‘Ted Lasso’ Should Remain Dead and Gone

This Week

Please don’t bring back Ted Lasso.

Scarlett Johansson changed my life.

Two legends unite.

My favorite video of the week.

My favorite new fact of the week.

Keep That Mustache Away From Me

It’s been my limited experience watching them that soccer games (football matches?) go on forever. Far too long. And, I’ve noticed, because of something called “stoppage time,” no one seems to really know when they are going to end. The scheduled play time runs out, fans are satisfied with the result—and yet, the match keeps going on.

Anyway, Ted Lasso has been officially renewed for Season 4. I thought that was an apt metaphor for my feelings about the decision.

(Trying to eke out a paragraph-long sports metaphor? I am exhausted.)

The previous season of the feel-good Apple TV+ awards juggernaut concluded in May 2023. While there were rumors that spin-offs were being considered, confirmation that the show is officially coming back—and coming back as Ted Lasso, with Jason Sudeikis back as the titular coach—just came, nearly two years after what many assumed could, and should, be a series finale.

Details are scant, beyond that this is happening. The Season 3 finale ended with Ted returning to the U.S. to be with his son and maybe reconcile with his ex-wife, perhaps the most emotionally intelligent thing the series scripted in that divisive season. In a new interview on Travis Kelce’s podcast, Sudeikis said that Ted will be coaching AFC Richmond’s women’s team.

One of the only other hints we have about the theme of the new season comes in a statement from Sudeikis, who in addition to playing Ted co-created the series: “As we all continue to live in a world where so many factors have conditioned us to look before we leap, in season four, the folks at AFC Richmond learn to LEAP BEFORE THEY LOOK, discovering that wherever they land, it’s exactly where they’re meant to be.”

Whatever greeting card or inspirational throw pillow inspired that statement, I hope the company behind it gets residuals.

Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, and Jeremy Swift are all confirmed to return, and it’s understood that Juno Temple and Brendan Hunt are in talks to come back as well. Fan favorite Phil Dunster, who played reformed cad Jamie Tartt, is expected to appear in a limited capacity, because of schedule conflicts.

In the renewal announcement, Channing Dunney, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. TV, the studio behind Ted Lasso, heralded, “If ever there was a show the world needed more of right now, it would be Ted Lasso.”

And I’m just like…is it?

Over its run, I was a huge champion of Ted Lasso, fervently defending it during its backlash for becoming too dark in Season 2 and for becoming, well, bad in Season 3. But even I feel like it’s time to retire the jersey.

The idea that what the world needs now is Ted Lasso is such a groan-worthy miscalculation of where we are as a culture—and where we were when the heartwarming series became a thunderous smash sensation.

Its free kick into the zeitgeist (these sports metaphors are killing me) came during the darkest era of our pandemic trauma and malaise. The show’s message that there is goodness in us and around us, if we dare look for and acknowledge it, was a revelatory salve. At a time when our instincts were exclusively towards cynicism and nihilism, Ted Lasso’s optimism was practically renegade.

In some ways the show, let alone its success, is a time capsule. What’s the point of a time capsule, when you just dig it back up right away?

The idea that the show’s tone and mere existence is a prescription for some sort of societal healing during our current maelstrom of violent awfulness is malpractice. It would be like Democrats thinking that releasing a video of celebrities singing “Fight Song” again would be at all helpful in combating current circumstances. (And given the party’s current struggle to do anything remotely impactful, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did try that throwback stunt—and that’s the problem.)

I love Ted Lasso. I love its characters. I cherish the role it legitimately had in cheering up its truly hurting audience. But can’t we let that be?

There was a resounding negative reaction to the final season, making it more perplexing to bring the show back after such a long stretch. I don’t have it in me to weather more rounds of discourse about whether a beloved show ruined its characters and its legacy by unnecessarily coming back. I’m a soldier with only so much strength, and I’ve been severely weakened by the last few years trying to defend the return of Carrie Bradshaw.

At the end of Season 3, the character Ted Lasso knew it was time to end the wild ride, pack it up, and go home. Maybe the show should’ve done the same.

Today’s Top Entertainment News

ScarJo Gifts Us a New Life Mantra

Kim Cattrall saying, “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself.”

Whoopi Goldberg saying she won’t get married again because “I don’t want somebody in my house.”

You can have your Brené Brown. You can have your Tony Robbins. You can have your Esther Perel. These celebrity women are my life coaches, and those are their words that I live by.

Now, I’m a changed man. I look at life anew. My perception of the world has shifted on its axis because a third instant-classic actress quote has come out, and immediately joins Cattrall and Goldbergs’ words in the Hall of Fame of Wisdom.

In a new interview, Scarlett Johansson said why she doesn’t take selfies with fans, explaining, “I don’t want to be identified as being in this time and place with you.”

I don’t want to be identified as being in this time and place with you.

It’s logical, honest, reasonable, and completely clear in its meaning. It’s also ferocious in its utter bluntness, in a way that I don’t just find empowering, but kind of fabulous. I’ve spent the week daydreaming of what it would be like to say it to someone and walk away, leaving them slack-jawed and stunned, but unable to refute or contest it.

I want to print it out on business cards to hand to the people trying to stop me on the street to get me sign up for GreenPeace, to people filming TikToks when I’m in the background trying to mind my own business, or to anyone I encounter throughout the day I find generally annoying.

I want to set it as an autoreply to essentially every email I receive at work.

I am in the process of petitioning Partiful to make the sentence an RSVP option on invitations.

This has the potential to change my life. I look forward to living by its message in my house that nobody else lives in while exclusively experiencing situations in which I’m enjoying myself.

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I Need a Collab Immediately

Jennifer Lopez and Meryl Streep both attended the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” (which, if you recall, is absolutely the funniest play I have ever seen) on the same night.

I need to know everything they talked about. I need to know every opinion they had of the show. I need to know how hard they laughed when [spoiler character] [did spoiler thing]. And I need to know how quickly Hollywood can turn this pairing into a movie. The Dream-Casting Manifestation of Kevin Fallon Productions will be thrilled to finance it.

An Icon. A Legend. The Moment.

Bernadette Peters appeared on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon this week to promote her new Broadway show Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, and broke out into an “impromptu” performance of the Sondheim standard “Broadway Baby.”

As is the requirement that GLAAD notifies you of when you first come out as gay, I have watched countless videos of Peters performing “Broadway Baby” at various venues at various times over the span of decades. It is thrilling each and every time. It’s rare to watch one of art’s greatest talents get to deliver a tour de force with a piece that is exactly suited to their skills and personality.

The abbreviated performance on The Tonight Show is an absolute blast. By the way, she is 77 and performing with that level of vibrancy. Meanwhile, I winced and said “oof” as I stood up from the couch a few minutes ago.

Oscar Is a Nudist

As someone who fancies himself curious about the world but who generally is a lazy idiot, I always find it fun when a factoid comes my way that reveals something that I had never considered—but then when you think more about it, you’re like, “Oh yeah! That’s true!”

That happened this week when Conan O’Brien revealed that he had an idea for a comedy bit at the Academy Awards where he and Oscar were domestic partners who irritate each other like an old married couple. The Oscar statue would wear an apron while cleaning the house, but the Academy turned down the pitch saying, according to O’Brien, ““No clothing on Oscar. Oscar is always naked.”

I had never thought about whether I'd seen an Oscar statue with clothes on. Turns out I hadn’t, and this is why. The Academy is insistent that he be a nudist.

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