Pop Culture Happy Hour - Ted Lasso

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Ted Lasso is finally back. But is this new fourth season worth the wait, and does it have anything fresh to say? Ted (Jason Sudeikis) has returned to the U.K., only this time, he’s coaching a brand new women’s soccer team. The hit Apple TV series features familiar faces including Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, and Brett Goldstein, as well as newcomers Tanya Reynolds and Abbie Hern.Want more laughs from Apple TV? Check out these episodes: Getting therapeutic with 'Shrinking'Seth Rogen and a fabulous cast highlight the satire 'The Studio'Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

We start off this new season. Ted is an assistant manager in the supermarket. And it's not actually clear, like, this is like a pet people on. Like, how does class work in Hollywood? Like, this dude is a former Premier League coach. He's rich. He's living his life that suggests that there might be something going on. Like, he's, like, chosen his life almost, like, kind of weird ascetic.

Too much sports gambling. Absolutely. Like, I can't figure out why he's in this particular social location, given, you know, his life to that point. Whatever happened to Ted Lassow? When we last saw the man, he had left England and returned to Kansas City. When we last saw the show, it had finished up a season that was maybe, but not definitely, its last. The show is back on Apple TV and Ted is back in the UK. Only now he's coaching a brand new women's team.

I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Linda Holmes. And joining us today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is one of the hosts of NPR's Code Switch podcast, Gene Demby. Hello, Gene. Welcome back. Well, good friends. How are you? Good to see you. to see you. So Ted Lassau, played by Jason Sudakis, found a success coaching men's soccer, aka football, despite initially knowing nothing about it. He then returned to the U.S.

to be closer to his ex-wife and son. Skip forward a couple of years now, team owner Rebecca, played by Hannah Waddingham, wants him back, not to coach the men who were being coached by Brett Goldstein's Roy Kent, but to coach an entirely new team of women. Some faces return from the first three seasons, including Juno Temple as Keeley, but the players are new. As for Ted's family, well, if he wants to take Rebecca up on her offer to go back to the UK, which you know he will, he'll have to figure that part out. So, Stephen, I'm going to start with you. What did you think about the beginning we have seen the first four?

What did you think about the beginning of the fourth season of Ted Lasso? Well, I think the first episode of this fourth season, the one that is largely set in Kansas City, I think, is pretty wobbly. I think you're kind of taking characters that we know from this other setting, kind of planting them in this new setting. And I think it really takes a while for this new season to find its footing. I found that first episode to be overlong. I wasn't necessarily buying all the kind of bits and subplots that are kind of leading us to this inevitable conclusion. But I think as the season rolls along without spoiling anything, I think it starts to find its footing a little bit. I think these episodes, you know, Ted Lassa was experiencing some episode bloat in later seasons. These episodes are running more in the like 40 to 50 minute range. And I think it could stand to be tighter. Not all of these B plots are working for me. And I think overall with this show, on one hand, I'm really happy to revisit these characters.

I'm happy to hang out with these characters again, but I'm not sure that what initially drew us to Ted Lassow is necessarily entirely still present in this show. And I think it suffers a little bit from something that is happening, I think, across the entertainment industry where entertainment that was really popular during the pandemic isn't necessarily hitting the same way in 2026. And I was really feeling that watching these episodes. That's very interesting because Ted Laso was, you know, originally kind of a pandemic discovery for a lot of people. And people went back and forth the time about it. It has like a warmth to it and kind of like a niceness to it that was kind of a relief at that point. Yeah, we were all in the trenches. Yeah, exactly.

Gene, what do you think? I mean, it's funny you talk about the warmth and sort of heart of the show because we just, Lyndon, we just talked about the dink, another Apple TV product, not too long ago about sports. And how that was very much on the right side of the cloying. versus sort of sweet and warm continuum. And I felt like very much that Ted Lassow has, especially in the third season, had already sort of like went too far in the direction of cloning. And I still felt like it's very much situated there now.

It was like very, very, like everything works out well in the end. And I think that's fun, right? It's a show about sports, right? Like it's supposed to be like a feel good show. The thing I don't buy was that, first of all, like we start off this new season, Ted is an assistant manager in the supermarket. And it's not actually clear, like, this is like a pet people mom. Like, how does class work in Hollywood?

Like, this dude is a former Premier League coach. He's rich. He's living his life that suggests that there might be something going on. Like he's, like, kind of weird ascetic. Like, why is he working here? Absolutely. Like, I can't figure out why he's in this particular social location, given, you know, his life to that point. And even, as we know, as Linda sort of said, we know he's going to end up going back across the pond and, like, you know,

charming everybody and went everybody over. But it wasn't even the sort of like momentum to get him back there. Didn't make sense because it was like, that's obviously a better. Your life would be so much better if you were living that life. What is keeping you tethered the Kansas City is the way that he's like, I don't know, there's so much to give up. And his family is like, dog, let's go. And he's like, he's like, oh, I don't know.

So it's just very hard to like, again, just like Stephen, I dig all these characters a lot. And I was, you know, sad to see the show go away. And I'm glad that it's back. But I'm also kind of like, is there still story? tell about these characters in particular, you know? Yeah. You know, the funny thing is, one of the original co-creators of Ted Lasso was Bill Lawrence, who also worked on scrubs and works, I think, particularly relevant to this, works on shrinking. And Bill Lawrence, there was some recent reporting in the Hollywood reporter.

Bill Lawrence and Jason Sudec has had some creative differences about, I think, what's to do with the show. Bill Lawrence ended up leaving the show, so he's not, I do not think was involved in this season at all. has gone off to do shrinking. When I talk to people, I tend to discover there are your really dig Bill Lawrence stuff people and your really do not dig Bill Lawrence stuff people. And very often that applies to shrinking. It applies to Ted Lasso.

It applies to Rooster, which is this newer show that Steve Carell was in where he played a writer who was teaching at a college. And I think for me, I am very much a Bill Lawrence person. I'm very much a shrinking person, which people who know me know. know well, I feel a little bit like the magic touch of Ted Lassow for me, not for everyone, not definitively, but for me was the Bill Lawrence piece, which was a little, for me, emotionally richer and a little more poignant, whereas I feel like Jason Sudecass in leading the show has trended a little bit more toward stories about Ted's kind of internal, like his

marriage and a bunch of stuff like that that I'm not as invested in. So I had trouble with that. I also have a little bit of trouble understanding what they thought it was going to do to center this around a women's team because it remains a show that is still really, you know, obviously orbiting around Ted. It's not that Rebecca and Keely are not great characters, but it is still a show that is orbiting around Ted. And I question why, like, what was this supposed to do other than just like be different? Like, be that story's over and a new story is starting and isn't that exciting. Do they have something they want to say about Ted and this women's team? I think you'll find over the course this season without spoiling it, you know, they're aware of kind of the general

dynamics of women's sports, the economics, the disadvantages, the differences in media exposure, stuff like that. But like, is there a reason why they want Ted to work with a women's team? And I'm not sure that I'm seeing that quite yet. And the tradeoff for that is that all of the players who I had gotten to really love, and I have no idea what the situation was with the actors who wanted to come back. If anybody didn't want to come back, I don't know what the specifics are on the business side, are all gone now. And because it's a new team. So, You don't get those players. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of them pop up, but they're not really part of the show, other than Roy, who is around.

But I'm just not sure why. Like, why are we doing this? Yeah. I mean, it feels like they were given an opportunity to reboot and they wanted to kind of take the show in the same direction and a different direction at the same time. It's certainly, I'm sure, as with kind of the direction that the show took in season three, I'm sure some of it is dictated by the interests of Jason. Cedakis, you know, that Jason Cedacus seems to be kind of at the helm of this show. Jason Cidacus famously very into women's sports, very much, you know, somebody who turns up in the stands at a lot of major women's sporting events.

And so I'm sure he's interested in women's soccer. And I think they're certainly hinting at some interesting player dynamics. That's going to take more time to unfold. And we're getting so many B plots about familiar characters that I think some of these new characters, at least in the first four episodes, feel a little underbaked. I do think there's promise in some of those characters. And I think there's some promise in the dynamic between, you know, not only Ted Lassow himself, but also Coach Beard, played by Brendan Hunt, you know, is back on this season. And, you know, they're working with a coach named Alice Chilton,

played by Tanya Reynolds, you know, and her coaching style is clashing with theirs in kind of potentially interesting ways. I think she's an interesting performer. And I think there's promise there, but they're still spending an awful lot of time really leaning into these B plots with Rebecca and Keeley that I don't think are really cohering. The way that I think the show wants them to, there is, again, without spoiling anything, there's this whole long thing with, like, Rebecca having this crisis of like, am I a feminist? Because of my hesitation in hiring a woman to coach this women's team. But it just feels like it doesn't know what it wants to say.

Mm-hmm. And you can feel like that whole, like, am I a feminist because I hired this white dude to coach this women's team. Almost felt like lampshading. It was like they almost had to like acknowledge that like that was the obvious like. That's exactly how it felt to me. Yeah. It was like, okay, they got to acknowledge that they basically said to this woman who's already in the role that like they were going with a different candidate. Yeah.

And at some point it's like it's like, it's funny. It was like, ha-ha. But it's actually like this is actually a problem. This is actually a giant problem. There's a much more qualified and capable and competent person right there. and Ted Lassau was there for Vibs, and, like, we're supposed to be okay with that. That's, like, even when in those, like, very solid first two seasons,

that was, like, I think, I think stuck in a lot of people's crawl, right? A lot of people were bothered about that. And this, it's, like, even more pronounced now. It's like, she was already in the job, and they sort of just swept her aside for this dude who was, like, it clearly learned something where he got super high and learned about it and, like, understood, like, total football towards the end of third season.

But, like, so maybe he still has some of that sort of tactical, you know what I mean, acumen? But, like, it's like, why is this dude in his job? He's just, yeah. I mean, you know, like, they just get a sports psychologist, you know what I'm saying? Like, they don't need him to do the, yeah, anyway. Yeah, I mean, this has been an issue, certainly the coaching angle has been an issue with this show from the very core concept, which is like, this guy is incredible with people.

And, you know, sports are played by people and he understands people. And that in many ways makes him a very effective motivator. But there's a huge difference between being a good motivator and being a competent coach or even understanding the rules of the sport that you are coaching and certainly like kind of rebooting it with a women's team, kind of sidelining a qualified coach in order to bring him into this role does kind of bring up kind of those same core issues. And of course, obviously for the show and in general, the answer is you have a combination of people. You have a combination of skill sets and hopefully they work kind of in concert with each other. But yeah, it certainly is

not doing anything to address that core issue that goes all the way back to the very first episode of this series. Right. Right. And I think the trick is that for a lot of people, as you're saying, one of the things they could never get over in this show was that it was all about sort of everybody learning how great this guy is and that they shouldn't doubt him just because he doesn't know what he's doing. And it's like I was.

able to get past that because it was so surrounded by other things that I really enjoyed, right? And it also had the scaffolding of Rebecca was bringing him into this job because she thought he would fail. And so there was a little bit of, you know, on the one hand, like, well, yes, the reason he got this job is because she knows he's unqualified. That's why she hired him. Now you've gone back to the beginning. You're retelling the story of people should not think that he shouldn't have this job just because it seems like maybe he shouldn't have this job. And it's clear when you see this that this women's league is facing some very particular challenges. The players have some challenges because the, you know, it's interesting watching this right at the same time that the women's professional baseball league is kicking off. And you see how like it's smaller. The stadiums are smaller. The crowds are small. There's only a few teams.

It's like this team is still trying to get on its feet, this soccer team. And the idea that like this guy is what they really need is just, I think it's going to wear on people. With that said, I agree with both of you that like it's fun to see these characters again, at least some of the time. I don't love everything they're doing. But I have been a coach beard girly for a really long time. I love that character. I love that performance. And they're clearly building to something interesting this season with that guy.

Yeah, and I'm really, you know, he's just such a weird character in a way that I very much value. I like Hannah Waddingham. I don't necessarily love what they're doing with Rebecca at the moment in the first part of the season, but I do love her. And I can always watch Breck Oldstein do basically anything, even that romantic comedy with Jennifer Lopez. We've got a lot more to talk about. We'll be right back after. this break. Welcome back. Gene, I wanted to pick up with you. What are you thinking about? The way the third season ended, I was actually kind of hopeful that there was going to be like,

okay, this is the story that Greyhounds post-Head, right? Like, there was a world in which you had Nate and Coach Beard and Roy Ken. I did think that's where they were going to go. And it felt like it would have been a really interesting, you know what I'm saying? Like continuation of the story. And it doesn't have to be, he doesn't have to be the sort of like the thing around which everything revolves. Have you really taught them anything or Or do you still have to be there and do it yourself? And now it's like, oh, it almost feels like everything else has been frozen in time, except for him, you know. And it's like, man, like he doesn't seem integral to all the stuff that he's being inserted in.

We're back into like a will they won't they thing with Keely. With Roy and Keely. And it's like, again, I like both those characters. It was like, oh, we did this. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I love Hannah Watt. I love him. And so I was like, I never thought, I'm bored watching Hannah Widerham.

Like, what's going on with the show? I just, I feel like a lot of ways, it feels like less joke dense than it has before. It is definitely less jokes. There's like way fewer jokes. While simultaneously, as Stephen mentioned, the episodes are longer. Yes, exactly. So there's like more. They've gradually stretched it out from more similar to a half hour to more similar to an hour while making it less funny.

It's fine. Like, I mean, you know, there are so many callbacks to the first show, the stuff that, like, the jokes that land on the first show was like, there's that famous joke. It's like, when he's trying to figure out the geography of the UK. He's like, how many countries in this country? And, like, there's a joke literally when in Kansas City. Like, how many cities in the city? It's like, oh, the same, it's like, ha, ha, get it. It's like, all this.

It's like, it's just, it feels like, the first episode in particular feels like fan service. Like, just, you know, I'm just all fans. It's like, but it's like. Well, it's a love letter to Kansas City. And I think if you love Kansas City, it's a really fun episode. And let's be honest. Who will love? No shit.

Outside of producer Mike. Cold and brutal. And, uh, Patrick Mahomes. You know what I mean? Anyway, no, no plan. I mean, honestly, like, I think I'd come down slightly on the other side of the, like, skipable debate. Like, as much as I can identify many flaws in these first four episodes, I still did find myself

kind of mashing that play button once I got through the episode. I still basically considered it a fun hang. I think lowering expectations and kind of, like, allowing the stakes of each episode to feel a little bit lower. Mm-hmm. I think maybe benefits this show. if people aren't necessarily like clamoring for every new episode, I am enjoying it.

I just, I think it is, if you're wanting to compare this season to previous seasons, I think it is closer to the kind of shapeless, intermittently enjoyable third season than those kind of more transcendent early episodes. Absolutely. I think that's right. I think that's right. And for me, I think much of how I feel about the rest of this season is, going to depend on how much they can ensure that neither the show nor the team feels like a Jason

Zudakis slash Ted Lasso personalist regime, you know? I think the more you get that collaboration from everybody, both in the team and on the show, I think the better it's going to be and I am optimistic that they are going to turn a corner and by the end of the season, I'm going to be like, yes, I understand where they were going with this. They pulled it all together. You know, ultimately it made sense to me. All that kind of stuff. I want lots of brains in the game. You know what I mean? Absolutely. This is like a, to the point you just made, like, one of the things I always feel in shows about sports teams is that they have all these characters on the team, right? And you never get to spend enough time with the players. Like, obviously, like, you have exceptions,

Friday night lights, right? The series, right? But I felt like even in the earlier seasons, the original recipe to Lassau, it was like, we got to see Danny, right? We got to see Roy. We got to do Jamie. But I always wanted to know more

about the locker room dynamic. Sam, right? We spent a lot of time with Sam. I always don't know more about the locker room dynamics. Like, that is so much of what's so fun about sports and, like, you know, these very different personalities sort of like congealing around this goal. Like, we get like some like really top line notes on some of the women on the team.

Like one of them is a mom. One of them is really talented. but she was like, you know, hard done by, you know. And it's just like, I want to know who these people are. I think that's a lot more important than finding stuff for Higgins today. I love him, though. I love him. I do, too.

I love the character. But I guess my closing thought is my favorite moment in original recipe, Ted Lassow, was when they wound up having the big Christmas dinner that all the team was there for and they were bonding. And it was, I think, at Higgins' house. And they were passing the food around and they were having a great time and people had brought what they wanted to eat. And some of it was, you know, whatever, it's what I'm used to eating at home, blah, blah, blah. And it was really warm and really great. And Ted wasn't there.

Ted was off with Rebecca. And I think what that episode did for me was it demonstrated, as we talked about, it's not just that he is a charismatic, you know, cult leader or whatever. It's that they've learned something from the methods that he's used and the things that he's taught them. And now they can do it themselves. They can do it themselves. And that's why in a way I also would have found that more interesting. But now we have him teaching the Tedlas away to a bunch of really talented women. And listen, it's going to go how it's going to go, right?

And we'll see, we'll see, we'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes. I'm going to keep watching and hopefully by the end. It will all work out. Well, that brings us to the end of our show, Gene Demby, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here, you guys. Thank you. Appreciate you.

This episode is produced by Lenin Sherburn, Liz Metzger, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, come in provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.