yet another lease of life, could’ve made the most patient of men run out of the virtue. But it makes the audience comfort her like Phil Dunster does in his memorable cameo. Roy (Goldstein) and Keeley (Juno Temple) are arguably the Ross and Rachel of Ted Lasso, though even the Friends pair couldn’t pull off the downright *adorbs* football commentary scene with a makeup set, including what Roy calls a “squishy pencil” (makeup brush, as Keeley corrects him).

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The strength of Ted Lasso, thus, remains in the quiet, slow change it brings about, just like its central character and his constant nudging towards a fair, equal, and kinder world. The audience is invited into the heads of all characters as they struggle with their feelings. But when they finally let them out to the ones they’ve been wanting to confide in, we’re gently drawn out. That not only prevents the show from getting preachy, but also helps us come to terms with leaving the beloved characters to their lives, if this is indeed the last season. A voiceover from the grave — one for the ages! — by the show’s old guard surely helps you tug it into the bed like it’s a child you want to kiss goodbye — “I think of each name as a comfortable music in the mouth… tending, as all music does… towards silence.”