Ted Lasso Season 3 post-mortem review: how the Apple TV+ comedy dropped the ball and lost the match

This post-mortem review contains detailed and immediate spoilers for Ted Lasso.

One of the more interesting things to ponder when it comes to Ted Lasso is how the show might’ve fared if it was one of Apple TV+’s launch slate. The streaming service debuted in November 2019 with just a handful of new shows – amongst them prestige soap opera The Morning Show, alt-history science fiction For All Mankind, post-apocalyptic epic See, and literary comedy Dickinson – each of which, at least initially, struggled to make an impact. Ted Lasso arrived in August 2020 on the heels of a psychological horror from M. Night Shyamalan, a workplace comedy from the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and a legal drama that promised Captain America’s television debut. It also arrived during five months into a global pandemic.

A lot of the football comedy’s early appeal can be linked, directly or indirectly, to the coronavirus pandemic. Its general feel-good vibe and positive attitude were celebrated as a breath of fresh air at a point when most weren’t getting out much; journalists hailed the show as “the warm hug we all need [in 2020]”, and the suggestion still occasionally arises that Ted Lasso the show saved lives. None of that would mean much without the show’s genuine and not inconsiderable charms across its first series, but equally it’s tough to imagine Ted Lasso becoming the Apple TV+ flagship had it swapped places with, say, Dickinson and launched alongside The Morning Show nine months earlier.

Going into its second series – which was, in the end, just that little bit more cloying and self-indulgent, a touch more inconsistent in its charms but still a welcome presence every Friday – there was a sense that Ted Lasso was being written by people well-aware of how beloved their work was. (And it was beloved: with 20 nominations at the 2021 Emmys, Ted Lasso broke a record previously set by Glee and became the most nominated first season of a comedy in Emmy history.) Jokes started creeping in at the edges that were clearly written in the hopes of being screencapped and shared on Twitter, eventually reaching a point where self-conscious acknowledgments of Paddington Bear, Animal Crossing or The Princess Diaries were dashed off as though they were functional punchlines on their own terms. 

Worse, though, was the sense that Ted Lasso’s production team started to believe their own hype: that Ted Lasso was a paragon of virtue, a light in the dark times, someone or something that could heal the world with a folksy quip. Across its second and third seasons, Ted Lasso became a show that would (often ostentatiously) gesture at ideas around toxic masculinity, consent, racism and homophobia in football, depression and anxiety, so on and so forth – always, it’s worth noting, on the right side of the conversation, but overtly self-satisfied with its rightness, and grating in how indistinct and anodyne its delivery of those messages were, quickly morphing into something that felt less like Ted Lasso and more like a Ted Talk.

That went hand-in-hand with a loss of basic craft, too. Ted Lasso’s first season, and much of its second, was always deceptively precise in its construction – if its character arcs initially tended towards the simplistic, they were still ruthlessly well-executed, and as it started to get more ambitious it still maintained an impressive level of clarity. Moving into Season 3, Ted Lasso seemed to lose that skill almost entirely, feeling rushed and poorly paced even as its runtime more than doubled. (Could this be attributed to executive producer Bill Lawrence, previously of Scrubs and Cougar Town, taking a step back to work on new comedy Shrinking and handing over the reins to star Jason Sudeikis? Perhaps.)

Probably the best example of this is in how the show handled supporting character Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammad). Nate’s evolution from victimised kitman to arrogant assistant coach to outright villain across the first two seasons is, genuinely, very well done – something to point to as an example that this show can and did get things right the next time one of its more embarrassing scenes goes viral online. His plotline across Season 3 highlights a lot of the flaws in Ted Lasso’s most recent and possibly final series, from the way the show became increasingly bloated to the way it left key character moments to happen offscreen between episodes (somehow, still, despite those absurd runtimes). 

What’s striking about Nate’s storyline though – compared to any other example you might pick out to highlight the bloat of the show, like Keeley’s (Juno Temple) move to an outside PR company – is the way it demonstrates that increasingly self-satisfied side of the show. In Series 2, Nate leaves Richmond under a cloud because of workplace bullying; in Series 3, there’s been a pivot, and his biggest crime is challenging Ted Lasso’s philosophy of niceness and tearing up the BELIEVE sign. It’s not about character flaws anymore – nor is its resolution, again largely taking place offscreen – but almost in a sense about someone who doesn’t like Ted Lasso the show. 

It'd be a mistake, speaking about Nate, not to mention Jade (Edyta Budnik). Nate’s redemption comes not from any effort to adjust the workplace dynamic at new club West Ham United, but instead from stalking a romantic relationship with the only waiter at his favourite restaurant. It’s uncomfortable to watch at times, and it’s striking that the show builds a redemption arc around essentially the good influence of a female character never even given a surname, let alone a personality. Each time that the show so earnestly paints itself as being On The Right Side Of The Issues, the sexism in its own writing stands out even more. (To say nothing of how the show presents Ted’s ex-wife and his therapist, or Rebecca and the Dutch pilot, or…)

Whether this is the end of Ted Lasso is something of an open question. Sudeikis has been publicly insistent for some time that the show had a three-season shelf life, and in Wednesday’s finale appeared at times visibly bored by a series that had at one point – again, genuinely, it worked once – been his greatest showcase. Still, the finale itself seemed to contort to leave open the possibility of a sequel or spinoff, with plotlines left unresolved and character arcs pointedly unfulfilled as if to inspire interest in a continuation. There’s even a direct tease of a Sudeikis-less series, as Ted tells journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance) to rename his book The Lasso Way because “it’s not about me, it never was”. 

Maybe the eventual Ted Lesso – Ted Lassno? – will be better than Ted Lasso ended up. Maybe it won’t be, and it’ll be 12 episodes of underwritten characters evangelising about how much they miss him while making winking references to the new Zelda game and Barbie vs Oppenheimer. In any case, though, it’s clear enough that in the end Ted Lasso simply dropped the ball. 

Ted Lasso is available to watch in full on Apple TV+ now. You can read more of our Ted Lasso coverage here, and find our considerably-more-optimistic review of the opening episodes of Season 3 here. 

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